Civic Duty: Go See ‘United 93’

A reminder of something to do this week since the mainstream media will not show this!!! H/t George Will.

Civic Duty: Go See ‘United 93’
http://www.newsandopinion.com/ In most movies made to convey dread, the tension flows from uncertainty about what will happen. In "United 93," terror comes from knowing exactly what will happen. People who associate cinematic menace with maniacs wielding chain saws will find that there can be an almost unbearable menace in the quotidian — in the small talk of passengers waiting in the boarding area with those who will murder them, in the routine shutting of the plane's door prior to departure from Newark Airport on Sept. 11, 2001.

Get the movie from your library here http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/70185524&referer=brief_results

But two uncertainties surrounded "United 93": Would it find an audience? Should it?
It has found one, which is remarkable, given that in 2005 most moviegoers — 57 percent — were persons 12 to 29 years old. Twenty-nine percent were persons 12 to 24. These age cohorts do not seek shattering, saddening experiences to go with their popcorn.

But in its first weekend "United 93" was the second most-watched movie, with the top average gross per theater among major releases. It was on 1,795 screens, and 71 percent of viewers were 30 or older.

To the long list of Britain's contributions to American cinema — Charles Chaplin, Bob Hope, Cary Grant, Stan Laurel, Deborah Kerr, Vivien Leigh, Maureen O'Hara, Ronald Colman, David Niven, Boris Karloff, Alfred Hitchcock and others — add Paul Greengrass, writer and director of "United 93." He imported into Hollywood the commodity most foreign to it: good taste. This is especially shown in the ensemble of unknown character actors and non-actors who play roles they know — a real pilot plays the pilot, a former flight attendant plays the head flight attendant — and several persons who play on screen the roles they played on Sept. 11.

Greengrass's scrupulosity is evident in the movie's conscientious, minimal and minimally speculative departures from the facts about the flight painstakingly assembled for the Sept. 11 commission report. This is emphatically not a "docudrama" like Oliver Stone's execrable "JFK," which was "history" as a form of literary looting in which the filmmaker used just enough facts to lend a patina of specious authenticity to tendentious political ax-grinding.
A New York Times story on the "politics of heroism" dealt with the question of whether the movie was "inclusive."

Well, perhaps. "United 93" did violate some egalitarian nicety by suggesting that probably not all the passengers were equally heroic. Amazingly, no one has faulted the movie for ethnic profiling: All the hijackers are portrayed as young, fervently devout Muslim men. Report Greengrass to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.
In a movie as spare and restrained as its title, the only excess is the suggestion, itself oblique, that the government response was even more confused than was to be expected. Most government people, like the rest of us, were in the process of having their sense of the possible abruptly and radically enlarged.

Going to see "United 93" is a civic duty because Samuel Johnson was right: People more often need to be reminded than informed. After an astonishing 56 months without a second terrorist attack, this nation perhaps has become dangerously immune to astonishment. The movie may quicken our appreciation of the measures and successes — many of which must remain secret — that have kept would-be killers at bay.
The editors of National Review were wise to view "United 93" in the dazzling light still cast by a Memorial Day address, "The Soldier's Faith," delivered in 1895 by a veteran of Ball's Bluff, Antietam and other Civil War battles. Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. said why understanding that faith is important:
"In this snug, over-safe corner of the world . . . we may realize that our comfortable routine is no eternal necessity of things, but merely a little space of calm in the midst of the tempestuous untamed streaming of the world, and in order that we may be ready for danger. . . . Out of heroism grows faith in the worth of heroism."
The message of the movie is: We are all potential soldiers. And we all may be, at any moment, at the war's front, because in this war the front can be anywhere.
The hinge on which the movie turns are 13 words that a passenger speaks, without histrionics, as he and others prepare to rush the cockpit, shortly before the plane plunges into a Pennsylvania field. The words are: "No one is going to help us. We've got to do it ourselves." Those words not only summarize this nation's situation in today's war but also express a citizen's general responsibilities in a free society.

Get the movie from Amazon here
http://www.amazon.com/United-Widescreen-David-Alan-Basche/dp/B000GH3CR0/ref=pd_ybh_2?pf_rd_p=280800601&pf_rd_s=center-2&pf_rd_t=1501&pf_rd_i=ybh&pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_r=0S4AZ7PS2T45JCQN7W67

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Report: Taliban Killed Civilians, Not US

A big hat tip from Sweetness and Light for this unreported story!!

Report: Taliban Killed Civilians, Not US
From the Marine Corps Times:
Kabul university students shout anti U.S. slogans during a protest in Kabul May 10, 2009. Several hundreds students from the Kabul university stage a protest against the recent civilian causality in Farah province by the U.S. air strikes, on Sunday.
Taliban held to blame in airstrike

By Trista Talton and Andrew deGrandpré - Staff writers Sunday May 10, 2009

Days before a May 4 U.S. airstrike allegedly killed Afghan civilians in Farah province, Taliban commanders met across the border in Quetta, Pakistan, to hatch a plot to turn Afghan public sentiment against U.S. forces, according to a military source in Afghanistan who is familiar with the incident.
By many accounts, their plan worked: Within hours of the airstrike, international media were reporting that upwards of 150 innocents, including women and children, had been killed. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and National Security Adviser James Jones, the former Marine commandant, both expressed sympathy for the loss of life.
But evidence now shows that many of those civilian casualties appear to have been killed by Taliban grenades — after the airstrike — in a blatant effort to drive up the number of dead and stir public resentment of U.S. military power, the source said.
The Taliban killed 30 to 40 civilians, according to the source. An official count has not been released pending completion of a joint U.S.-Afghan investigation.
Army Gen. David McKiernan, the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, told reporters May 7, “We have some other information that leads us to distinctly different conclusions about the cause of these civilian casualties.”
Defense Secretary Robert Gates, speaking during a news conference that same day in Kabul, said he had seen such reports but that nothing was confirmed. Neither McKiernan nor Gates elaborated.
What went down
The stage was set for the bombing May 4 in Gerani village when Taliban fighters publicly executed three civilians they accused of aiding the Afghan government, the military source in Afghanistan said. The executions, he said, were designed to draw out the Afghan and U.S. forces operating in the area and ambush them when they arrived.
It worked. By midday, a convoy of U.S. and Afghan soldiers headed to the Bala Baluk district, a known Taliban stronghold in southwestern Afghanistan that is home to more than 100,000 Afghans. When they arrived in the village, they were greeted by dozens of Taliban fighters armed with AK47s, rocket-propelled grenades and Russian PKM machine guns, the source said.
A massive firefight ensued. Outnumbered, the American and Afghan troops called for additional support. A group of Marines with Marine Corps Forces Special Operations Command responded, said Army Col. Greg Julian, a spokesman for U.S. Forces Afghanistan.
Once the Marines arrived, the fighting escalated substantially. Having identified several Taliban fighting positions, the Marines called in an airstrike, Julian said.
When it appeared that the Taliban were backing off, the air support was called off and the U.S. and Afghan forces returned to their bases.
Making sense of it all
Within hours of the fighting, the Taliban launched an aggressive information campaign, claiming that between 100 and 300 civilians had been killed, the source in Afghanistan said. Indeed, those figures have appeared in various media reports.
That’s where the Taliban commanders’ original planning session comes in, the military source in Afghanistan said. In advance of the battle, he said, they ordered Taliban foot soldiers to use grenades, if possible, to execute the civilians they had corralled into the compounds during the ambush, and then present their bodies to the villagers as “evidence” that U.S. warplanes bombed innocent civilians.
“In the chaos of a firefight, they figured no one would know the difference,” the source said.
Then the Taliban mingled its own dead with the civilians, to make the number of dead appear larger, he said. Taliban corpses were buried with the civilian bodies to give the appearance that they were part of the civilian death toll, the source said, adding that latest estimates put the number of Taliban dead around 50.
In Gerani, the lone gravesite contained 60 bodies “at most,” the source said, and an employee at the provincial hospital reported staff there treated 11 patients as a result of the fighting.
“If 200 people were killed, you would think there would have been a lot more wounded,” he said. “Even if 60 were killed, it seems like that would have been the case — unless, of course, most of those 60 people were executed … after the fact. Two hundred killed and 11 wounded? You do the math.”
Moreover, he added, intel suggest that some of the dead civilians had wounds consistent with fragmentation and bullet holes — rather than the burns and tissue damage commonly found on victims of a bombing.
During a meeting with coalition forces and Afghan government officials after the airstrike, villagers — some of whom were held hostage by the Taliban — confirmed that the Taliban rounded up some of the civilians and killed them, the source said. Most of the villagers understood it to have been a calculated plan carried out by the Taliban to blame the entire incident on U.S. and Afghan forces, he said.
This is not the first incident in which the military has rejected claims of mass civilian casualties resulting from U.S. airstrikes. Last year, following a series of investigations, coalition officials concluded that the Taliban killed most of the civilians who were claimed to have died as a result of an airstrike in Azizabad, a village in the Shindand district in Herat province.
In 2007, a company with MarSOC was kicked out of Afghanistan after claims that a platoon of Marines indiscriminately fired on and killed civilians following a suicide bomb attack on their convoy. After an investigation, Lt. Gen. Samuel Helland, head of Marine Corps Forces Central Command, determined the Marines acted appropriately.
Unfortunately this report will be ignored.
Indeed our media watchdog are still shouting from the rooftops that the US is accepting blame for these civilian deaths.
Even the US Marines can’t match the power of the Democrats, their lackeys in our media, and their terrorist allies.
(Thanks to BannedbytheTaliban for the heads up.)

Nuclear Jihadist & Proliferator - A.Q. Khan - Released from Pakistan's Jail

This Book that you should read http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/144547830&tab=holdings?loc=79912 Nuclear Jihadist by Douglas Frantsz,and Catherine Collins.

talks about this person who Pakistan has released as mentioned here from http://www.jihadwatch.org/ who helped the spread of nuclear weapons technology to Iran, Lybia, Pakistan, and North Korea

February 7, 2009
"Pakistan may be giving Khan 'license to resume, perhaps directly, his past actions to aid, abet and profit from the spread of nuclear weapons.'"

Up to his old tricks again?
There could be serious potential fallout from the freeing of A.Q. Khan, about which Robert wrote yesterday here.

But have no fear, since the "US wants assurance from Pak on AQ Khan's future role." That's the headline of this article from the Times of India, February 7:
WASHINGTON: President Barack Obama wants assurance from Islamabad that released Pakistani scientist Abdul Qader Khan, accused of leaking atomic secrets, isn't involved in any of the activity that led to his arrest. ( Watch )
"Obviously the president and this government want assurances that Dr Khan is not engaged or involved in any of the activity that resulted in his house arrest earlier," White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said on Friday.
A Pakistani court on Friday ordered the release of Khan, considered the father of Pakistan's atomic bomb, who spent five years under house arrest after admitting selling nuclear secrets to Iran, North Korea and Libya.
"We've seen the reports of the release but have yet to receive official word from the government," Gibbs said.
"Obviously, this president has made clear many times the great concern that he has about nuclear proliferation."
Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton also expressed concern about the release of Khan. In the House, foreign affairs committee chairman Howard Berman suggested that US aid to Pakistan could suffer because of the development.
Berman said he is "deeply concerned" that Pakistan may be giving Khan "license to resume, perhaps directly, his past actions to aid, abet and profit from the spread of nuclear weapons."
Congress, Berman said, will take Pakistan's refusal to allow US officials to interview Khan "into account as we review and create legislation on US-Pakistan relations and the circumstances under which US assistance is provided to Islamabad."
CIA spokesman George Little called Khan "one of the most dangerous proliferators in history" and praised the disruption of his smuggling network as "a genuine intelligence success."
Earlier, state department spokesman Gordon Duguid describing Khan as "a serious proliferation risk" said in US view "it would be unfortunate if the court released him."
"We believe AQ Khan remains a serious proliferation risk. The proliferation support that Khan and his associates provided to Iran and North Korea has had a harmful impact on international security, and will for years to come."
"The Pakistanis are well aware of our position on this," he said. "This is not a new position."
Asked if the US was anticipating Khan's release when it recently announced sanctions targeting him, the spokesman said: "The sanctions were announced to target the AQ Khan network, which we are actively pursuing and we are trying to roll up."
"And the United States and its international partners have done a good job in tracking down this network. That should have no effect or influence on whether or not Mr. Khan is let out of his current status of detention," he said.

Posted by Raymond at February 7, 2009
http://www.jihadwatch.org/archives/024753.php

Islam Renouncing Jihad and all other forms of War and Terrorism?

I wanted to send this article about an ongoing debate within Islam itself about the legitimacy and effectiveness of various types of Jihad. I think you'll find this timely and interesting.


Wright on al-Qaeda
Peter Wehner - 05.27.2008 - 12:14 PM
Lawrence Wright, author of the brilliant book The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11, has written an extremely significant essay in The New Yorker, “The Rebellion Within.”Wright’s article is devoted to an issue that has fascinated me for months now and which I have written on (see here and here): how the tide within the Islamic world is turning against jihadism and more specifically, the significance of Sayyid Imam al-Sharif–who is more widely known by the pseudonym Dr. Fadl–breaking with the extremist and violent ideology he helped develop and popularize. This is one of the most significant and, until now, unreported ideological developments within the Islamic world. (Wright wisely points out that Fadl’s defection is not the only relevant data point; we have seen key Saudi and Palestinian clerics make similar arguments. For example, Sheikh Abdul Aziz bin Abdullah Aal al-Sheikh, the highest religious authority in Saudi Arabia, issued a fatwa in October 2007 forbidding Saudi youth from engaging in jihad abroad. And a month earlier, Sheikh Salman al-Awdah, an influential Saudi cleric whom Osama bin Laden once lionized, wrote an “open letter” condemning bin Laden).By way of background: Fadl, an Egyptian, is a living legend within the Islamic world and former mentor to Ayman Zawahiri, the ideological leader of Al Qaeda. In November 2007, the first segment of Fadl’s book appeared in the newspapers Al Masri Al Youm and Al Jarida. Titled “Rationalizing Jihad in Egypt and the World,” it attempted to (in Wright’s words) “reconcile Fadl’s well-known views with his sweeping modifications.” The result is that “Fadl’s arguments undermined the entire intellectual framework of jihadist warfare.” Wright argues that Fadl’s book is “a trenchant attack on the immoral roots of Al Qaeda’s theology:”
The premise that opens “Rationalizing Jihad” is “There is nothing that invokes the anger of God and His wrath like the unwarranted spilling of blood and wrecking of property.” Fadl then establishes a new set of rules for jihad, which essentially define most forms of terrorism as illegal under Islamic law and restrict the possibility of holy war to extremely rare circumstances. His argument may seem arcane, even to most Muslims, but to men who had risked their lives in order to carry out what they saw as the authentic precepts of their religion, every word assaulted their world view and brought into question their own chances for salvation.There is more:
Fadl repeatedly emphasizes that it is forbidden to kill civilians-including Christians and Jews-unless they are actively attacking Muslims. “There is nothing in the Sharia about killing Jews and the Nazarenes, referred to by some as the Crusaders,” Fadl observes. “They are the neighbors of the Muslims . . . and being kind to one’s neighbors is a religious duty.” Indiscriminate bombing-”such as blowing up of hotels, buildings, and public transportation”-is not permitted, because innocents will surely die. . . .Speaking of Iraq, he notes that, without the jihad there, “America would have moved into Syria.” However, it is unrealistic to believe that, “under current circumstances,” such struggles will lead to Islamic states. Iraq is particularly troubling because of the sectarian cleansing that the war has generated. Fadl addresses the bloody division between Sunnis and Shiites at the heart of Islam: “Harming those who are affiliated with Islam but have a different creed is forbidden.” Al Qaeda is an entirely Sunni organization; the Shiites are its declared enemies. Fadl, however, quotes Ibn Taymiyya, one of the revered scholars of early Islam, who is also bin Laden’s favorite authority: “A Muslim’s blood and money are safeguarded even if his creed is different.”Wright’s essay–which includes fascinating details on Fadl’s life, his relationship with Zawahiri, the rift that developed between them, and their recent debate about the nature of meaning of jihad–concludes:
One afternoon in Egypt, I visited Kamal Habib, a key leader of the first generation of Al Jihad, who is now a political scientist and analyst. His writing has gained him an audience of former radicals who, like him, have sought a path back to moderation. We met in the cafeteria of the Journalists’ Syndicate, in downtown Cairo. Habib is an energetic political theorist, unbroken by ten years in prison, despite having been tortured. (His arms are marked with scars from cigarette burns.) “We now have before us two schools of thought,” Habib told me. “The old school, which was expressed by Al Jihad and its spinoff, Al Qaeda, is the one that was led by Ayman al-Zawahiri, Sheikh Maqdisi, Zarqawi. The new school, which Dr. Fadl has given expression to, represents a battle of faith. It’s deeper than just ideology.” He went on, “The general mood of Islamist movements in the seventies was intransigence. Now the general mood is toward harmony and coexistence. The distance between the two is a measure of their experience.” Ironically, Dr. Fadl’s thinking gave birth to both schools. “As long as a person lives in a world of jihad, the old vision will control his thinking,” Habib suggested. “When he’s in battle, he doesn’t wonder if he’s wrong or he’s right. When he’s arrested, he has time to wonder.”“Dr. Fadl’s revisions and Zawahiri’s response show that the movement is disintegrating,” Karam Zuhdy, the Islamic Group leader, told me one afternoon, in his modest apartment in Alexandria. He is a striking figure, fifty-six years old, with blond hair and black eyebrows. His daughter, who is four, wrapped herself around his leg as an old black-and-white Egyptian movie played silently on a television. Such movies provide a glimpse of a more tolerant and hopeful time, before Egypt took its dark turn into revolution and Islamist violence. I asked Zuhdy how his country might have been different if he and his colleagues had never chosen the bloody path. “It would have been a lot better now,” he admitted. “Our opting for violence encouraged Al Jihad to emerge.” He even suggested that, had the Islamists not murdered Sadat thirty years ago, there would be peace today between the Palestinians and the Israelis. He quoted the Prophet Muhammad: “Only what benefits people stays on the earth.”
“It’s very easy to start violence,” Zuhdy said. “Peace is much more difficult.”The tectonic plates have been shifting within the Islamic world for many months now. Thanks to Wright’s new essay, many more people in this country will recognize what is unfolding and its ramifications for al Qaeda specifically and jihadism more broadly. And while there is plenty of work that remains to be done and this struggle is far from over, what we have seen are heartening, far-reaching, and perhaps even pivotal developments in the history of jihad.
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