I saw the Daniel Pearl video today.....and I'm hurting and sickened.

Natch. There's not much on offer most days.

What's this? Are there videos of Americans chopping off the heads of completely innocent people? What you suggest is hardly equivalent to the pearl tape.

America is not a blameless innocent. Fair enough. I am only objecting to your apparent view that chopping a reporter's head off and accidental civilian casualities are morally equivalent. They are not.

As for the tape being propaganda, it is. I imagine that tape is quite popular among islamic militants. Join us, and you get to kill jews.

So if the Taliban had officially declared war on us and had bombed at the Pentagon, killing some innocent civilians as a side-effect, that would have been better morally?

No they aren't...a reporter in a hostile land obviously takes on certain risks; no-one forced him to be in Pakistan. Afghans killed by "friendly fire", on the other hand, have no choice in the matter.

Don't get me wrong. War is a crime, always, no matter the justification. Making official war for the wrong reasons is no better than terrorism perhaps. But America's particular justification in this instance strikes me as morally superior to Bin Laden's.

Ridiculous. Meaning what, exactly? Living in Israel is not a vocation. Israel is legitimately at war with terrorists; I am in no moral position to judge how they choose to defend themselves, other than I want nothing to do with it.

I am not certainly not condoning the death of Pearl, but I don't think he was your typical American citizen abroad, either. He was a walking symbol of everything Islamic extremists hate, who chose to work in Pakistan of all places.

I apologize if I was too vague there.

You seemed to imply that Pearl was in a dangerous place, where he was not welcome, and that his very presence was an incitement to murder. As if those militants could not control themselves. As if it was partially Pearl's fault somehow. It seems to me that his crime was being a Jew and an American. Nothing more. It was cold blooded murder, pure and simple. If you cannot come out and and say it was flat-out wrong, without making excuses for his murderers, then I fear we cannot find common ground.

Pearl's death was awful, brutal and avoidable. However, it was not inconceivable and, frankly, I think it's patently stupid to think that every country we have conflict with is going to follow the rules of engagement that we define for ourselves.

It's hardly sensationalistic. It really did happen, you know, and they were the ones who filmed and sent it to us with glee. I don't agree that we need to see it to "stiffen our spines" or some such nonsense, but if some do wish to see it, why is that a problem? You're not for censoring it are you? There seems to be an attitude that any atrocities committed by terrorists need to be kept secret, while any that America commits should be broadcast to the world. With the reasoning quoted above, showing civilian casualities on CNN will only help the terrorists and their recruitment.

Finally, any reminder of the inhumanity humans are capable of is worth seeing.

I do not think the tape needs to be censored. Philosophically, I don't have a problem with it being available for people to view it. Emotionally, with the way it has been presented and talked about, I definitely feel that the people who are talking it up as a reminder of the atrocities other nations are capable of are jingoistic fuckfaces who, in slightly different circumstances, would gleefully lynch my entire family.

Build nuclear power plants everywhere, quit buying foreign oil, quit sending money to Israel.

The core issue here is the implacable hostility of hard-line Muslims to the perceived threat of certain modern Western values (you know, democracy, freedom of choice, popular culture's celebration of the secular, the rights of women and homosexuals, the tolerance of sub- human Jew swine, that kind of thing) and the fact that for years this has been expediently stirred up by Arab regimes as a means of deflecting attention from the disatisfactions resulting from their own corruption &/or incompetance.

So we deal with this how? By no longer antagonising Islamists by enticing ordinary Arabs with our decadent ways (ways which only constitute a threat to existing orders because given half a chance most people embrace them)? Or, as Kris suggests, by withdrawing support from the only real democracy in the Middle East (in deference to those ethically-different jew-haters who have, ever since its inception, declared themselves intent on its estruction)?

Or do we oppose Islamists every bit as vigorously as we opposed German fascists and Japanese militarists. Is there any reason to suppose that their future generations would be any less grateful for it? How can one even talk about the values of another culture if it has no basic mechanisms in place to guarantee self-determination? The presently commonplace unwillingness to pass cultural judgement could hardly be less supportive of non-Westerners that it is. If one's supposed open-minded tolerance isn't rooted in an idea of a common humanity then all you're doing by refraining from criticism is giving free reign to those who will define 'the Other' to suit there own self-serving ends, i.e. I wouldn't presume to say what's best for you = I'll let your dictators define it instead.

I don't know why you're attempting to paint me as a bleeding-heart simpleton who would sell his family back into slavery to avoid fighting a war when my central point in this entire thread has been, "Why are people in this country so fucking stupid that they need graphic footage of a person's death to remind them that there are a lot of dangerous people out there in the world who don't like us?" I hope you're having fun, though.

(Merriam-Webster)

I saw the Daniel Pearl movie trailer today...and just about everything I could say can be summed up in the film's title: "A Mighty Heart". It looks very much like they've taken an atrocious real-life tragedy and given it the whole Hollywood cornification treatment. Go and watch it, and you'd probably feel, erm, hurting and sickened.

At least "Atonement", whose trailer I also saw, is only gonna ruin one of my favourite books.

Haha, this has long been out in the US and the Metacritic reviews are pretty positive! Me and my big mouth.

Yes, you and your big mouth.

the movie takes its title from the book, which mariane pearl wrote.

That I now realise. I now wish to avoid another diplomatic incident. Perhaps the trailer just jammed together the film's corniest 2 minutes and left out all the good stuff!

"Heart" is a good film.

ya i agree. i can post a link to a not-very-interesting interview i did with winterbottom about the movie if anyone is not-very-interested.

unbelievable ass-hattery upthread

situation normal.

It does more then appease bloodlust. It makes it that much harder for Al Queda to operate which sounds like a pretty good goal by me.

So glad this worked out so well.

hells yeah link that shit up

xpost

http://www.montrealmirror.com/2007/062107/film1.html

If anyone's going to avoid 'Hollywood cornification' it'd be Winterbottom. A meta-discussion on the nature of film, propaganda and Hollywoods role in it maybe, but cornification, no.

lj is right abt the trailer tho. i haven't seen the film.

What i don't understand about the Daniel Pearl story is, he is researching al-Qaidah (the guys that blow up shrines), for that he wants to interview a sufi shrine custodian, to get an interview with the shrine custodian he contacts a kashmiri militant group. wtf? This totally clueless person was a reporter for the Wall Street Journal?

trailers are made by marketers, not the directors of the film, ppl should not get het up about them.

What i don't understand about the Daniel Pearl story is, he is researching al-Qaidah (the guys that blow up shrines), for that he wants to interview a sufi shrine custodian, to get an interview with the shrine custodian he contacts a kashmiri militant group. wtf? This totally clueless person was a reporter for the Wall Street Journal?

-- Heave Ho, Sunday, August 19, 2007 3:04 PM (33 minutes ago) Bookmark Link

wtf are you talking about

lol at this guy reckoning he is smarter than a WSJ reporter

s1ocki;
Daniel Pearl was investigating al-Qaidah. For that he decided to interview the custodian of the shrine of Mian Meer in Lahore, a mystical leader named Mubarak Ali Gilani. To get to Gilani he contacted the representatives of a Kashmiri militant group in Karachi. These three groups have little to do with one another (and in the case of the first two they would actually be mutually agonistic)

i don't know the ins-and-outs, but would it not be quite hard for a WSJ journalist investigating AQ to just... show up at AQ central and show them his credentials? presumably with this kind of thing you have to change cars a few times before you get there.

Gilani was interviewed on a suspected connection to the shoe bomber, iirc

Pearl was South Asian bureau chief of one of the world's best newspapers and a skilled investigative journalist. LOL @ pathetic internet message board dude and his tenuous bullshit.

no wonder americans are so well informed about the rest of the world

Richard Reid was tied to Gilani. Pearl was working on a story about Richard Reid, so he wanted to interview Gilani. What is so hard for you to understand about that?

And who tied him to Gilani? The very same clueless american journalists themselves.

He was investigating a rumored link - it makes perfect sense to do as a journalist.

also it's not like he deliberately contacted the group that kidnapped him - it was a ruse

pearl had access to guess papers

so he was an idiot for not know what we know now years later after extensive research and reporting? for fuck's sake.

i could've told you back then - mystic shrine people are not al-Qaida

Daniel Pearl was not investigating Al Qaeda -- he was retracing the path of Richard Reid, whom multiple sources said had visited Gilani in Pakistan, and whether or not this had anything to do with Al Qaeda, it was relevant to the story Pearl was writing. But thanks for continuing to be obtuse.

"a mighty heart" was amazing!

you know i only realized it was angelina jolie 92% of the way in

http://www.fairplaygames.com/pics/heaveho.jpg

HA

the nyt called it "insistently political" which is how i'd describe jolie's intensely guttural howling though i thought this all had marianne pearl's approval if not some of the team of journalists

things i enjoyed about the movie

- fun picking out the farsi cognates of punjabi, urdu and hindi dialogue, bit like reading old english or hearing english / germanic roots i guess (fewer false cognates though)

- tremendous supporting cast including IRRFFFFFAANNNN KHAAANNNNNNN

seriously can we talk about what an awesome movie this was?

i was into it!

in fact i interviewed winterbottom about it

yeah i feel it's a bit slept on. pretty devastating.

at the end of the day, yeah it's another syriana, but it's also one of the very few best "mockumentary" style movies i've seen, up there w/ battle of algiers and sans soleil.

i watched it twice and in between viewings i read the daniel pearl project, the thing from vanity fair and marianne's book. i would say every line of dialogue, every event and every shot tells a crucial part of the story. "insistently political", and the politics of the movie themselves are, i think, unimpeachable.

at the end of the day, yeah it's another syriana, but it's also one of the very few best "mockumentary" style movies i've seen, up there w/ battle of algiers and sans soleil.

i watched it twice and in between viewings i read the daniel pearl project, the thing from vanity fair and marianne's book. i would say every line of dialogue, every event and every shot tells a crucial part of the story. "insistently political", and the politics of the movie themselves are, i think, unimpeachable.

also as a pan-central-asian i thought the role alotted to and performances of the muslim actors was tremendous

oops