Fauda

We've been watching a series called Fauda (Chaos) on Netflix over the last week or so. Very intense and often extremely suspenseful.
It concerns the ongoing war between the Israelis and the Palestinians. In this case the focus is mostly on a crack group of soldiers set up to infiltrate the Palestinians and undermine their terrorist attacks. All the soldiers in this group speak Arabic like natives and can pass for Arabs. Their main target is a terrorist who was supposed to be dead - in fact the main character of the series had understood that he'd killed him a couple of years before. But the terrorist is alive and well, and is almost killed (again) early in the piece, only just escaping once again. In the process, however, a wedding is disrupted (the terrorist's younger brother is the groom) by the soldiers (in disguise as the waiters providing the sweetmeats) and tragedy occurs. From then on it's a question of who will win: the soldiers, who want to rid the country of the terrorist, or the terrorist, who is planning a massive attack on the Israelis.
Because the series is made by Israelis, we're rooting for them even though they don't necessarily come across as full of integrity at every point. They're not out for revenge, they just want to keep their country free of a terrorist who they thought they'd already finished off. The Palestinian side is well-presented even though it's hard to empathise fully with them because their cause isn't just revenge, it's outright slaughter. But they come across as human beings, caught up in a seemingly timeless war between two peoples, in which they are basically carrying on a fight that has gone on for centuries in one form or another.
There are a host of characters, several of whom don't survive the crossfires for various reasons. There are some wonderful big set-pieces, and scenes of considerable anguish (from both parties to the war). The Palestinians (many of them played by Israelis - though the terrorist himself is actually a Palestinian actor) tend to present a kind of thinking that is so imbued with hatred that it's hard to empathise fully with them. On the other hand, the behaviour of the Israelis isn't always the best, and there is some laxity in the sexual department between some of the main characters. This didn't seem necessary to the plot, for me, but since a second series is being made, perhaps these elements affect what is yet to come.

Goodies and baddies

We watched Air Force One again last night; I’d forgotten how jingoistic it is.

Near the beginning Harrison Ford (playing the President of the USA) gives a speech (in Russia) saying how he won’t stand for little terrorists taking over as presidents of little countries and the US will step in and stop them! And it goes on in like fashion throughout.

We’ve already seen the US SAS-equivalent flying in and capturing one of these little terrorists while shooting everyone else in sight (of course these people don't count; they're just unnamed guards 1 through to 20, and no one cares that they might be real human beings). One never gets to sympathise in any way with the baddies: Gary Oldman is the main baddie and he has some very nasty scenes, which only make us hate him more and more.

Of course it’s very excitingly done, and is full of tension (Wolfgang Petersen at his best). Harrison Ford does his usual steely-eyed stuff at the crucial moments (see picture), and it’s a wonder the baddies don’t turn into butter and melt away. And not only is he the President he’s also a Father and a Husband. Oldman tries to get in a word edgeways about being a 'father' too (with three little kiddies), but you know he doesn’t have a capital F on his version of 'father.'

A couple of quotes from reviews about this movie:

The two hours of this movie felt like such an eternity that I was certain my clothes were going to be out of style by the time it was over. [Charles Taylor in Salon.com]

The movie also resurrects that ancient and dependable standby, the Choosing of the Wires. In countless other movies, the bomb squad hesitates between ``Red . . . or black? Red . . . or black''). This is a big-budget movie and presents us with five wires. It's an emergency, and the president needs to decide which two he should connect. See if you can guess the right two colors. The choices are green, yellow, red, white and blue. [Roger Ebert]

Islam and the world

In his recent newsletter, Rowland Croucher asks the question: Does Islam have a plan to take over the world?

That might sound like conspiracy theory stuff or the edge of paranoia, but what follows in the article is rather scary stuff. Where Muslims are a small percentage of the population - under 2% - they appear as moderate, peace-loving people. Above this level they begin to proselytize, (attempting to convert people to Islam) - often encouraging people in jails to become Muslims. (This has happened on a very small scale here in NZ already.)

Gradually, as their percentage of the population increases, they begin to force change, including political change: this is happening in England. Once they're above 10% of the population, small-scale terrorism increases. Above 20% there is terrorism against people of other religions. And if Peter Hammond's stats in the article are to be believed, you don't want to be in a nation where Muslims are above 40%; these nations experience widespread massacres, chronic terror attacks, and ongoing militia warfare. Bosnia (40% Muslim), Chad 53.1%, Lebanon 59.7% are examples.

Things get worse as the percentages increase. The irony is that once a nation becomes fully Islamic, it doesn't bring peace - as promised all along the line by those promoting Islam. Then the extremists begin to kill the moderates.

At the moment in Europe, and in some other Western countries, the Muslim population is increasing through Muslim couples having more babies than the local inhabitants. This is a quieter form of revolution, but effective nevertheless.

Anyway, you don't have to believe me - and you can call me anti-Muslim if you like. You can remind me that it's the Christian's duty to love everyone, neighbours and enemies...and Muslims. Unfortunately, if Rowland and his two experts are to be believed, this may not be the wisest move - unless, of course, all the Muslims you know convert to Christianity.

John Gray - philosopher

I’ve just been reading an article in the NZ Listener from a couple of weeks ago about the philosopher, John Gray. I’m going to quote a few paragraphs and comment on them.

[John] Gray thinks we’re doomed. His latest book, Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia, argues that creeds that presume humankind can remake society are holdovers of Christian apocalyptic thinking – the illusion that a harmonious world will follow from an event of mass destruction that eliminates conflict. With the Enlightenment, the yearning to see human history as progressing towards a goal became secular rather than religious.

Gray isn’t anti-religion as a later quote will show. However, I think he’s mistaken in believing that Christians ever thought the world as it is would become harmonious. It will take God himself to recreate the world to bring about harmony.

Gray professes that secular ideologies – from Marxism and Nazism to extreme forms of liberalism and conservatism – contain this repressed religious inheritance. By believing that paradise on Earth can be created by force, the utopian mind justifies mass bloodshed.

Christian religion never believed that the a paradise on Earth could be created by force.

History doesn’t necessarily bear out Gray’s belief that utopianism is inevitably destructive. He argues that campaigns are not utopian if they potentially can be realised. But many historical strides, like abolishing slavery, would at one time have seemed as implausible as democratising Iraq.

Was the abolishing of slavery a Utopian idea? I think the writer of the article - Ben Naparstek - is mistaken in saying this.

The idea of using mass terror to refashion the world was absent in the medieval period, Gray says, and emerged only with the French Revolution. He sees al Qaeda as an inheritor of the same post-Enlightenment revolutionary tradition as communism, nazism and neoconservatism.
It’s interesting to see someone actually putting the blame for some of the worst atrocities of the last few centuries where it belongs; on the so-called Enlightenment.

He conjectures that the invasion of Iraq sounded the death knell for secular utopianism. “Iraq practically precludes another large-scale experiment along those lines.

And one final (long) quote:

Gray says his harshest detractors are “evangelical humanists”, hostile to his beliefs that secular movements renew Christian patterns of thought and that 20th-century tyrannies were by-products of Enlightenment ideology. “They’ve said things like, ‘Well, the Enlightenment can’t have any role in these episodes because the Enlightenment is pluralistic and tolerant’, which reminds me of those gormless Christians who say, ‘Christianity couldn’t have any role in the Inquisition because it’s a religion of love.’”

The role of atheism in Maoist and Stalinist totalitarianism is rarely acknowledged, says Gray. “Mao launched his attack on Tibet with the slogan ‘religion is poison’.”

Though not a believer, Gray excoriates the recent fad for books attacking religion by the likes of Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins and Michel Onfray. “The difference between religious believers and secular rationalists is that religious believers are used to questioning their myths, whereas secular rationalists think their myths are literally true. I advocate an attitude of scepticism and critical distance from all these powerful belief systems.”

This seems to me to be the wisest thing said about Hitchens, Dawkins and the like in quite some time.

Distracted by the Trivial

Once again the Islamic world is up in arms with a matter concerning Salman Rushdie. Some MP in Pakistan is threatening suicide bombers if the knighthood Rushdie has received isn’t taken away from him. The warped thinking that goes on in the Islamic world can scarcely be believed. Firstly, it’s none of their business who the Queen gives a knighthood too – and calling her an ‘old crone’ is hardly diplomatic.
But far more importantly, these same people who condemn a writer for writing something that offends them find no offence in the fact that 75 people were blown up in Baghdad today, and hundreds of others were injured. Do we hear anyone in the Muslim world condemning this act of terrorism? I certainly haven’t. And if we discuss such an omission in the Islamic world the Muslim speakers are likely to say it was all the fault of the Americans. If the Americans hadn’t been in Iraq it wouldn’t have happened. The plain nonsense of such a statement (which has been made before) is self-evident. The hypocrisy of the Islam is so blatant that the Western world can only stand by open-mouthed, wondering what piece of nonsense they’ll come up with next.
They have a great deal in common with Napoleon the Pig from Orwell’s book, Animal Farm. Whatever piece of nonsense he wanted to spout had to be believed, such as: All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others.
The Islamic world seems to say: Everything we say is wise, though much of it is nonsense.