President Trump apparently ordered today’s pre-emptive strike on Iran’s top military official for planning to mass murder Americans in Iraq. The Islamic dictatorship of Iran confirmed the death. The New York Times reports confirmation of both assertions.
The historic nature of this excellent act of U.S. self-defense is unmistakable. Donald Trump is the first American president to militarily counterstrike this evil enemy explicitly on the principle of saving American lives. Time and again, from President Carter, who refused to assassinate Iran’s first Islamic dictator, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, before the monster returned to impose a barbaric theocracy, to President Obama, who appeased Iran and brokered a deal which brought Israel’s prime minister and the late Elie Wiesel to plead to a joint session of Congress for U.S. rejection of Obama’s death pact.
“This is devastating for the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps, the [Islamic] regime and Khamenei’s regional ambitions,” Mark Dubowitz, who runs a think tank opposing appeasement of Iran, referring to the Iranian dictatorship’s ayatollah, told the Times, which reported that President Trump ordered the drone strike on Baghdad’s International Airport.
In the 40 years since Iran waged war on America by seizing our embassy in Teheran, capturing Americans as prisoners of war wrongly dubbed “hostages”, beating U.S. Marines, baiting Americans for a race war involving radical leftists including Rev. Jesse Jackson and waging war with mass murder on American Marines in Beirut and across the world, including sponsoring nonstop attacks on America from hijacked passenger jets to countless untold acts of war, not a single American government hit Iran back hard. Carter shrunk in defeat after his folly over Khomeini. Reagan retreated. Bush the pappy appeased Iran, letting the savages threaten a published Western author and bomb American bookstores. Clinton did nothing when Iran bombed the United States Navy. Bush the son ordered the Marines to stand down in Iraq when Iran’s mystics ordered a siege against America. Obama welcomed and appeased Iran over and over. Even when Obama ordered the U.S. military to kill the top Moslem connected to carrying out the attack on Black Tuesday, September 11, 2001, he did so with a sad, morose, somber tone and honored the monster, granting an Islamic ritual at sea. And pleading with the enemy by pledging that he had done so in accordance with the faith that moves the enemy to destroy the West.
On Friday, January 3, 2020, the third American president to be impeached by Congress, Donald Trump, hit Iran by taking out one of its top thugs. It’s even better that he did so on the grounds of saving Americans’ lives, contrary to all of his presidential predecessors combined, who
“General Suleimani was actively developing plans to attack American diplomats and service members in Iraq and throughout the region,” the Pentagon said in a statement. “General Suleimani and his Quds Force were responsible for the deaths of hundreds of American and coalition service members and the wounding of thousands more.”
Inspired by the documentary, Surviving Mumbai, first time feature film director Anthony Maras made the docudrama Hotel Mumbai starring Dev Patel (Lion) as an Indian hotel waiter, Armie Hammer (Call Me By Your Name) as an American husband and father and Jason Isaacs (The Death of Stalin) as a Russian.
The movie, opening this weekend, recreates an Islamic terrorist attack on the city formerly known as Bombay. The November 26, 2008, act of war is one of those timed, coordinated assaults like the jihadists’ failed Bojinka plot or the attack on America on September 11, 2001.
Maras, who graciously appeared with Isaacs at an afterwards Q & A at the ArcLight Hollywood where I saw the movie, means well. He’s apparently a lawyer by profession and he brings a certain eye for detail to the story. But Hotel Mumbai is too journalistic, which results in a film which unintentionally glorifies the jihadists. By focusing on the hotel guests’ diversity or multicultural backgrounds, downplaying any acts of heroism, which were often unsuccessful and rendered impossible by incompetence by India’s government, Maras ends up with a movie about another act of war against the West which goes unaccounted for and unavenged.
To be clear, the attack was a victory for the barbaric Islamic fundamentalists. The state sponsors, even the planners, were never exactly identified, let alone caught or destroyed. On the upside of this extremely naturalistic approach, Maras depicts with accuracy the Islamic terrorists’ devoutly religious rituals, including their incessantly mindless repeating of the phrase “God is great!” For this brave depiction alone, Maras deserves a serious credit for showing the truth of what happened during this monstrous act of evil. It was a massacre born of faith and religion. Hotel Mumbai makes this clear.
But the movie mixes in other aspects that dramatize the jihadists’ victory that, on balance, amount to a morally gray, neutral motion picture. By refusing to delve into the impetus, motives and fundamentalism of the mass murderers’ faith in Islam and, instead, showing them to be relatively innocent boys, Hotel Mumbai implies a moral equivalency. Indeed, one of the most tense scenes involves an act of mercy on behalf of the Moslem terrorists. Unfortunately, this makes Hotel Mumbai both confusing and morally agnostic about its subject. The grand hotel and its noble and heroic staff, which regard the individual “guest as God”, are lost in the mayhem.
Hotel Mumbai is more like a graphic recreation refusing to take sides than a proper cinematic portrayal of an act of war by savages against civilization.
Having partly reviewed and previewed, I’ve now seen every episode of Hulu’s 10-episode microseries based on The Looming Tower by Lawrence Wright. The program traces the rising threat of Islamic terrorism in the 1990s and the derailment of the FBI and CIA from preventing it. The title invokes the twin New York City skyscrapers destroyed in the 2001 attack on the United States. These buildings loom like giant ghosts.
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The Looming Tower dramatizes American appeasement, evasions and contradictions. This show is a docudrama, which is to say that it dramatizes key assertions, facts and documentary evidence of the federal government’s total corruption and incompetence, with the exception of the FBI’s John O’Neill (Jeff Daniels, Steve Jobs). As such, this is pure naturalism, so don’t expect any happy endings or silver linings as have been depicted in previous Islamic terrorism-themed productions. As any proper series or movie about Soviet Russia, Nazi Germany or the Holocaust must account for evil and maintain an appropriate tone matching mass murder, The Looming Tower projects the requisite seriousness for the subject matter. In every episode, the cumulative effect builds not on what will happen but how what will happen will be evaded by the U.S. government.
In this case, the fault lies chiefly with the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), which hoards its data collection, though the national security adviser Condoleezza Rice also bears culpability, as I already knew. The FBI and the rest of the Bush administration does, too, insofar as they deliberately acted with malice toward the very idea of national defense against Islamic terrorism. One of The Looming Tower‘s assets is its depiction of the entire government seeking to avoid, deny or ignore Islamic terrorism or, worse, use it to gain power. This problem has only gotten worse; they’ve dropped the ‘Islamic’ and thus avoid any admission of what moves the enemy.
Unfortunately, insidiously, this problem also infects The Looming Tower. By slowly but purposefully featuring dual tracks of religion in O’Neill’s conflicted Catholicism and his protégé’s occasional invocation of Islam — FBI agent Ali Soufan, portrayed by Tahar Rahim (Soufan also produced the series) — The Looming Tower minimizes the cause of 9/11: religious fundamentalism. The series would have been better off dropping the religious subplot, which adds nothing to the series, and sticking to the facts of what happened, what didn’t happen, and why. Observant Moslem agent Soufan’s using Islam and the Koran to send a terrorist on a guilt trip simply isn’t compelling. Even if, as portrayed, the terrorist Abu Jandal hung his head in shame at Soufan’s Islamic-themed lecture and inquisition, which I doubt, it’s beside the point. The more consistently preached and practiced version or interpretation of Islam is what motivated the hijackers to attack the Twin Towers. The Islamic jihad’s only spread farther since.
As depicted, the CIA’s Martin Schmidt (Peter Sarsgaard) tries to stop the catastrophic attack in advance, as does O’Neill, who was murdered in the Twin Towers. O’Neill had just taken a job as the World Trade Center’s security chief after being pushed out of the FBI. Why? He had offended the American ambassador to Yemen during an investigation of the bombing of the USS Cole. Schmidt’s power-drunk protégé, icily portrayed by Wrenn Schmidt, lied to Congress about her knowledge and actions pertaining to the hijackers. Certain FBI agents, too, are contaminated by evasion of Islamic terrorism and lust for getting status and prestige from concealing data.
The hero of this horror story, O’Neill, went down with the collapse of the World Trade Center, which should have been portrayed and isn’t. Like any dramatization of the National Socialist or Communist mass murder, any honest depiction of 9/11 ought to show the carnage, suffering and horror of what nearly 3,000 Americans, including the man who all but predicted the attack, faced on Black Tuesday. As O’Neill, Daniels is excellent. He’s never out of character. His idealistic cop is always hard driving and thinking ahead, until the end of his life. As Richard Clarke, the only government official decent enough to admit failure and apologize to the American people, which is more than Bush, Rice and Cheney ever did, Michael Stuhlbarg (The Shape of Water, Call Me By Your Name) is good.
But Clarke, Soufan and O’Neill, who by this account sought a proper and meaningful defense of America, are a contrast to most of those working for the government as portrayed in The Looming Tower. By and large, and this is the impact of Legendary Television’s 10-episode series, the women and men of the FBI, CIA and White House lust for power. They do not choose to think. They chose to evade thought at every turn, in every moment, at each crucial opportunity to defend the nation against attack. As the final scene ends in this gripping portrayal of American appeasement of Islamic terrorism, whatever its flaws, I was reminded of the gloomy truth that the U.S. has become less free since 9/11.
Ayn Rand once said: “The human characteristic required by statism is docility, which is the product of hopelessness and intellectual stagnation. Thinking men cannot be ruled; ambitious men do not stagnate.” The Looming Tower captures this sense of despair, loss and nothingness. The series affirms that America is doomed to statism, and that, unless we put more men like O’Neill in charge, Americans have every reason to expect more mass death. In its lazy, unfocused, range-of-the-moment, partying, self-congratulating and shuffling law enforcement and national security complex, America’s government reflects the people Americans have become. Today’s is the government the people, if not O’Neill and those who go against the status quo, deserve. The Looming Tower rightly dramatizes this docility in stark, ashen gray.
Having previewed Hulu’s new TV miniseries based on the Pulitzer-Prize winning book, The Looming Tower: Al Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 by Lawrence Wright, I can attest that the series takes its subject, the impending Islamic terrorist siege on September 11, 2001, seriously. The show chiefly stands out for an intelligent performance by Jeff Daniels as federal policeman John O’Neill.
O’Neill tried in vain to warn the United States government that Islamic jihadists would strike the World Trade Center again after 1993. In the wake of repeated failures by the U.S. government, despite being forewarned in specific detail in advance, to stop Islamic terrorist attacks in San Bernardino, Boston, Orlando and Texas, The Looming Tower depicts the truth about the ominous implications of today’s corrupt, deficient United States government and its surveillance statism. This week’s newest mass murder in Florida, another instance in which the federal government knew in advance of an impending attack and did nothing, highlights the point.
The Looming Tower follows key members of the the FBI’s and CIA’s counter-terrorism teams in New York and Washington, D.C. as they jockey for status or, in O’Neill’s case, rush to prevent new jihadist acts of war, while ostensibly working to achieve the same goal. With crackling dialogue, and not too much equivocation of the enemy’s ideology, this well-paced procedural re-creates condensed points from Wright’s 2006 bestseller, focusing on the government’s detrimental internal rivalry.
Emphasis on John O’Neill, the subject of Frontline‘s excellent profile, “The Man Who Knew“, as he faces and responds to attacks on Americans, including the Iranian-sponsored attack on the USS Cole, is warranted. This politically incorrect freethinker, who died when Islamic terrorists attacked America on Black Tuesday, forecast the act of war which ended his life.
Jeff Daniels, recently cast to play Atticus Finch in Aaron Sorkin’s new Broadway adaptation of Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird and so memorably effective in key roles in Pleasantville and Steve Jobs, steals every scene. Whether battling his CIA counterpart Martin Schmidt (Peter Sarsgaard) or mentoring an Islamic colleague (Ali Soufan), Daniels portrays O’Neill with the passion, rationality and sense of urgency he is reported by Wright and Frontline to have possessed.
Legendary Television’s The Looming Tower, which also stars Michael Stuhlbarg (The Shape of Water, Call Me By Your Name) as Richard Clarke, airs the first episode on February 28 — two days after the 25th anniversary of the first Islamic terrorist attack on the World Trade Center (previously depicted in the HBO movie Path to Paradise).
I did not watch every episode of The Looming Tower. What I have seen is very good.
Last night’s discussion at LA’s Hammer Museum, a Hammer Forum program titled “9/11: the Saudi Connection”, brought an invigorating exchange of ideas and projections and a powerful call to action.
The program, moderated by local public radio’s Ian Masters, who rightly pointed out in his introduction that Islam is not the exclusive source of religious fundamentalism, featured former CIA operative and CNN security analyst Robert Baer and former U.S. Senator and former Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Bob Graham. Baer and Graham have written books about Islamic terrorism, the September 11, 2001attack and Saudi Arabia’s sponsorship of acts of war against the West.
Baer, who has been to Saudi Arabia, called the dictatorship—which everyone kept calling a “kingdom”—”a country in peril.” As he does on cable news shows, Baer sees Saudi Arabia’s demise as imminent due to a “herd mentality” which has become embedded in the country, which, he added and emphasized, “cannot stand for long”. In a short speech, Baer made reference to the fact that, for all practical purposes, Syria and Iraq no longer exist as functional states run by governments (as I recognized about Iraq earlier this year). For the same reasons, he explained, Saudi Arabia’s origins as an artificial country formed in tribes in 1932 preclude its continued existence.
Baer contends that the Middle East is driven by tribalism, not ideology. He sees tribalism as the larger threat to the West. In the contest between Shiite and Sunni Moslems, Baer counts four Sunni-dominated Mideast capitals which have recently been lost to Shiite Moslems: Baghdad, Beirut, Sunna and Damascus, which he sees as fueling discord and war in the region, leading to the fall of Saudi Arabia and displacement of as many as 120 million Arabs fleeing into the West.
Baer’s assessment is sobering. But Baer adds that he thinks Islamic terrorists are neither evil—he thinks modern Middle East problems are caused by Western “imperialism”—nor moved by ideology, i.e., fundamentalist, radical or jihadist Islam, terms he declined to use throughout the evening. In fact, he kept insisting that he’s not an apologist for Islamic jihad but, by denying the role of ideas and rationalizing Islamic terrorism, he is.
Despite this moral error, Baer’s practical and historical observations, forecasts and accounts should be taken seriously. He argues that, because Saudi Arabia depends on subsidies and being the West’s sole, main supplier of oil, the dictatorship wants the oil industry’s fracking to stop. His comments on how fracking has hurt Saudi Arabia did not go over well with the left-wing, west Los Angeles audience, but he explained why fracking—and America’s decreased dependency on Saudi oil—is relevant to the region’s stability. Additionally, during Q & A, Baer added when asked that he regards Edward Snowden as an annoyance, though he admits that indiscriminate mass surveillance does not protect the United States. In short, Baer’s projection that Saudi Arabia’s days are numbered is cogent where his causal connection is not.
On the other hand, Florida’s former Sen. Bob Graham displayed full moral clarity.
Sen. Graham, acting in this capacity as an American statesman in the best sense, called upon his memory of the 9/11 Commission’s first witness, a woman named Kristen Breitweiser, who had lost her husband Bob in the attack. He reminded the audience that Americans have an obligation to answer why? And: Did the hijackers act alone? He told the Los Angeles audience that the first two hijackers entered the United States through Los Angeles International Airport and detailed specific meetings implicating Saudi Arabia (as does my own research, first posted here). He spoke about the San Diego connection and how $50,000 for the hijackers was dispatched from the Saudi embassy in Washington, DC to a woman. He mentioned the prominent Sarasota, Florida, family and their connection to three Florida-based 9/11 hijackers and explained how the family returned to Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. Graham spoke of discrepancies in the FBI investigation and, once again, urged the audience to press the U.S. government to declassify and release the 9/11 report’s 28 classified pages (which he has read) detailing the attack’s financing by Saudi Arabia.
Sen. Graham named President Lincoln as a great president for insisting upon transparency in government during the Civil War, knowing it would make U.S. allies look bad and he praised Lincoln for putting the enlightenment of the American people above sparing an ally’s embarrassment. The Democrat singled out the Obama administration for criticism. He denounced American “passivity” about this 14-year-old Islamic act of war. When asked to name the best presidential candidate in terms of disclosure about the attack on September 11, 2001, Graham answered succinctly and without pause: “Rand Paul”, who supports releasing the 28 classified pages.
In a moment of rare, bipartisan unity around an intelligent idea to advance national defense, Baer agreed with Rand Paul and Bob Graham about declassifying the 28 pages and said that he, too, thinks the pages should be released. Judging by audience response, by the program’s end, most in the audience seemed to agree. Finally, Baer, whatever his flaws, expressed the perfect afterthought to Sen. Graham’s crusade to illuminate the facts of the September 11, 2001 mass murder: “Rational people must [be free to] make up their minds.”
With Saudi Arabia proposing to build 200 mosques in Germany as a “response” to the exodus from Arab states to Western Europe (reported here during the presentation), let me add: rational people haven’t much time.
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The movie, opening this weekend, recreates an Islamic terrorist attack on the city formerly known as Bombay. The November 26, 2008, act of war is one of those timed, coordinated assaults like the jihadists’ failed Bojinka plot or the attack on America on September 11, 2001.
