Some thoughts on "United Ft. 93"...
I know some of my Republican friends -- they're the only friends worth talking to about matters of substance since Democrats will simply mindlessly take whatever position is anti-American, anti-religion (in it's most anti-Christian form) and anti-goodness -- objected to the seeming moral equivalence of the climactic scene where the Islamist murderers and the Christian heroes are intercut praying before the climactic scene.
Yet I took from this exactly the opposite of the moral equivalence my friends objected to. What I saw was the most stark and compelling differences between people praying to a god for the strength to complete their murderous mission and those praying for the strength to complete their mission of on-going life for themselves and for the strangers around them. Nothing could more starkly or more aptly show the difference between the religion of Islam and that of the Judeo-Christian world.
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Two movies were made recently that dealt with real life Islamic/Arab terror attacks. They could not be more different.
The first -- lauded by Hollywood and promoted ad nuseum by the leftists in the Old Media -- was the Marxist-penned, pro-terrorist, Modern Liberal marvel from director Steven Spielberg entitled "Munich."
With its typical Hollywood, leftist agenda of promoting "multiculturalism" -- the notion that all peoples, cultures, religions, forms of government and behaviors are equally good and equally right -- "Munich" sought to show that there is no difference between those who murder innocent people and those who track down and kill the murderers. Violence only begets more violence is the Modern Liberals' mantra (along with "if it feels good, do it"), and "Munich"'s aim was to convince others of just that.
Paul Greengrass's "United Ft. 93", on the other hand, dealt with the last of the four airplanes hijacked by Islamic fascists seeking to destroy the very symbols of freedom and Democracy, whether it was the people's house or the United States Congress where freedom's business is done. Whether intended as such, the message that comes through loud and clear is that the only hope these people had for life -- and to save the lives of thousands on the ground -- was to fight back. Here the argument might well be: a lack of will to fight evil leads to only more evil.
This is a dominant battle in today's "culture wars" in America. One side believes that all people are equally good and therefore the way to end violence such as Islamic fascist mass murder is to appease and capitulate. The other believes that sometimes evil requires a violent reaction: it is the battle between those whose bottomline philosophy is that "war is not the answer" and those who believe that sometimes -- sadly -- is is the only answer.
Telling to me, is that in order to "prove" the Leftists' point, the Marxist Tony Kushner who wrote the screenplay for "Munich" and the left-leaning Spielberg had to "fudge" almost everything in their fictional movie "inspired" by true events. In Hollywood-ese "inspired by" at the start of a movie means that the filmmakers are in no way required to employ truth.
And there was very little truth to be found in "Munich." From scenes invented out of whole clothe (like the laughably ludicrous battle over the music on the radio when the terrorists and the Mossad agents found themselves in the same hotel), to words spoken by the fictional-version Golda Meir in which she says exactly the opposite of what is on the historic record to the climactic scene where the Mossad agent, Avner, renounces his Israeli citizenship and moves to another country because the burden on his soul of having tracked down and killed the murderers of innocents was just too much to bear, there is not an important moment in "Munich" that is not an out-and-out lie.
On the other hand, if there has been a single complaint about the movie "United Ft. 93" it is that it is too honest. Based entirely on the real-life transcripts, phone calls and interviews with real people, "Ft. 93", recreates in stunningly accurate detail the fight of good versus evil.
The lesson here is that to believe the left one has to believe lies. To believe the rest of us, one only has to witness the truth.
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Speaking of United 93 and 9/11...
One thing that struck me as odd in the days after 9/11 was Bush saying "We will not tolerate conspiracy theories [regarding 9/11]". Sure enough there have been some wacky conspiracy theories surrounding the events of that day. The most far-fetched and patently ridiculous one that I've ever heard goes like this: Nineteen hijackers who claimed to be devout Muslims but yet were so un-Muslim as to be getting drunk all the time, doing cocaine and frequenting strip clubs decided to hijack four airliners and fly them into buildings in the northeastern U.S., the area of the country that is the most thick with fighter bases. After leaving a Koran on a barstool at a strip bar after getting shitfaced drunk on the night before, then writing a suicide note/inspirational letter that sounded like it was written by someone with next to no knowledge of Islam, they went to bed and got up the next morning hung over and carried out their devious plan. Nevermind the fact that of the four "pilots" among them there was not a one that could handle a Cessna or a Piper Cub let alone fly a jumbo jet, and the one assigned the most difficult task of all, Hani Hanjour, was so laughably incompetent that he was the worst fake "pilot" of the bunch. Nevermind the fact that they received very rudimentary flight training at Pensacola Naval Air Station, making them more likely to have been C.I.A. assets than Islamic fundamentalist terrorists. So on to the airports. These "hijackers" somehow managed to board all four airliners with their tickets, yet not even ONE got his name on any of the flight manifests. So they hijack all four airliners and at this time passengers on United 93 start making a bunch of cell phone calls from 35,000 feet in the air to tell people what was going on. Nevermind the fact that cell phones wouldn't work very well above 4,000 feet, and wouldn't work at ALL above 8,000 feet. But the conspiracy theorists won't let that fact get in the way of a good fantasy. That is one of the little things you "aren't supposed to think about". Nevermind that one of the callers called his mom and said his first and last name, more like he was reading from a list than calling his own mom. Anyway, when these airliners each deviated from their flight plan and didn't respond to ground control, NORAD would any other time have followed standard operating procedure (and did NOT have to be told by F.A.A. that there were hijackings because they were watching the same events unfold on their own radar) which means fighter jets would be scrambled from the nearest base where they were available on standby within a few minutes, just like every other time when airliners stray off course. But of course on 9/11 this didn't happen, not even close. Somehow these "hijackers" must have used magical powers to cause NORAD to stand down, as ridiculous as this sounds because total inaction from the most high-tech and professional Air Force in the world would be necessary to carry out their tasks. So on the most important day in its history the Air Force was totally worthless. Then they had to make one of the airliners look like a smaller plane, because unknown to them the Naudet brothers had a videocamera to capture the only known footage of the North Tower crash, and this footage shows something that is not at all like a jumbo jet, but didn't have to bother with the South Tower jet disguising itself because that was the one we were "supposed to see". Anyway, as for the Pentagon they had to have Hani Hanjour fly his airliner like it was a fighter plane, making a high G-force corkscrew turn that no real airliner can do, in making its descent to strike the Pentagon. But these "hijackers" wanted to make sure Rumsfeld survived so they went out of their way to hit the farthest point in the building from where Rumsfeld and the top brass are located. And this worked out rather well for the military personnel in the Pentagon, since the side that was hit was the part that was under renovation at the time with few military personnel present compared to construction workers. Still more fortuitous for the Pentagon, the side that was hit had just before 9/11 been structurally reinforced to prevent a large fire there from spreading elsewhere in the building. Awful nice of them to pick that part to hit, huh? Then the airliner vaporized itself into nothing but tiny unidentifiable pieces no bigger than a fist, unlike the crash of a real airliner when you will be able to see at least some identifiable parts, like crumpled wings, broken tail section etc. Why, Hani Hanjour the terrible pilot flew that airliner so good that even though he hit the Pentagon on the ground floor the engines didn't even drag the ground!! Imagine that!! Though the airliner vaporized itself on impact it only made a tiny 16 foot hole in the building. Amazing. Meanwhile, though the planes hitting the Twin Towers caused fires small enough for the firefighters to be heard on their radios saying "We just need 2 hoses and we can knock this fire down" attesting to the small size of it, somehow they must have used magical powers from beyond the grave to make this morph into a raging inferno capable of making the steel on all forty-seven main support columns (not to mention the over 100 smaller support columns) soften and buckle, then all fail at once. Hmmm. Then still more magic was used to make the building totally defy physics as well as common sense in having the uppermost floors pass through the remainder of the building as quickly, meaning as effortlessly, as falling through air, a feat that without magic could only be done with explosives. Then exactly 30 minutes later the North Tower collapses in precisely the same freefall physics-defying manner. Incredible. Not to mention the fact that both collapsed at a uniform rate too, not slowing down, which also defies physics because as the uppermost floors crash into and through each successive floor beneath them they would shed more and more energy each time, thus slowing itself down. Common sense tells you this is not possible without either the hijackers' magical powers or explosives. To emphasize their telekinetic prowess, later in the day they made a third building, WTC # 7, collapse also at freefall rate though no plane or any major debris hit it. Amazing guys these magical hijackers. But we know it had to be "Muslim hijackers" the conspiracy theorist will tell you because (now don't laugh) one of their passports was "found" a couple days later near Ground Zero, miraculously "surviving" the fire that we were told incinerated planes, passengers and black boxes, and also "survived" the collapse of the building it was in. When common sense tells you if that were true then they should start making buildings and airliners out of heavy paper and plastic so as to be "indestructable" like that magic passport. The hijackers even used their magical powers to bring at least seven of their number back to life, to appear at american embassies outraged at being blamed for 9/11!! BBC reported on that and it is still online. Nevertheless, they also used magical powers to make the american government look like it was covering something up in the aftermath of this, what with the hasty removal of the steel debris and having it driven to ports in trucks with GPS locators on them, to be shipped overseas to China and India to be melted down. When common sense again tells you that this is paradoxical in that if the steel was so unimportant that they didn't bother saving some for analysis but so important as to require GPS locators on the trucks with one driver losing his job because he stopped to get lunch. Hmmmm. Yes, this whole story smacks of the utmost idiocy and fantastical far-fetched lying, but it is amazingly enough what some people believe. Even now, five years later, the provably false fairy tale of the "nineteen hijackers" is heard repeated again and again, and is accepted without question by so many Americans. Which is itself a testament to the innate psychological cowardice of the American sheeple, i mean people, and their abject willingness to believe something, ANYTHING, no matter how ridiculous in order to avoid facing a scary uncomfortable truth. Time to wake up America.
enlightenment, even though you probably won't read this, I just feel the need to tell you that it is because people like you exist that the absurd things that Evan Sayet says are not simply attacking phantasms that don't exist, but things that some people (albeit nowhere near the sane majority) actually believe. You give Evan Sayet a job. Give yourself a pat on the back.
I've been searching the Internet for an essay Thomas Sowell wrote describing how multi-culturalism and Modern Liberal's fascination with cultural traditions and diversity are among the primary forces holding-back the progress of black Americans.
You touched on this in your Heritage Foundation speech. Assimilation isn't just good for society, it's good for the individual that successfully assimilates. Society's discrimination in choosing the best and leaving the rest (I think you said that, Evan) suggests that by adopting America's common culture we avail ourselves the opportunity to succeed in ways not dissimilar to how Western culture has succeed and others have not.
Simply co-existing with other cultures is not proof all cultures are equally successful. Or at least they aren't equally successful as far as their citizens benefit.
I'm sure I could have composed that thought better, and in fact Thomas Sowell did. But until I track it down I'll have to leave it at that.
you do know that BOTH movies are BASED on a true story, right?
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