Category: Old Dish

Another haven for tolerance is attacked by young Muslim fanatics.

“As you know, Jane Fonda, Sean Penn, Warren Beatty, et al are not filmmakers, they are celebrities. They do not speak for the independent film community. I’m an independent filmmaker, and let me tell you I am horrified by the Van Gogh story. It is as disturbing as it gets. He made a short film about a Muslim woman, and he gets brutally murdered for it? I can’t wrap my head around it. I shot a movie with a crew of five in the projects of the South Bronx, and somehow I was not in that kind of danger.

I wish those Hollywood bloviators were not considered representatives of the creative community. They are funded by the studios, meaning they are funded by corporations, just like the people on the right they criticize. So you’re hearing it, right now, from a filmmaker living in Hollywood: the Theo Van Gogh murder is a horror, an outrage, and a sin against mankind.”

Two interesting developments. In Iran, the nut-job Islamo-fascist president may be provoking a split in the ruling elite. By recalling dozens of ambassadors, and calling for the annihilation of Israel, Ahmadinejad may be creating a new crisis of legitimacy. Money quote:

Mohammad Khatami and Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, two former reformist presidents, are openly critical of his policies. On Sunday, Mr Khatami accused the new leader of “using fascist values and principles in the name of Islam to criticise liberalism”. Mohammad Atrianfar, a close Rafsanjani ally, yesterday called the sackings a big diplomatic mistake. “The President does not understand that he should proceed with caution,” he said.

When a former Iranian president calls the current one a “fascist” in the press, we have a small sliver of progress. Meanwhile, in Iraq, we have a clear sign that the Shia and Kurdish factions are reaching out to disaffected Sunnis in the military. Keep the diplomacy up, Zalmay. And Syria’s regime is on the brink … Our enemies can make mistakes too. And that is one small piece of hope.

It lasted 65 million years. Slime molds have all the fun.

“What separates homosexuals and lesbians from every other minority group is that they are born and raised within the bosom of the majority. Unlike Latino or Jewish or black communities, where parents and grandparents and siblings pass on cultural norms to children in their most formative stages, each generation of gay men and lesbians grows up being taught the heterosexual norms and culture of their home environments or absorbing what passes for their gay identity from the broader culture as a whole. Each shift in mainstream culture is therefore magnified exponentially in the next generation of gay children. To give the most powerful example: A gay child born today will grow up knowing that, in many parts of the world and in parts of the United States, gay couples can get married just as their parents did. From the very beginning of their gay lives, in other words, they will have internalized a sense of normality, of human potential, of self-worth – something that my generation never had and that previous generations would have found unimaginable. That shift in consciousness is as profound as it is irreversible.” – from “The End of Gay Culture,” just posted opposite. You can her an NPR audio interview with me on the essay here.

Dan Savage suggests that liberals and libertarian conservatives drop the interminable debate about an amorphous and contentious “right to privacy” in the constitution, and simply propose a new constitutional amendment to make it explicit. I’m reluctant to amend the constitution on any grounds but the most urgent, but Dan’s argument is worth considering, if only because it takes a far less defensive approach to the issue than most Democrats and moderate Republicans.

“If you’ll look at my lovely FEMA attire, you’ll really vomit. I am a fashion god,” – Michael Brown, yucking it up in an email the day of Katrina. Jon Stewart couldn’t make this stuff up.

“I think our policies required abuse. There were freaking horrible things people were doing. I saw [detainees] who had feet smashed with hammers. One detainee told me he had been forced by Marines to sit on an exhaust pipe, and he had a softball-sized blister to prove it. The stuff I did was mainly torture lite: sleep deprivation, isolation, stress positions, hypothermia. We used dogs.” – army specialist, Anthony Lagouranis, who recently left the military, and served in Iraq.

It’s time to mark the first anniversary of the Islamist murder of film-maker Theo van Gogh. For those of you in Hollywood, he was an artist killed by Muslim theocrats. The silence on much of the left about van Gogh is as telling as the silence on the right about torture.

Greg Sargent ponders a legal but pie-in-the-sky scenario for the Fitzgerald investigation.