Posted on 04/29/2006 4:39:58 AM PDT by fanfan
United 93, the just-released movie about the passengers who fought back against their hijackers on 9/11, is being recognized as one of the most terrifying films to come out of Hollywood in recent years.
My colleague Peter Simpson, the Citizen's arts and entertainment editor, was so affected after Monday's advance screening that he wrote a front-page assessment for the next-day's paper. The horror, he correctly noted, stems from the astonishing realism and the awful sense of inevitability: The audience knows how the story ends. My other colleague Jay Stone gave United 93 five stars in his review yesterday.
I too attended the advance screening, not as an arts critic but as a student of terrorism and militant Islam. Jay and Peter are right that the movie is effective as a piece of drama, but I took away three political lessons.
1) Soldiers, not lunatics: 9/11 was so sensational in conception and execution, so wholly out-of-the box, that many people assumed it was the product of disordered minds. What kind of madmen fly aircraft into buildings?
United 93 makes clear that the hijackers, though on a suicide mission, were not madmen. They were disciplined, well-trained and committed, in other words, soldiers. True, they believed their cause was worth dying for, but other soldiers on other battlefields in history have approached their missions that way.
There are strategic implications. If we characterize jihadists as crazed sociopaths, we risk dismissing them as aberrations or freaks and minimizing the threat they represent. We risk making 9/11 into a unique criminal event, like a random school shooting or the Paul Bernardo murders.
Sociopathic criminals like Paul Bernardo are interested in self-gratification and pose a danger mainly to individuals who come into their personal orbit. But the 9/11 hijackers had broader ambitions: They belonged to a political movement larger than themselves. Criminal acts are different from acts of war, and we need to understand the difference if we are to protect ourselves.
2) Terrorism is easy: In an operational sense, 9/11 was a complex affair. Most notably, the conspirators needed to learn how to fly commercial jets. Yet as a matter of general principle, it's easy to be a terrorist. Terrorism is the deliberate targeting of non-combatants -- the targeting of unarmed people and institutions. Anyone can commit an act of terrorism at any time.
United 93 helps us understand the total vulnerability of what security experts call soft targets. There are no missile-defence systems around civilian skyscrapers. The movie captures the profound feeling of helplessness that engulfed the air-traffic and military command centres when they realized that the United States was under attack that morning. The whole country was suddenly one big target.
Anything and anybody is a terrorist target -- a day-care centre, a shopping mall, a corner church -- and it's impossible to protect them all. The political lesson is that defensive measures alone are not sufficient to fight militant Islam, not when Islamists define their struggle as a war against civilians. In the short term we can harden some obvious targets, but softer ones will always remain.
So we have to look at anti-terrorism as an offensive and long-term effort. The U.S. invasion of Iraq was a radical attempt to reboot the Middle East, to spark a re-ordering of dysfunctional Arab-Muslim societies in a way that would make room for democratization. The Iraq gamble may ultimately prove too ambitious, but the Americans were right to try.
3) You do what you got to do: United 93 was the only hijacked plane that did not reach its target, and that's because the passengers rose up and tried to storm the cockpit. Why did they rise up? As the movie shows, the passengers learned from phone calls to family on the ground that the other planes had been commandeered into the Twin Towers and the Pentagon. It was then that the United 93 passengers knew they weren't turning back to the airport for negotiations. When the enemy is on a suicide mission, your only hope is to destroy him before he destroys you. And so the men and women of United 93 died fighting.
If the Islamists -- those seeking to transform Islam from a religion into an expansionist, messianic, violent, political movement -- gain ascendancy in the Middle East, then the suicide bomber "will become a metaphor for the whole region," as the historian Bernard Lewis has put it. Islamists cannot be negotiated with, mainly because their demands, that we become Muslim or we die, are impossible to meet.
Currently the most dangerous Islamist is Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Iran's apocalyptic-minded president who is holding the West hostage with his quest for nuclear weapons. Right now the world is scared, yet still hoping Mr. Ahmadinejad will turn back to the airport, so to speak.
Very soon we will have our United 93 moment and realize this is one airplane we'll have to land ourselves.
Leonard Stern is the Citizen's editorial pages editor.
Ok. I understand. Masks are Ok for some but not for others.
Selective law enforcement is what has us in the mess we are in.
Imagine if the Nazis, Japanese & Soviets had wrapped their doctrines within the principles of 'religion'. Now, picture our future adversaries painting themselves as 'victims' who only want to practice their 'religion' in 'peace'.
So we have to look at anti-terrorism as an offensive and long-term effort. The U.S. invasion of Iraq was a radical attempt to reboot the Middle East, to spark a re-ordering of dysfunctional Arab-Muslim societies in a way that would make room for democratization. The Iraq gamble may ultimately prove too ambitious, but the Americans were right to try.
The above statement is a concise "history of American involvement in Iraq", all wrapped up into a single paragraph. Not only does he not that what we tried to do there was the reasoned, justified and the proper approach, he also realizes that, ultimately, it may be doomed to failure, because taking a "reasoned" approach is all-but-useless with Islamics.
If the Islamists -- those seeking to transform Islam from a religion into an expansionist, messianic, violent, political movement -- gain ascendancy in the Middle East, then the suicide bomber "will become a metaphor for the whole region," as the historian Bernard Lewis has put it. Islamists cannot be negotiated with, mainly because their demands, that we become Muslim or we die, are impossible to meet.
Currently the most dangerous Islamist is Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Iran's apocalyptic-minded president who is holding the West hostage with his quest for nuclear weapons. Right now the world is scared, yet still hoping Mr. Ahmadinejad will turn back to the airport, so to speak.
Very soon we will have our United 93 moment and realize this is one airplane we'll have to land ourselves.
A grand slam. These three paragraphs are prophetic. Not only is the coming war with Iran inevitable, it is inescapable. We hesitate to act at our own peril, and the longer we postpone, the more ominous that peril grows.
- John
For your "nailed it" consideration.
a powerfully written paragraph worth repeating
Bernard Lewis has spent so much time among the trees that he can't see the freakin' forest.
Islam needs no such transformation.
Islam has been, for its entire existence thus... "expansionist, messianic, violent, political movement -- it needs no transformation whatsoever!
Islam, by definition is identical to gunpowder: it consists of three parts which, absent any one of them, ceases to be the original thing.
Islam is a political thing, a religious thing and a social thing simultaneously and inseparably.
Bernard Lewis knows this; most of the rest of the world does not.
Eliminate the political component of islam and it ceases to be islam, and its religion is rendered powerless. Fat chance of that!
Let's hope so.
I'd love to sit with McLame while he watches it!
Great post.
Bump!
If you're anything like me, you better take a long walk before getting into your car after the movie. I had no tears, no sorrow. The anger and rage that I felt on 9/11 was rekindled. The fire in my belly was back.
Yes. Plus now he's living in the upper west side of Manhattan.
He's young, good at heart, and confused. And he has a praying mother.
Living in Moscow on the Hudson, sadly, does not bode well for his conversion from the dark side.
"They should all be exterminated!"
(slaps forehead)
Of course! Genocide! It's the final solution!
Now why didn't I think of that before?
What I thought of it?
Intense
Real
Shocking
From the first minute to the last, it captured my attention.
Emotionally, I was a wreck at the end. Anger was the major emotion, and sadness.
I rushed out of the theatre before the credits. I couldn't hold it in any longer. By the time I got to my car, I was sobbing.
I have tears in my eyes now.
If you haven't seen it, please go.
Overall...a damn good portrayal of United 93 crew and passengers.
Call it whatever you like. If you believe in co-existance with islam, you are mistaken. They don't want it!
We have no choice but to co-exist. There are a billion Muslims on this planet - that's one-sixth of humanity. I very much doubt we could kill them all even if we tried.
If we did try - and I'm sure you won't agree - we would end up killing millions of innocents who don't give a sh*t about politics and just want to live their lives - like most other people.
Aside from that, I find the idea of genocide repulsive, along with the people who promote it.
You may very well find the idea of 'genocide' repulsive. All well and good. But when your enemy doesn't, you will loose!
I'm far too old to care about what others think of me. I'll not be around when the final battle in this war is fought, but that's only because our 'leadership is still under the allusion that they can combat this evil with ideas. In a fight where the choice of weapons is guns or ideas, I'll take the guns.
allusion = illusion
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