marty wrote:jbeall wrote:Clearly, antoine's sarcastic comments about willfully ignorant people refusing to do anything other than stereotype an entire region of the world fell on deaf ears. Congratulations, marty, you just proved antoine's point.
You miss
my point. See how I used the word "extremists" rather than just "Muslim"
[...]
For your own knowledge about Middle East history please read Bernard Lewis' objective and excellent account in "From Babel to Dragoman" and you will see that Israel has every right to its existence and Lewis does this without condemning the Palestinians right either and acknowledges it is a very complex issue.
Fair enough, but now it appears you've missed
my point. It is human nature to be complex, and extremist or not, even the hijackers were human beings, and therefore probably more complex than those who want to paint 'extremists' (of whatever stripe) with a broad brush are willing to acknowledge.
Israelis don't have to hijack planes. Their country is recognized by the U.S., the U.N., and all the Western powers, and therefore they have recourse to various legal systems (including their own) that the Palestinians are denied, and their assaults on the on the Palestinians' human rights (the wall, for example) have legal legitimacy solely because it's sanctioned by virtue of being a governmental action.
I don't know what 'Western media' you watch/read, but the popular media I come across tends to consider shade acts of Arab violence as unprovoked terrorism and Israeli violence as justified retaliation. I would argue that neither case is so simple. And for the record, I support Israel's right to exist, and I also believe that the Palestinian state has a right to exist as well. The Holocaust was an unbelievable atrocity, but it doesn't justify further, if lesser, atrocities perpetuated against a people that had nothing to do with it.
But I'm always willing to learn more, so I will take your advice and check out the book--thanks for the recommendation.
And exte, your argument would have more credibility if more people were using the internet to get alternative sources of news instead of trying to download Paris Hilton's porn vid. Like you (I hope), I use the internet to find numerous sources of news, try to sift through them, separating the wheat from the chaff if you will, in order to be more informed about the way the world actually is. Would that we were in the majority! (I could go on about this, especially the tendency of 'like to attract like', for raving liberals and conservatives to gravitate toward sites where the news strictly reinforces their viewpoint and dissenting opinions are suppressed, but that's for another forum.)
To get back to the topic, I would argue that
United 93 doesn't actually portray
any of the characters with too much depth, and that's the point. This isn't a psychological thriller, but rather an aesthetic attempt to understand the truth of the
events as they actually happened. Neither the hijackers nor the passengers are treated with that level of characterization because doing so would turn the film into both a heroic narrative and an anti- (or even pro-)terrorist screed, in the process making it an 'ideological' film at the expense of the (admittedly speculative) veracity that constitutes the films strongest quality.
To its credit,
United 93 avoids these easy answers; leave the racist portrayals of Arabs as radical eeeeeeeeeeevil removed from causality to the Chuck Norris and Arnold Schwarzenegger blockbusters. I watched the film with a knot in my stomach, wanting very badly what I knew was going to happen, NOT to happen. At the same time, the film didn't let me indulge my (admitted) desire to point fingers at Bush. I was left with a jarring experience that took me closer to what the horror of that day must have felt like for the passengers on the plane, and for that reason I think
United 93 succeeeds admirably, and deserves a Best Picture nomination. Oh well, too bad.
