Moore Madness

In class, we saw Michael Moore’s movie “Fahrenheit 9/11”. Here’s some stuff I noticed:

-Michael Moore is gleefully partisan and obnoxious. Half of the movie seems to be narrated in sarcasm and with a huge dollop of cynicism. When he’s not compiling footage that mocks Bush, he’s riding around in an ice cream truck with a bullhorn reading the Partriot Act. Such silliness shows his contempt and explains his condescending attitude that he uses to confront both the administration and his audience.
-This film was well put together. I think I even heard Philip Glass music, or at least what sounded like Philip Glass music. This film did win the Palme d'Or at Cannes in 2004. But although it might have won the battle, it lost the war (election).
-Michael Moore’s subliminal messages weren’t very effective. This is probably due to the tapwater, which the government infuses chemicals that form robots in the brain. The primary function of these robots is to keep the mass controlled populace unalerted to the fact that their water is being tampered with. A secondary effect of these robots might be to block propaganda by such dissidents as Michael Moore.
-A lot of times Michael Moore inadvertently interviewed automatons instead of real people with souls. Automatons are basically robots made of human flesh that serve the global hegemony by infiltrating almost all facets of society. Only a trained eye can spot an automaton from a real human though, so I can’t be too harsh on him.

Second Essay

Here is my second essay where I compare that same story given by two different news sources:


Al Jazeera
'Chemical Ali' sentenced to death

Ali Hassan al-Majid, also known as "Chemical Ali", has been sentenced to death for ordering the gassing of Kurds in the Iraqi village of Halabja, state television has reported.
Al-Majid, who was a senior aide to Saddam Hussein, the executed Iraqi leader, was sentenced to be hanged for the 1988 attack, in which 5,000 Kurds are thought to have died.
Families of some victims cheered in court when the guilty verdict was handed down on Sunday.
"The decision has been issued today, January 17, to sentence Ali Hassan al-Majid, to death by hanging ... for crimes against humanity," Aref Abdul-Razzaq al-Shahin, the head of the court, said.
The Iraqi High Tribunal also sentenced three other Saddam aides, including the former defence minister, to 10 to 15 years in prison for the Halabja attack.
In March 1988, Iraqi jets swooped over the village and sprayed it with a deadly mix of mustard gas and the nerve agents Tabun, Sarin and VX.
Three-quarters of the victims in the five-hour assault were women and children. It is thought to have been the deadliest gas attack ever carried out against civilians.
Operation Anfal
Al-Majid, a cousin of Saddam, was nicknamed "Chemical Ali" for overseeing the gassing of Iraqi Kurds during the so-called Operation Anfal campaign, which culminated in 1988.
About 182,000 Kurds were estimated to have been killed in gas and bomb attacks during the Anfal operation, while 4,000 villages were destroyed.
The latest sentence comes 10 months after the same court handed down a death sentence to al-Majid for his involvement in the killing and displacement of Shia Muslims in 1999.
He had already received death sentences for crushing a Shia revolt soon after the 1991 Gulf War and for his role in the Anfal campaign.
His execution has been delayed by legal disputes over his conviction.
Al-Majid was captured in August 2003, five months after US-led forces invaded Iraq and ousted Saddam.
Saddam's cousin gets 4th death sentence
Last Updated: Sunday, January 17, 2010 12:56 PM ET

CBC News
Saddam Hussein's cousin, Ali Hassan al-Majid, was sentenced to death in Baghdad on Sunday, the fourth such sentence for the man notoriously known as Chemical Ali.
Al-Majid was handed the punishment for his involvement in the poison gas attack on the northern Kurdish town of Halabja in which over 5,000 children, women and men died.
Hussein appointed Al-Majid as governor of Northern Iraq and charged him with carrying out the deadly attack on March 16, 1988.
Like the previous three death sentences, Sunday's decision from the court was for crimes against humanity in Iraq.
The previous three have not been carried out, in part because survivors of the gas attack wanted to have their case against al-Majid heard.
Families of some of the victims cheered in court when the guilty verdict was handed down.
Other officials in Saddam's regime received jail terms for their roles in the attack on Halabja, a Kurdish town near the Iranian border.
Former defence minister Sultan Hashim al-Taie faces 15 years in prison, as does Iraq's former director of military intelligence, Sabir Azizi al-Douri.
Al-Majid has already been convicted of killing tens of thousands of Kurds in a crackdown in the late 1980s, and for the killings of Shia Muslims in 1991 and 1999.












Peter Rubino
News Article Comparison

In this assignment which we were given, we are supposed to compare the same news story as told by both western news agencies and eastern news agencies. The goal was to compare and contrast to show the difference in how the same information was presented to different people by different people. This specific news story that I have chosen is about the sentencing of a middle-eastern war criminal inside a courtroom in Iraq. Indeed there are many things between the two specific articles that may be compared and contrasted.
The story that I have decided to cover is the sentencing of war criminal Ali Hassan al-Majid. He recently received his fourth death sentence by an Iraqi court. This sentence is for his gassing of the Kurds in Northern Iraq in 1988 Kurdish town of Halabja in which over 5,000 children, women and men died. This was the largest use of chemical weapons against civilian population in history. This was part of a larger campaign, called operation Anfal, in which civilian 180,000 Kurds were killed by the Iraqi government.
One point of comparison is of the length and setup of the two articles. The story as told by CBC contains 209 words broken into 9 paragraphs, with the average word being about 5 letters long. The story reported by Al Jazeera contains 320 words broken into 13 paragraphs, with the same average word length. It is also noteworthy in noting that in both the article written by CBC and the article written by Al Jazeera, the first paragraph mentions that Chemical Ali was convicted and sentenced to death and the second paragraph mentions why he was given a sentence.
One of the reasons why the report written by Al Jazeera may have been over one hundred words longer than the report written by CBC is that Al Jazeera is a Middle East news station and this is a story that has occurred in the Middle East. CBC, however is part of the American news media conglomerate. Therefore Al Jazeera was physically closer to the event. Thus people who read Al Jazeera may expect more in depth coverage of the events since people in the Middle East are closer the events themselves and thus care more about local or semi local news as opposed to an American who is much further away.
One major structural difference is the presentation of “Operation Anfal”. CBC mentions the gassing, but does not go into deeper depths about the Baathist’s campaign to purge the Kurds. Al Jazeera gives an entire section about the horrific background behind the operation, and lists more facts. The reason why they do this is that this operation was probably much more memorable and notable to a Middle Eastern viewer than to an American one.
Ali Hassan al-Majid was also given three separate other death sentences for three other war crimes. The version told by Al Jazeera makes it more clear exactly what these crimes were, saying “The latest sentence comes… after the same court handed down a death sentence to al-Majid for his involvement in the killing and displacement of Shia Muslims in 1999. He had already received death sentences for crushing a Shia revolt soon after the 1991 Gulf War and for his role in the Anfal campaign.” The CBC story briefly mentioned these crimes, but did not include as much detail.
A pertinent question on the minds of the readers of these stories might be “why have the other death sentences not been carried out?” This is a valid question, but here is where the two articles digress in terms of language used to present the fact. The Al Jazeera article mentions “legal disputes over his conviction” which is vague, and sounds passive. The article by CBC stated that the victims of the horrific attacks wanted to have their case heard in court, which is more specific.
The Al Jazeera article also mentions that to al-Majid will be hung to death, a fact skipped over by CBC. Perhaps CBC didn’t want to mention the hanging, because to a Western viewer hanging seems like a cruel and brutal punishment. This would have humanized him, probably more so to a western viewer. In reality though, there are far more brutal things that could have been done to somebody whose war-crimes are so ghastly. Hanging may be a brutal way to die, but it is far less severe than say, handing him over to the Peshmerga.
However there are some instances where the language used by the two different news articles is almost identical. For example, CBC reported that “Families of some of the victims cheered in court when the guilty verdict was handed down.” This is very similar in the statement made by Al Jazeera, which says “Families of some victims cheered in court when the guilty verdict was handed down on Sunday.”
Perhaps the most surprising thing in comparing these two articles is not how much they differ, but how much they agree with, and compliment each other. The both essentially give the facts of the trial, and the outcome in the same manner. The Al Jeezera article has a more in depth coverage, and mentions more facts, but other than that they are both pretty similar.

Weapons of Mass Obfuscation

In class, we just finished watching the movie “Loose Change”. It tries to communicate to the viewer that the Official Report of 9/11 was false, and that it was an inside job done by the government.

The most frustrating thing about this film is that is does not project a coherent thesis or idea about the who, why or what of 9/11. Instead of propagating a new idea about 9/11, cynical filmmaker Dylan Avery simply attacks old ideas via nitpicking techniques. Odd, seemingly irrelevant facts are presented, and odd, seemingly irrelevant people talk. Contradictory data is presented, and the contradictions noted, in an attempt of subversion of any data. Anything to make us question the government’s view is compiled and presented in a jumbled fashion.

A good movie that tries to sway public opinion should be like a painting or a pamphlet – anything with a structure and foundation. This movie is like a fusillade of darts throw at said structure in hopes that a few of the darts will stick. In short, it’s a movie made to destroy, not to create. The evidence never gells and the result is that this movie does not blow a massive hole into the official report of 9/11, rather it perforates a small part of it, leaving the vast remainder intact.

I’m open to new ideas, even radical or crazy ones. The problem with this movie is that it constantly and consistently tries to undermine any notion of truth or solution. When questions are answered and those answers questioned again, and this cycle perpetually repeats itself, it seems like a slippery slope towards nihilism. While researching this movie on Wikipedia, I found that while this movie was being revised and re-edited, references to Wikipedia were removed because they were not considered to be a very good source. The last sentence of this paragraph is false.

Not Without My Melodramatic Xenophobia

Burn This Movie!!





























Not Without My Daughter 1991
1.5/4 stars


Not Without My Daughter, with its paranoid, gynocentric worldview and telenovela ambitions, betray cinema’s power of narrative movement. The dryly shot scenes have no sense of kinetic storytelling, but resonate like passive exposition. There’s no life to be found in the audiovisual display: no lighting or shadows that stand out, no juxtapositions that are memorable, no framing that seems important. Most of the movie rests on the muted-hysteria performance of Betty, however actor-turned-director Brian Gilbert places too much attention on the performances and not enough on anything else, delivering a cinematic stillbirth.

As if that's not enough, the movie's racism is latent enough for even the New York Times to raise objections:

" Though "Not Without My Daughter" exploits the stereotype of the demonic Iranian, an idea with some political currency right now, it is not an exploitation film. It is, however, an utter artistic failure, and its reliance on cultural stereotypes is a major cause.

The film makes lurid use of its fact-based story: in 1984 an American named Betty Mahmoody (Sally Field) travels with her Iranian-born husband, Moody (Alfred Molina), and their daughter to visit his family in Teheran. In the film's reductive approach to character and politics, rabid religious fundamentalism and social conservatism swirl through the air, and Moody catches its symptoms as easily as if he were picking up a flu germ. His promise that the family would return to Michigan in two weeks turns out to be a sham, and Betty is virtually held hostage in her in-laws' home. She and her daughter must escape illegally from what she calls "this backward, primitive country," an assessment the film supports.

She shouldn't have been surprised at her husband's deception, for on screen the portents were there all along. At first he is viewed as a sympathetic sort, telling his small daughter that after 20 years in this country, "I'm as American as apple pie." But soon he makes a gesture that seems an evil omen in the context of this simple-minded film: He takes a sacred oath on the Koran. When a foreign religion intrudes on apple-pie America, it is a clear sign of trouble in a film that clumsily uses ethnicity to outline its heroes and villains.

"Not Without My Daughter" has gained more attention than it might have if the Middle East were not exploding. When Moody stands in his Michigan house and tells Betty that her fears are unfounded, that "we're not going to go sightseeing in the Persian Gulf or anything foolish like that," the comment reverberates more eerily than it would have a year ago.

But however timely it is, however scrupulous its facts, the film seems unreal because its characters are so one-dimensional, so downright scary from the start. When the Mahmoodys arrive at the Teheran airport, large images of the Ayatollah Khomeini glare down at them from billboards, and they are surrounded by black-clad women who are meant to be loving relatives, yet who descend on the family like vultures. Why the daughter, little Mahtob, goes so willingly to her aunt, who resembles a witch in a Disney cartoon, is one of the smaller questions the film raises.

The larger issue has to do with Moody's abrupt transformation and his secret decision, made before leaving Michigan, that he would keep his family in Iran. Whatever psychological reasons might have been behind such a move, they are not readily apparent in the film. Here, he seems a pure product of his culture, a mysterious, misogynistic Easterner. "Everything is so different," he says about the 10 years and the Islamic revolution that have intervened since his last visit home. Yet he adjusts in a flash. He forbids Betty to use the phone or to leave the house without him and is backed up by everyone from his family to Mahtob's teachers.

When one exceptional Iranian says of Moody's family, "They're from the provinces; they're more fanatical than most," it is a meaningless disclaimer, for the film views fanaticism as the Iranian national character. And because the people are portrayed so unrealistically, the story's valid and important social criticism -- under Iranian law, Betty had no legal rights to her daughter -- is reduced to melodrama and undermined as well."

Orientalism Essay

Here is the essay I did for class. It is long and I don't advise that you read it.


Orientalism is a specific viewpoint that is held by Western observers who observe Eastern culture. It is a viewpoint that stresses the differences between the East and West, and portrays the East as the alien ‘other’. Thus the truth about the reality within the East is obscured by Western dominated sentiments and blatant biases. What emerges from Orientalist study is a portrayal of an “Orient” which is simultaneously alluring and mysterious with its wealth and its women, yet grotesque and untouchable with its backward ways and strange religions. This viewpoint is not held just by academics, but by writers, artists and other broadcasters of information. These people unknowingly (and perhaps unintentionally) propagate a vision of the Middle East and Asia that is based on archetype and generalizations. This process of stereotyping and generalizing has lead to the erosion of distinctions between multiple ethnic groups: Americans may be able to tell the difference between a Mexican and American, but are unable to tell the difference between a Kurd and an Israelite, or an Indian and a Mongolian. The marginalization of such important factors such as race, religion and location in the East has led to Orientalist scholars creating a fictional “Orient” in which to study. This is an important success for the Orientalist, as they can now frame everything Eastern in terms of its relation to Western counterparts. The Orient is constructed as the antithesis of the Occident (West). In addition, distinctions between individual cultures in the East no longer need to be made. It is seen from Western eyes as a dark, unintelligible, forsaken land, with otherworldly tendencies leaning in the direction of the exotic and erotic. This fictionalized, all encompassing place only exists in the mind of the Western viewer. However, one of the more harmful aspects of Orientalism is that is has become so ingrained in the collective conscious with images of the East, that Orientalism itself becomes invisible. Racism and stereotyping become non offensive once they become routine. Once racism against the Arab or the Indian seems normal, it has become the norm. It seems only natural that the events that play out in the Middle and Far East to become framed in Western rhetoric. This Western rhetoric about the East has been the long held reason for colonization, occupation, and general interference. Consider the colonization and division of Africa by imperialist forces. Their rational was the “White Man’s Burden” – The notion that cultured, civilized Europeans had a duty to occupy Africa and free the Africans from their savage backward ways and pagan religions. This assumed the destruction of the previous African culture and way of life, as such a thing was seen from the West as inferior. The imperialist nations used this rational to justify a measure that was really done for economic and political power grabs. Even in our most recent rational for the most recent war has been to “Free the Iraqi people”, as if occupation is freedom, or that there were and aren’t more repressive regimes. The West cannot fathom a nation where people don’t pine for democracy and capitalism. As such they use such words such as “free” “help” and “democracy” to justify military expansionism that cares little about such ideals. And in our current unipolar geopolitical era, the only threats to Western expansionism, interventionism, occupations or other acts of imperialism come from those non aligned states who are being intervened with. This view that scholarly discourse about the Orient is not only an extension of imperialist thought, but actually helps enable divides between the East and West, has been proposed by Edward Said. He called this discourse “a way of coming to terms with the Orient that is based on the Orient's special place in European Western Experience.” This proposal meant that all those scholars of the Orient had been subliminally promoting bias and prototyping. This concept was met with some criticism, notably Daniel Martin Varisco, who said that Orientalism assumed “its harmful political consequences are something that only the West does to the East rather than something all societies do to one another." He called this theory a “binary blame game”. Bernard Lewis has criticized the racist and imperialist implications of Orientalism, noting that studies of the Orient arose from Humanism. He stated: “What imperial purpose was served by deciphering the ancient Egyptian language, for example, and then restoring to the Egyptians knowledge of and pride in their forgotten, ancient past?” The preceding statement shows the subtle, near-invisible ethnocentric thought held by the Orientalist. For one it assumes that the Egyptians care about the knowledge and pride of their past the way a Westerner would – with its translation and preservation. The second part of the statement assumed that the Egyptians could not, or would not decipher it themselves eventually, so imperialist had to do it for them. Phrases such as “deciphering the ancient” and “forgotten, ancient past” are distancing techniques, used to make Egypt seem far off and remote. It is always there and never here. And Orientalism is alive and well today in popular culture. Take Aladdin for instance, which opens with the lines of “I come from a land, a far away place, where the caravan camels roam.” Who would describe their home as a far away place? Nobody. This is simply a western projection of an Oriental. Even William Burroughs “Naked Lunch” was turned into a bastion of Orientalist sediment when David Cronenberg translated it for the big screen. In that movie, the character travels to a place called Interzone, where every stereotype about North African, Indian, Middle and Far East peoples was put into play.

The Turner Diaries faked 9/11

George Bush has committed many crimes against that Palestinian people and their land. But Bush is just a puppet of the Brotherood and other pro Zionist forces and Fifth Columns that operate in what is the illusion of a United States Government. These pro illusionist forces conspire to commit treasons and conspiracies that involve the fabrication of real events and the superimposition of illusory constructs on top of real world political events. Few people have caught on to these acts of occlusion, but one of them has been steadfast protestor Frank Chu:

I said it man

I don’t know man… We just watched this thing in class and it’s all… like stuff and all. It was really sad like and about these two mothers and… well… it’s all like, ya know. I said it man. It’s just like I don’t know how to feel… and I say it and I says it. I don’t know… It’s just… like with this thing… Man, I’ll tell em, I show em… It was sad about this thing. And the two girls… I don’t even know where to begin. One of the girls looked like the other girl, but didn’t look like both of the girls. There… I said it man… I don’t know.