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| Al Jizz Documentary |
| 2004-06-28 |
| Know Your Enemy Department: If you have the time and the self control to fight the urge to pull your seat loose from the floor and hurl it at the screen, I’d recommend this film. It reveals the Al Jazeera staff to be pan-Arab nationalists with profound sympathies for the Jihadis -- as long as they help to advance their Nasserite agenda. Also explored are the Arab love-hate relationship with the West and the deep Arab need to explain everything with a conspiracy. That’s my review. The link goes to the WaPo’s write up. An excerpt is provided below for balance and nuance (sarcasm alert). Blessed with good timing and virtually unlimited access to her sources, Noujaim -- who co-directed the 2001 documentary "startup.com" [also recommended] -- was at al-Jazeera’s headquarters in Qatar on the eve of the U.S. invasion of Iraq in March 2003. There, Arab journalists, along with their 40 million viewers, watched as President Bush announced his plan to invade a country just 20 miles away [sic]. Eventually, al-Jazeera reporters went to Baghdad to cover the war, and one died there, killed in a U.S. attack that, even though it was deemed justified in a later investigation, looks from the film’s perspective like nothing short of a scandal. |
| Posted by:11A5S |
| #2 At the very same time, there was another man in Kuwait. His perspective on the Iraqi situation was wholly different from Noukaim's. He wrote a special article concerning the anniversary of the liberation of Kuiwait. His name was Michael Kelly. Here is an excerpt: Who Would Choose Tyranny? Tyranny truly is a horror: an immense, endlessly bloody, endlessly painful, endlessly varied, endless crime against not humanity in the abstract but a lot of humans in the flesh. It is, as Orwell wrote, a jackboot forever stomping on a human face. I understand why some dislike the idea, and fear the ramifications of, America as a liberator. But I do not understand why they do not see that anything is better than life with your face under the boot. And that any rescue of a people under the boot (be they Afghan, Kuwaiti or Iraqi) is something to be desired. Even if the rescue is less than perfectly realized. Even if the rescuer is a great, overmuscled, bossy, selfish oaf. Or would you, for yourself, choose the boot? I think of Michael's words often especially when I read a comment from a WWP zipperhead like antiwar. |
| Posted by: Super Hose 2004-06-28 2:38:47 PM |
| #1 P.S. The name of the movie is "Control Room." |
| Posted by: 11A5S 2004-06-28 2:24:16 PM |