Protected: I Have My Limits, You Know!

This post is password protected. To view it please enter your password below:

Password:

Protected: Is This Really Too Much To Bear?

This post is password protected. To view it please enter your password below:

Password:

Protected: Update: Qatif

This post is password protected. To view it please enter your password below:

Password:

Protected: How Tight Can You Pinch That Dinar?

This post is password protected. To view it please enter your password below:

Password:

Protected: Polygyny Recovery Isn’t An Uphill Climb; It’s A Long Journey Over Peaks And Down Into Valleys

This post is password protected. To view it please enter your password below:

Password:

Protected: In the Process of Trying To Clean the Mud off Themselves, Saudi Ministry of Injustice Flings a Lot of It on the Qatif Victim

This post is password protected. To view it please enter your password below:

Password:

A Mighty Film

Leaving the theater after a matinee screening of Michael Winterbottom’s A Mighty Heart I thought that coming out into the bustling mall would lift my mood — or at least distract me — but it didn’t. That’s how powerful and engrossing the story of Daniel Pearl’s kidnapping and death is. From the opening sequences that caught the mood of a dusty, teeming Karachi to the final scene of Mariane Pearl walking down a narrow sidewalk with their son Adam, this film gripped me and it was virtually impossible to turn away from the dreaded story as it unfolded.

Winterbottom uses fast paced camera work with abrupt cuts and lightning panning, interspersed with shaky hand-held effects, to drive the story in the fashion of a “you are there” documentary. What keeps it from breaking apart in response to its own force are the scenes of Mariane (played by Angelina Jolie) keeping her wits about her in the center of the media/intelligence/political/diplomatic storm.

And she does keep her wits about her, even in her anguish once she is told about the videotape of his beheading. The scene is visceral — you know it is coming because we all know the story and followed it in the news — and yet when it does come, you cannot be prepared. How can you prepare yourself for the horror of knowing what those bastards did to Pearl? How can you prepare yourself for the wife’s anguish at losing her husband before he has the chance to see his first child?

In the end that is what A Mighty Heart is all about. It is about some horrible bastards who desecrate the name of our God when they shout “Allahu Akbar” when they are captured or worse, when they take the knife to Pearl’s neck. I visibly flinched to hear His name invoked by these filthy animals.

More simply, it is about a man, who was a reporter, a husband and a father-to-be, and his pregnant wife, also a reporter, and how their lives got in the way of somebody’s idea of jihad. Danny Pearl was just a pawn in their desire to build up an inevitable clash between Muslims and the West. Winterbottom’s film leaves no doubt that on both sides of the issue we are all being taken for a horrifying ride in the West vs. Islam Demolition Derby.

Protected: In Her Own Words: The Woman from Qatif

This post is password protected. To view it please enter your password below:

Password:

Protected: So Much I Want To Say

This post is password protected. To view it please enter your password below:

Password:

Protected: “Adieu, mes amis. Je vais à la gloire!” (Goodbye, my friends, I am off to glory!)

This post is password protected. To view it please enter your password below:

Password: