Evidently this knucklehead so hates American Troops in the Field that he will go to great lengths to associate an isolated vile incident perpetrated by a gang of dirtbags who just so happened to be in the US Army.
VENICE (Reuters) - A new film about the real-life rape and killing of a 14-year-old Iraqi girl by U.S. soldiers who also murdered her family stunned the Venice festival, with shocking images that left some viewers in tears.
"Redacted", by U.S. director Brian De Palma, is one of at least eight American [?] films on the war in Iraq due for release in the next few months and the first of two movies on the conflict screening in Venice's main competition.
Inspired by one of the most serious crimes committed by American soldiers in Iraq since the 2003 invasion, it is a harrowing indictment of the conflict and spares the audience no brutality to get its message across.
De Palma, 66, whose "Casualties of War" in 1989 told a similar tale of abuse by American soldiers in Vietnam, makes no secret of the goal he is hoping to achieve with the film's images, all based on real material he found on the Internet. [so it must be true! ed.]
"The movie is an attempt to bring the reality [who's reality?]of what is happening in Iraq to the American people," he told reporters after a press screening.
"The pictures are what will stop the war. One only hopes that these images will get the public incensed enough to motivate their Congressmen to vote against this war," he said.
Abeer Qasim Hamza al-Janabi was gang raped, killed and burnt by American soldiers in Mahmudiya, south of Baghdad, in March 2006. Her parents and younger daughter were also killed. Continued...
There is plenty of blame to be distributed in the particular case. That de Palma has chosen to leverage this tragic and vile incident in his campaign to demonize all things associated with the Iraq War and the US Military and as a representation of the behavior of "US Soldiers" is utterly contemptuous!
Remember the recruitment phrase leveraged by the US Army at the time? "An Army of One!" No marketing phrase could better represent these vermin who were and are still individuals, who still have free will. They inconsiderately wear the uniform and are too STUPID to recognize the whole that they in turn represent! In my mind, this is one of the most inexcusable and most extreme failings of the US Army, that of not instilling a more resilient sense of DUTY, HONOR, and COUNTRY in the minds of its recruits. Morality is not a word we need to shy away from, it needs to be engrained. Which I am quite sure a man of Mr. De Palma's philosophical leanings would have trouble blessing as well!
Where De Palma and his ilk are the most despicable are in their flagrant and willful disregard for Accurate Statistical Representation. Yes atrocities occur in warfare, and the United States Military has gone to great lengths to reduce the occurrence of these incidents, eliminated? no, but greatly reduced? Absolutely! But the "oh so sanctimoniously sensationalistic acrimony" piously pontificated by those who so hate the Martial Philosophy of Warriors is sickening and tiresome! The "feeding frenzy for the surreal" mentality of today's Hollywood producers and the leftist propagandists "Reporters" in the Mainstream Media (yes that line has blurred tremendously) has become so paramount the result is to all but censor the overwhelmingly positive behavior, conduct and professionalism in today's United States Armed Forces.
De Palma openly states his vainglorious wish... "The pictures are what will stop the war. One only hopes that these images will get the public incensed enough to motivate their Congressmen to vote against this war"
Propagandist for the Militant Extremists is what this equates to. It will receive more screenings and lauded support from peaceniks, Al Qaeda, and our (that'd be the United States') other sworn enemy than any other! The vile vermin who perpetrated this act DO NOT in any way shape or form represent the other 99.999 percent of United States Army Soldiers! But alas this is what movie makers the likes of De Palma would have you believe. Which is the bigger lie? In the illustrated case De Palma uses as his Metaphor for all things military, these scum were tried, and convicted and incarcerated for their crimes! I would think most intelligent people could easily see why the US Army would not really want to publish commercials on Monday Night Football using these wretched repulsive dregs as spokesmen!
But De Palma chooses to use these individuals as Poster Children for the US Army. You have to ask yourself,... better yet... go ask a returning veteran, or your serving brother, or father... "So how many innocents did you rape today?"... I'll wait...............................
When you recover from the physical punctuation of the delivered answer... maybe, just maybe you'll begin to understand the degree of contempt that representative accusations, like Mr. De Palma's tripe, really deserve.
Be weary of the enemy in our midst... The methods employed by these empowered few, who choose to view life through the narrowest of keyhole, are on the precipice of pernicious propaganda in Machiavellian proportions and cater to the addle mind.
"All propaganda has to be popular and has to accommodate itself to the comprehension of the least intelligent of those whom it seeks to reach."
--- Adolf Hitler
Redacted redacted
I am appalled to hear that Redacted has even itself been redacted. As if it were possible to further destroy the identities of the poor, maimed, dead Iraqis whose faces formed the background of the end titles in Brian De Palma’s film, now add the redaction of their images entirely. Are the cost benefit analysts working for the pharmaceuticals, automobile manufactures and the tobacco companies the only ones with any sense of risk or courage anymore? I prefer to think this has less to do with protecting the producers from legal action or the Iraqis from humiliation and invasion of privacy, than a monumental cowardice when it comes to confronting of the American moviegoer with a little too much reality. De Palma’s initial acquiescence to the insurers forced him to abandon the use of any actual documentary footage in the body of the film. This has already resulted in the Right Wing warmongers accusing him of “making it all up” because he restaged rather than using the real footage. This colossal inability on their part to understand the difference between art and life is too outrageous to even deserve comment.
What this chronic failure of nerve on the part of underwriters will do to the future of actual documentary filmmaking I leave to cynical speculation. I am convinced however that eventually the entertainment industry, corporations and the insurance pencil pushers will so lobotomize the creative spirit in this country, that the only artists left in our culture will be members of the Britney Spears Ilk’s Club.
If you wish to see an unrepentant, unredacted piece of filmmaking that is not afraid of lawsuits and not afraid to show the real face of war, I recommend to you a moving three minute video on YouTube called “Kindertotenlied”. (Readers of this blog may recognize the quote at the end of the video.)
http://youtube.com/results?search_query=kindertotenlied&search=Search
I hope that when the producers, whose footage was stolen for use in this video, finally get around to suing little old filmmaker (me), they will learn exactly how much blood can be squeezed from a rock (as opposed to Iraq). Abject poverty, ah my foes and oh my friends, does have its privileges!
Peace,
Bob Boldt
Posted by: Bob Boldt | October 21, 2007 at 07:57 PM
Sorry Ken,
Lucky for you I don't respond to personal attacks.
Peace,
Bob Boldt
Posted by: Bob Boldt | September 04, 2007 at 01:08 AM
Nice to see the loony left has shown up.
Bob,
Soldier/Sailors/Airmen/Marines WERE spit on in public. The statemnet that this is a myth is one of the great lies put out by the lazy academic left. (Student radicals even "egged" the Apollo 11 crew on one of thier first public events after their mission.)
Your comments about the men and women of our armed services are beyond contempt. Your view portrays them as nothing more than retarded animals. YOU ARE NOT A HUMAN. YOU ARE VILE GARBAGE. I HAVE NO PITY FOR YOU OR YOUR CAUSES.
Posted by: Ken | September 03, 2007 at 12:22 PM
“If you go to war, you realize it is not primarily about victory or defeat, it is about death and the infliction of death and suffering on as large a scale as you can make it. It is about the total failure of the human spirit. We don't show that because we don't want to. And in this sense journalists, television reporting, television cameras are lethal. They collude with governments to allow you to have more wars because if they showed you the truth, you wouldn't allow any more wars." Robert Fisk
I was opposed to this war long before it was announced. Nearly every prediction I made concerning the subsequent results of the Iraqi war have been born out - in full. Lest you think liberal Democratic partisanship plays even the smallest role in my critique of our incursion in Iraq, I was also one of the first to oppose a Democratic president - Johnson, when he announced our Vietnam War via the Gulf of Tonkin resolution.
Pro war blog reactions to Brian De Palma’s film have been as vitriolic as can be expected toward anyone right or left who is critical of the legality, the goals or the means involved in the “pacifying” of Iraq. Their prevailing view remains firmly wedded to the unshakable notion that what our soldiers are doing in Iraq (as they did in Vietnam) “is not murder and war crimes it is the work of quiet professionals giving their lives so that you have a safe environment to create counter productive (sic) “art”.
Benjamin Cook http://arenablog.blogspot.com/
For the sake of the focus of this post, I am willing to grant your statistically ludicrous assumption that 99.999 percent of our incursionary forces bears no more guilt for war crimes than did the soldiers in Vietnam or the German foot soldiers in WWII who were “…just following orders.” Who then remains to be criticized for their actions and their participation in this latest war?
In a similar way that no one in the anti-Vietnam war movement blamed the soldier for that war, (No case has ever come to light of any of us ever spitting on a soldier, as has been widely reported in the urban myth department) so too the Americans who “serve” in Iraq and Afghanistan should bear only a secondary responsibility for the atrocities that have so come to characterize our presence in the middle east theater of operations. Our benighted soldiers are actually to be pitied, certainly not ever to be in any way admired or treated as heroes. They are perhaps truly at best pathetic victims. Their suffering, their injuries and even their deaths should be a distant second in our hearts to the nearly million innocent Iraqis they have been directly and indirectly responsible for killing.
These brightest and best of our youth have suffered a four part betrayal: 1]lied to by recruiters 2] understaffed, over deployed and propagandized shamelessly during their tour(s) 3] cheated in the medical treatment they are entitled to after they have been used up by this war. 4] and perhaps the greatest betrayal of all: not being discouraged nearly enough by brain dead parents, public and press from being forever mentally and morally stained by participation in one of the most illegal and immortal enterprises since Hitler’s attempt to dominate the world.
I am not saying this because of any partisan interest. I am saying this solely because I am a human being who is watching helpless as his economy, his Constitution and his respect for human life is being daily disregarded by ninety five percent of our elected hypocrites who instead of ending this horror, have the unmitigated presumption to lecture us on the lessons of patriotism, ethics and faith.
Would anyone be bold enough to say of our soldiers’ atrocities as has been said of the corruption of our politicians?
“The ninety-five percent of corrupt politicians give the other five percent a bad name.” Henry Kissinger
Oops! sorry, I promised I wouldn’t bring the subject of atrocities up.
Bob Boldt
Jefferson City, MO
PS
Unlike you, I have not yet had the experience of De Palma’s film, Redacted. I can only speculate whether your immeasurable distain for the man is born out of an inability to accept the message or simply your desire to shoot the messenger.
PPS
Love your photos!
Posted by: Bob Boldt | September 02, 2007 at 02:18 PM
Mr. dePalma seems to be fixated with the rape of little girls by men in uniform. Wonder if Hedi Fleiss' little book has these preferences also...
Dear Mr. Spielberg,
You own the rights to Eugene Fluckey's THUNDER BELOW. May we, the American public, see a movie about a true war hero. ADM. Fluckey, unfortunately recently passed away, IT IS TIME TO HONOR HIM, HIS CREW AND ALL THE MEMBERS OF THE SILENT SERVICE OF WWII.
Or... How about a hero of the war in Iraq/Afghanistan. Does Smith, Dunham or Deitz ring a bell?
Posted by: Ken | August 31, 2007 at 08:06 PM