Sunday, October 08, 2017

Filmstruck Now Streaming "Who Shall Live and Who Shall Die?"

Glad to see that Filmstruck is now streaming my 1981 documentary, Who Shall Live and Who Shall Die? with a nice introduction by Columbia University Professor Annette Insdorf...click here to watch: https://www.filmstruck.com/us/watch/detail/1300010061.

Thursday, October 05, 2017

Pamela Geller's CAN'T WE TALK ABOUT THIS?



Pamela Geller's new documentary, CAN'T WE TALK ABOUT THIS? THE ISLAMIC JIHAD AGAINST FREE SPEECH couldn't come at a more appropriate moment, as Americans are experiencing the silencing not only of dissent on college campuses, but also the decline of the "public's right to know"as evidenced by the scarcity of public information about the recent massacre in Las Vegas. 

Instead of talking about the attack, its targets, the possible motivations of the gunman, or the glee with which ISIS and leftists have greeted the bloody deed, the media and political leadership have focused laser-like on the issue of gun-control...which, if this were a terrorist attack, would be supremely irrelevant as terrorists have used every weapon imaginable: guns, bombs, cars, trucks, knives, acid, and sabotage. And they have used these weapons to terrorize Western societies precisely in order to prevent discussion of...Islamic terror!

Geller's superb documentary shows how the inability to talk about Islamic terror since 9/11 has guaranteed defeat in the "war of ideas" currently taking place between the West and the Islamic world. For while Islamic terrorists spread their ideas with "propaganda of the deed," the West doesn't talk about its own ideas in response. It is a form of unilateral intellectual disarmament in a global ideological struggle...

In fact, as the film shows, Western authorities attempt to suppress Western ideas in the face of a Leftist-Islamic alliance against them, attacking critics of Islamic terror like Geller and her all-star cast of witnesses: Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Geert Wilders, Mark Steyn, Douglas Murray, Ezra Levant, Lars Vilks, Robert Spencer, Garland Muhammad cartoon contest winner Bosch Fawstin, and Geller herself.

This is reminiscent of nothing so much as the Establishment's response to Communism following the Kennedy assassination. Until JFK's murder in Dallas by Communist assassin Lee Harvey Oswald, American media, colleges, schools, and publications were free to discuss Communist aggression against the West. Afterwards, supposedly Cold-War liberals changed sides, and mention of Communism became taboo in respectable society. Those who worried about the "Red Menace" were mocked, ostracized, and shunned...portrayed as crazy, paranoid, delusional believers in "Reds under the bed" or advocates of "McCarthyism."

Until Ronald Reagan was elected President of the United States and defeated the Soviet Union, the collapse of which opened Russian archives that revealed the Comintern had indeed been active to promote worldwide Revolution, the Rosenbergs had been spies, Alger Hiss had been a Russian Agent, and that the USSR had been active in Vietnam and Central America...just as the "crazy" anti-Communists had charged. 

Reagan had succeeded because he refused to adopt the Establishment consensus and avoid the issue of Communism. Rather he called the USSR an "Evil Empire" and confronted it head-on.

Yet, after the fall of Communism, a messianic age of peace and love and understanding did not arrive, despite Clinton administration promotion promotion of Francis Fukuyama's fatuous "The End of History." Rather, what took place was what Fukuyama's teacher, Samuel Huntington, described in his own book, "The Clash of Civilizations." Instead of a "unipolar world," ancient tensions that had been subsumed under the East-West conflict once again bubbled to the surface--a "return of the repressed."

Chief among these was the rise of Islam as a competitive and adversarial ideology opposed to bourgeoise Western democracy, most dramatically in the attacks on New York and Washington on September 11th, 2001. As damaging as the Kennedy assassination had been to the US, apparently nothing had been learned. Once again, ideological underpinnings were willfully ignored. Just as it had become a career-ender to call someone a Communist in the latter half of the 20th Century, it became a career-ender to call someone an Islamist in the first half of the 21st.

And just as in the Post-Vietnam era, the West began to lose its mojo. Afghanistan and Iraq became costly, futile quagmires instead of quick, decisive victories. Americans saw the social fabric fray under domestic attacks reminiscent of the 1960s.

All this is either discussed or implied in Geller's brilliant film. The West defeated Communism only when Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan allied to directly confront it ideologically as well as military and economically.

The takeaway from CAN'T WE TALK ABOUT THIS? is perfectly clear: Until Americans are free to confront Islamic terror directly, it cannot be defeated. To silence criticism of Islam is to surrender to the enemies of America and Western Civilization.

The next step to Making America Great Again is to talk openly about Islam. And the best way to do that, in my opinion, would be for President Trump to broadcast CAN'T WE TALK ABOUT THIS? on Radio Free Europe, the Voice of America, and PBS--just as President Reagan sponsored the broadcast of LET POLAND BE POLAND, a film that led to the fall of the Berlin Wall and collapse of the Evil Empire.

Broadcasting Pamela Geller's film on US-Government sponsored channels as soon as possible would be a signal to the world that the Islamic fundamentalists and their supporters no longer had America running scared.