The Power of Film

"What Artistotle did for drama, Suber has now done for film. This is a profound and succinct book that is miraculously fun to read." -David Koepp, Screenwriter, War of the Worlds (2005), Spider-Man, Mission Impossible, Jurassic Park

That's the blurb for my former UCLA Film School professor's new book, The Power of Film. You can buy a copy from Amazon.com, by clicking on the box:

RobertDreyfuss.com

Just found out that the author of Devil's Game: How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam has his own website, here:

A second big mistake that emerges in Devil’s Game occurred in the 1970s, when, at the height of the Cold War and the struggle for control of the Middle East, the United States either supported or acquiesced in the rapid growth of Islamic right in countries from Egypt to Afghanistan. In Egypt, Anwar Sadat brought the Muslim Brotherhood back to Egypt. In Syria, the United States, Israel, and Jordan supported the Muslim Brotherhood in a civil war against Syria. And, as described in a groundbreaking chapter in Devil’s Game, Israel quietly backed Ahmed Yassin and the Muslim Brotherhood in the West Bank and Gaza, leading to the establishment of Hamas.

Still another major mistake was the fantasy that Islam would penetrate the USSR and unravel the Soviet Union in Asia. It led to America’s support for the jihadists in Afghanistan. But as Devil’s Game shows, America’s alliance with the Afghan Islamists long predated the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 and had its roots in CIA activity in Afghanistan in the 1960s and in the early and mid-1970s. The Afghan jihad spawned civil war in Afghanistan in the late 1980s, gave rise to the Taliban, and got Osama bin Laden started on building Al Qaeda.

Would the Islamic right have existed without U.S. support? Of course. This is not a book for the conspiracy-minded. But there is no question that the virulence of the movement that we now confront—and which confronts many of the countries in the region, too, from Algeria to India and beyond—would have been significantly less had the United States made other choices during the Cold War.

Herb Meyer: Time to Crush Hezbollah

From The American Thinker:

...on April 18, 1983, Hezbollah blew up that building and killed her, along with the agency’s top Mideast analyst, Bob Ames, and more than 60 other people. Six months later, on October 23, Hezbollah launched an attack in Beirut that killed 241 of our Marines, sailors and soldiers.

Why Reagan Held Back

President Reagan decided not to retaliate for either of these attacks, and I believe this was among the toughest decisions he ever made. What the President understood – and what so many people demanding retaliation back then did not – is that in 1983 we were in the final stages of winning the Cold War. This was the President’s great objective and achieving it would absorb all of his, and the administration’s, energies and efforts. He would allow nothing – not even Hezbollah’s attacks on our embassy and our Marines – to distract us from defeating the Soviet Union.

Now we are engaged in another global struggle, and this time Hezbollah is right in the middle of it. In the war on terrorism, Hezbollah isn’t a distraction. It’s a wholly-owned subsidiary of Iran, and a partner of Syria – both of which are determined to stop us from winning in Afghanistan and Iraq. Today, through what appears to be its own miscalculation, Hezbollah finds itself at war with Israel. Good. This may be the best break we’ve had since 9-11. We ought to give the Israelis all the help we can – militarily, on the ground as well as in the air – to annihilate Hezbollah and all its leaders. That will weaken Iran and Syria, and by doing so help us win in Afghanistan and Iraq....

...When you’re in the middle of a war, of course you need to think before you act. But there is such a thing as over-thinking, and today we are in serious danger of making this mistake. In war there is nothing – absolutely nothing – that brings victory faster and more completely than the total annihilation of your enemy. Do that and everything else – what the late, great Senator Sam Ervine of North Carolina once called “the complex complexities” – sort themselves out.

Right now we have an unexpected opportunity to obliterate Hezbollah, and by doing so to increase our chances for victory in Afghanistan and Iraq. We’d be fools not to go for it.

Jerusalem Post: NGOs Demonize Israel for Hezbollah

Gerald Steinberg writes:

IN THIS battlefield of political warfare, a group of powerful NGOs play a central role, introducing and amplifying the demonization of Israeli self-defense.

New York-based Human Rights Watch issued eight statements on the Lebanon conflict between July 13 and July 24, of which only one focuses on criticism of Hizbullah.

HRW, which has been producing anti-Israel propaganda for many years (often providing a single exception as a fig leaf to mention in responses to critics), included a detailed "Q and A" report purporting to analyze violations of international law, primarily by Israel.

In a detailed article written by Dr. Avi Bell and published by NGO Monitor, HRW's analysis was shown to be based on "distorted views of the underlying facts, selective omission of crucial legal issues... [that] mislead readers and betray the bias of the piece."

HRW's campaign was joined by similar statements - some more balanced and honest than others - issued by Amnesty International, B'Tselem, Christian Aid, the International Commission of Jurists (based in Geneva), the International Federation of Human Rights Leagues (based in Paris), Oxfam, Norwegian People's Aid, MIFTAH (run by Hanan Ashrawi), and others.

THESE NGO superpowers have immediate access to the media and politicians. HRW and Amnesty have annual budgets of tens of millions of dollars, of which more seems to be used for promotion than for actual research.

Enjoying what is know as the "halo effect," few if any journalists or diplomats bother to check the details, biases or credibility of NGO claims. When the details were examined by NGO Monitor's research staff, or Prof. Alan Dershowitz of Harvard University, the claims have often been shown to be false or unverifiable.

Bull Moose on the Israel-Hezbollah War

From The Bull Moose:

We have now arrived at the point in Israel's war of self defense against Hezbollah when world opinion is turning against the Jewish state. As the Moose expected, it was inevitable. It happens every time.

The bottom line is that world opinion will not be satisfied until Israel stops defending herself. This war is as just as Israel's fight for existence in '48 or '67 or '73. It is not about occupation. It is a fight against evil. It is as clear cut as WWII.

It truly boggles the mind that the world carps and complains that Israel is "disproportionate" in its war to defend itself. Israel was a nation at peace that was attacked by a terrorist organization that was given refuge in Lebanon and is part of the government. Israel has every right to eliminate that threat. Israel has the power to level Lebanon - and that would have been the fate of that suffering country during any other time in human history. Instead, Israel is risking the lives of her troops to avoid as many civilian casualties as possible.

Israel should be celebrated and applauded by the world for her actions. Instead, the world denounces the Jewish state.

The problem is that liberal civilization lacks the moral clarity that existed in the '40s. Now, all is relative. And the world is weary of this fight. But, once again, Jews have no choice.

Victor Davis Hanson: A Dictionary of the Israel-Hezbollah Conflict

VDH channels Ambrose Bierce in National Review Online:

“Civilians” in Lebanon have munitions in their basements and deliberately wish to draw fire; in Israel they are in bunkers to avoid it. Israel uses precision weapons to avoid hitting them; Hezbollah sends random missiles into Israel to ensure they are struck.

“Collateral damage” refers mostly to casualties among Hezbollah’s human shields; it can never be used to describe civilian deaths inside Israel, because everything there is by intent a target.

“Cycle of Violence” is used to denigrate those who are attacked, but are not supposed to win.

“Deliberate” reflects the accuracy of Israeli bombs hitting their targets; it never refers to Hezbollah rockets that are meant to destroy anything they can.

“Deplore” is usually evoked against Israel by those who themselves have slaughtered noncombatants or allowed them to perish — such as the Russians in Grozny, the Syrians in Hama, or the U.N. in Rwanda and Dafur.

“Disproportionate” means that the Hezbollah aggressors whose primitive rockets can’t kill very many Israeli civilians are losing, while the Israelis’ sophisticated response is deadly against the combatants themselves. See “excessive.”

Anytime you hear the adjective “excessive,” Hezbollah is losing. Anytime you don’t, it isn’t.

“Eyewitnesses” usually aren’t, and their testimony is cited only against Israel.

“Grave concern” is used by Europeans and Arabs who privately concede there is no future for Lebanon unless Hezbollah is destroyed — and it should preferably be done by the “Zionists” who can then be easily blamed for doing it.

“Innocent” often refers to Lebanese who aid the stockpiling of rockets or live next to those who do. It rarely refers to Israelis under attack.

The “militants” of Hezbollah don’t wear uniforms, and their prime targets are not those Israelis who do.

“Multinational,” as in “multinational force,” usually means “third-world mercenaries who sympathize with Hezbollah.” See “peacekeepers.”

Seattle Gunman Reportedly Won US Institute of Peace Essay Contest

According to the Seattle Post-Intelligencer:

Those who knew Naveed Haq said Saturday that to them he was an enigma, a puzzle that they wish they could have solved before his deadly rampage in a Seattle Jewish center.

Stunned and saddened by the news, some of Haq's acquaintances recounted many of what they saw as the contradictions of his life.

He held a degree in electrical engineering and was the son of a successful engineer, yet he couldn't keep a regular job. He was smart, creative and skilled as a writer. He recently won an essay contest for a U.S. Institute of Peace scholarship.

I wonder what the US Institute for Peace has to say about this report?

Civilian Deaths in Perspective

After following the incredible atrocity propaganda campaign (it reminded me of British "Germans Raped Belgian Nuns" stories during World War I) waged by Hezbollah and its allies in the non-Fox media, I googled statistics on other wars, and found this study by Marc Herold analyzing significant civilian casualties in
America's Afghanistan campaign, NATO's Serbia campaign, and in Cambodia. Russia's Grozny campaign not included in study, but probably no better: ...And this site claims there have been over 39,000 civilian casualties so far in Iraq.

Ann Althouse on Woody Allen's Scoop

This is the most interesting review of the film that I've read, anywhere:

So I think this is Woody's elaborate meditation about sex, specifically about an old man's exclusion from sex. The scoop, which Splendini can't get, is the woman's vagina. (Dictionary definition of "scoop": "7. A hollow area; a cavity.") There are many more things I could talk about here, but I don't want to spoil the ending and I've gone on too long already.

Yoel Marcus: Israel Must Fight Harder, Faster

Yoel Marcus writes in Ha'aretz:

Until 1967, the State of Israel fought against neighbors who refused to recognize its existence. Since then, all the Islamic countries (with the exception of Iran) have stopped talking about the destruction of Israel. We have peace treaties with some of them, and some of the more sane ones even appreciate having us around.

The current war is being waged by fanatic Islamic organizations - President George Bush's axis of evil - whose declared aim is to wipe Israel off the face of the earth. They are fighting us in the name of Allah, attacking civilian targets in Israel and Jewish targets overseas. In the same way that we have no answer to long-range ballistic missiles, we have no answer to the ideology that promotes Israel's destruction.

The trouble is that we are fighting with yesterday's weapons. Israel should have switched over long ago to another form of deterrence and retaliation. When Hezbollah kidnapped two soldiers on our border, using rocket fire as a diversion, Israel should have responded with a very powerful pinpointed strike. Instead, the chief of staff recommended a war best described as half tea, half coffee - bombing and besieging Lebanon in the hope that the world would intervene and create a demilitarized zone between us and Hezbollah. So far, the air raids and massive destruction that were meant to restore our power of deterrence have only done the opposite. No minister in the security cabinet, apart from Shimon Peres, has asked what Israel is planning to do in the last stage of the game.

A recent scenario has Israel agreeing to a cease-fire and a multinational force deployed between the Litani River and the international border. But Israel cannot go about its business and ignore the intolerable ease with which Hezbollah lobs missiles at innocent civilians - something that no Arab country at war with Israel has ever dared to do in all the years of its existence. It is unthinkable to walk away from the battlefield with the depressing sense that out of all the wars Israel has ever fought, only Hezbollah, a mere band of terrorists, was able to bombard the Israeli home front with thousands of missiles and get off scot-free.

Before any international agreement, Israel must sound the last chord, launching a massive air and ground offensive that will end this mortifying war, not with a whimper but with a thunderous roar.

Debka Analysis: International Community Hands Victory to Hezbollah

From Debka.com:

DEBKAfile notes: France has a highly-developed relationship with Hizballah. French diplomats in Beirut have maintained contacts with Hizballah leaders close to Hassan Nasrallah in the last two week of fighting. In 2004, President Jacques Chirac invited Nasrallah to a conference of Francophone Arab leaders. They shook hands and the Hizballah leader was seated beside the French president at the top table. France may well have obtained prior Hizballah consent to its draft.
In Jerusalem, Rice was assigned with clinching Israeli concessions, which reportedly include:
1. Release of Lebanese prisoner in return for Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev. The argument is still ahead on the exact definition of “Lebanese prisoners.” defined.
2. Withdrawal of Israeli positions from the Shebaa Farms and the Mt. Hermon and Mt. Dov slopes and passes for the handover of these strategic points to the multinational force. This would give Nasrallah, who has been fighting to achieve this end for six years, his greatest triumph and give Syria and the Palestinians an object lesson on the application of brute force to obtain results.
3. Israel no longer presses for the disarming of Hizballah. That too is left to the “international community.”
In other words, just as Ariel Sharon and Ehud Olmert handed over the Gaza-Egyptian border terminals to a European unit in 2005 to expedite the pull-out from the Gaza Strip, so too is Olmert again entrusting to a foreign force the Israel-Lebanese border and the security of northern Israel - with the Shebaa Farms thrown in as an extra. This result lets Nasrallah come out on top after provoking a full-scale war and provides a boost for all the forces of fundamentalist Islamic terror waging war on the West. It is also the outcome of the Israeli army’s unfortunate failure to break the back of Hizballah in 18 days of combat.

Andrew McCarthy: Seattle Attack is Terrorism

Read it here. (ht lgf)

Debbie Schlussel: Inside Hezbollah's American Support Group

Debbi Schlussel reports on Hezbollah's American supporters in Dearborn, Michigan:

Sunday was a busy day.

First, I watched Michigan FBI Special Agent in Charge Daniel Roberts chase after Hezbollah terrorists on the elliptical machine at a swanky suburban Detroit gym.

Then, I did the work he and his agents should be doing. But aren't. (Don't believe claims by Roberts and paunchy FBI sidekick, William Kowalski, that they are "monitoring" Hezbollah.) I headed to the Bint Jebail Cultural Center in the heart of Islamic America--Dearborn, Michigan. More on that club--a hangout for thousands of Hezbollah supporters on our shores--later.

Tony Blair Explains Worldwide Struggle Against Islamist Extremism

At the White House, with George W. Bush, yesterday:

PRIME MINISTER BLAIR: I don't think, actually, it's anything to do with a loss of American influence at all. I think -- we've got to go back and ask what changed policy, because policy has changed in the past few years. And what changed policy was September the 11th. That changed policy, but actually, before September the 11th this global movement with a global ideology was already in being. September the 11th was the culmination of what they wanted to do. But, actually -- and this is probably where the policymakers, such as myself, were truly in error -- is that even before September the 11th, this was happening in all sorts of different ways in different countries.

I mean, in Algeria, for example, tens and tens of thousands of people lost their lives. This movement has grown, it is there, it will latch on to any cause that it possibly can and give it a dimension of terrorism and hatred. You can see this. You can see it in Kashmir, for example. You can see it in Chechnya. You can see it in Palestine.

Now, what is its purpose? Its purpose is to promote its ideology based upon the perversion of Islam, and to use any methods at all, but particularly terrorism, to do that, because they know that the value of terrorism to them is -- as I was saying a moment or two ago, it's not simply the act of terror, it's the chain reaction that terror brings with it. Terrorism brings the reprisal; the reprisal brings the additional hatred; the additional hatred breeds the additional terrorism, and so on. But in a small way, we lived through that in Northern Ireland over many, many decades.

Now, what happened after September the 11th -- and this explains, I think, the President's policy, but also the reason why I have taken the view, and still take the view that Britain and America should remain strong allies, shoulder-to-shoulder in fighting this battle, is that we are never going to succeed unless we understand they are going to fight hard. The reason why they are doing what they're doing in Iraq at the moment -- and, yes, it's really tough as a result of it -- is because they know that if, right in the center of the Middle East, in an Arab, Muslim country, you've got a non-sectarian democracy, in other words people weren't governed either by religious fanatics or secular dictators, you've got a genuine democracy of the people, how does their ideology flourish in such circumstances?

So they have imported the terrorism into that country, preyed on whatever reactionary elements there are to boost it. And that's why we have the issue there; that's why the Taliban are trying to come back in Afghanistan. That is why, the moment it looked as if you could get progress in Israel and Palestine, it had to be stopped. That's the moment when, as they saw there was a problem in Gaza, so they realized, well, there's a possibility now we can set Lebanon against Israel.

Now, it's a global movement, it's a global ideology. And if there's any mistake that's ever made in these circumstances, it's if people are surprised that it's tough to fight, because you're up against an ideology that's prepared to use any means at all, including killing any number of wholly innocent people.

And I don't dispute part of the implication of your question at all, in the sense that you look at what is happening in the Middle East and what is happening in Iraq and Lebanon and Palestine, and, of course, there's a sense of shock and frustration and anger at what is happening, and grief at the loss of innocent lives. But it is not a reason for walking away. It's a reason for staying the course, and staying it no matter how tough it is, because the alternative is actually letting this ideology grip a larger and larger number of people.

And it is going to be difficult. Look, we've got a problem even in our own Muslim communities in Europe, who will half-buy into some of the propaganda that's pushed at it -- the purpose of America is to suppress Islam, Britain has joined with America in the suppression of Islam. And one of the things we've got to stop doing is stop apologizing for our own positions. Muslims in America, as far as I'm aware of, are free to worship; Muslims in Britain are free to worship. We are plural societies.

It's nonsense, the propaganda is nonsense. And we're not going to defeat this ideology until we in the West go out with sufficient confidence in our own position and say, this is wrong. It's not just wrong in its methods, it's wrong in its ideas, it's wrong in its ideology, it's wrong in every single wretched reactionary thing about it. And it will be a long struggle, I'm afraid. But there's no alternative but to stay the course with it. And we will.

Naveed Afzal Haq Arrested in Seattle Jewish Federation Attack

From the Seattle Times

A Muslim man angry with Israel barged into the offices of the Jewish Federation of Greater Seattle Friday afternoon and opened fire with a handgun, killing one woman and wounding five others before surrendering to police.

Three of the women were in critical condition late Friday.

A law-enforcement source identified the arrested suspect as Naveed Afzal Haq, 30, who until recently had lived in Everett, and said Haq apparently has a history of mental illness.

Dr. Harvey Sicherman Explains Israel's Lebanon War

Listen in to an mp3 podcast of a telephone conference call seminar, in which the former aide to 3 US Secretaries of State (Haig, Schulz, Baker), who heads the Foreign Policy Research Institute of Philadelphia, explains the Israeli-Hezbollah conflict in the context of confrontation with Iran.

Dick Morris on Anti-Israel Democrats

Here's an interesting Dick Morris column on the domestic political fallout from Israel's Lebanon War (ht Belmont Club via Roger L Simon):

Clinton’s willingness to use American power to force a cease-fire on Israel before it had fully eradicated Hezbollah stands in stark and sharp contrast to George Bush’s insistence on letting Israel proceed with its attacks until the terrorist group is neutralized.

In a nutshell, this illustrates the difference between the Democratic and Republican approaches to Israeli security.

Bush and his administration clearly see the Israeli attack as an opportunity to clean out terrorist cells that have come to be pivotal in Lebanon. With Hezbollah’s power extending into the cabinet in Beirut, it is clear that Israeli military action is necessary to forestall the creation of a terrorist state on its northern border.

While Clinton said he embraced the need for Israeli security, when the going got rough, he bowed to world opinion and called for a cease-fire. When the United States asks Israel to stop fighting, it is like a boxer’s manager throwing in the towel. The bottom line is that true friends of Israel cannot afford to let the Democrats take power in Washington.

What Arabs are Watching on TV

Calling Karen Hughes...(btw, anyone seen her lately?)

Thanks to a tip from Andrew Sullivan, we can all see this typical Egyptian music video, containing the widespread black propaganda message that the US & Israel are two sides of the same coin--who blew up the World Trade Center...

Protester Confirms John Bolton

Just watched the video of the protester being taken out from the John Bolton Senate confirmation hearing, here.

After that embarrassing outburst, no message from the protester at all other than she doesn't like him, I'd say the Senate has to confirm him. But, I've been wrong before...

An Interesting Photo from the Archives

This picture of the Hezbollah leader in Lebanon meeting with the UN Secretary General is from DebbiSchussel.com:(ht Michelle Malkin)