John Podhoretz of The New York Post criticized two signers of the World Can’t Wait – Drive Out the Bush Regime today in an article about new post-9/11 films. Paul Haggis is directing a film starring Sean Penn about Richard Clark’s book “Against All Enemies”. Podhoretz says both “aligned themselves with those who view the entire War on Terror as fundamentally illegitimate”.
The World Can’t Wait Call says ” Your government, on the basis of
outrageous lies, is waging a murderous and utterly illegitimate war in
Iraq, with other countries in their sights,” and goes on to criticize
the open justification of torture. Depending on whether you think
there is a war on terror, or that the war on Iraq is causing more
terror on the people of Iraq, Podhoretz has correctly picked up on the
fact that something here is fundamentally illegitimate.
But then, he goes on to call our Advisory Board member Lynne Stewart
“a full-blown American agent of Islamist terrorism”. The New York Post
has vilified Lynne Stewart since she was personally indicted by John
Ashcroft 4 years ago. Lynne’s case is under appeal. She was politically
prosecuted because she dared to challenge the restrictions on lawyers
being able to defend their clients. This is why she is on our Advisory
Board.
Podhoretz did correctly quote our Call.
HOLLYWOOD
AT WAR
By JOHN PODHORETZ
New York Post
May 19, 2006 — HOLLYWOOD’S
first venture into the minefields of the War on Terror was “United
93,” a masterpiece. We’re just now getting a sense of what its future
ventures might be like. And while it’s not surprising that Hollywood would be placing the subject in the
hands of Bush administration critics, it is striking the degree to which those
critics have aligned themselves with those who view the entire War on Terror as
fundamentally illegitimate.
When former White House counterterrorism official Richard Clarke’s book,
“Against All Enemies,” was released in 2004, it was widely viewed as
an attack on the Bush administration for being insufficiently hawkish toward al
Qaeda in its early days. Clarke said he had tried to warn his new employers in
the Bush administration about the dangers of al Qaeda before 9/11 and tried to
urge a variety of aggressive measures against Osama bin Laden, but they
wouldn’t and didn’t listen.
Clarke’s book became a No. 1 bestseller and is now becoming a movie. He’ll
be played by Sean Penn. Writing and directing the film is Paul Haggis, whose
“Crash” won the Oscar this year.
The very fact that Penn and Haggis want to associate themselves with Richard
Clarke is very interesting, given the nature of their political views. Take
Sean Penn. He wrote contemptuously in an open letter to President Bush – months
before the invasion of Iraq
– about the idea we were fighting “a new kind of war.”
“How far have we come from understanding what it is to kill one man,
one woman or one child, much less the ‘collateral damage’ of many hundreds of
thousands?” Penn wrote. “Your use of the words, ‘this is a new kind
of war’ is often accompanied by an odd smile.”
Though Penn didn’t say so explicitly, it would appear from these words and
others he has written that he was opposed to the war in Afghanistan the
year before. Yet Clarke, in his book, criticizes the Bush administration for
its failure to take military action against al Qaeda in Afghanistan before
9/11. And his book is soaked through with the idea that we are in a
“new kind of war” – even claiming to have believed this when
believing it wasn’t cool.
Haggis, whose film will surely be a valentine to Clarke, made a splash when
he spoke at an anti-Iraq war rally last year.
That, in and of itself, is no big deal. After all, Richard Clarke himself
claims to have opposed going to war in Iraq – even though in the 1990s he was a
chief promulgators of the idea that al Qaeda and Iraq were forming a strategic
partnership that might include bin Laden “boogieing to Baghdad” if
the going got tough.
But there was more to Haggis’ rally than just a desire to bring the boys and
girls home from Mesopotamia. He was recruited
to speak by International ANSWER, a Marxist-Leninist group that loudly opposed
American military action not only in Iraq
but also in Afghanistan.
Haggis is also a signatory on a statement circulated by World Can’t Wait,
which ran “People look at all this and think of Hitler – and they are
right to do so. . . . The Bush regime is setting out to radically remake
society very quickly, in a fascist way, and for generations to come.”
This is the kind of rhetoric used not by those who think the war in Iraq went too
far but by those who believe American military action of any sort is
evil – even after 9/11. How many millions of dollars would you like to bet that
Haggis was opposed to military action to roust al Qaeda and the Taliban from Afghanistan?
But that’s not the worst aspect of World Can’t Wait. One name on the group’s
advisory committee is Lynne Stewart. She was the lawyer for Omar Abdel-Rahman,
the blind sheik who masterminded the 1993 World Trade
Center bombing. Last
year, Stewart was convicted of serving as an active accessory in Abdel-Rahman’s
terror network because she knowingly and purposefully passed secret messages
from him in prison to his associates outside prison.
Paul Haggis, who will be making a movie about how the U.S. government didn’t
respond forcefully enough to terror before 9/11, shares views and signatures
with a full-blown American agent of Islamist terrorism.
Words fail.
And then, of course, there’s Oliver Stone.
A trailer has just been released for “World Trade
Center,” the story
of the last two men saved from the Ground Zero wreckage. The trailer is
horrifying and bombastic, overdrawn and overdone – everything “United
93” was not. But that is to be expected from its director, Oliver Stone.
Stone’s last circulated commentary on the al Qaeda attack came on Oct. 6,
2001, when he appeared on a panel at Lincoln
Center. He began ranting
in terms that can only be described as insane about movie-studio bosses and
their connection to the attacks. Sitting next to him was the essayist
Christopher Hitchens.
Stone: “They control culture, they control ideas. And I think
the revolt of September 11th was about ‘F— you! F— your order.’ ”
Hitchens: “Excuse me – ‘revolt’?”
Stone: “Whatever you want to call it.”
Hitchens: “It was state-supported mass murder, using civilians
as missiles.”
Stone: “The studios bought television stations. Why? Why did the
telecommunications bill get passed at midnight, a hidden bill at midnight? The
Arabs have a point!”
The Arabs have a point – these are the words of the man who has now
directed a movie called “World
Trade Center.”
Words fail. Again.
John Podhoretz’s new book is “Can She Be Stopped: Hillary
Clinton Will Be the Next President of the United States Unless . . . “
jpodhoretz@gmail.com
