The Interpreter

It seems like Hollywood suddenly found out that Africa has more than jungles and hidden treasures. After Hotel Rwanda, here comes The Interpreter, a political thriller that still had some faith in the UN. In return, the UN finally allowed the cameras into the UN building in New York, which makes this movie unique.

But again, whenever a Hollywood movie deals with politics, you can smell a hidden agenda behind the scenes. The imaginary African country of Matobo, with its brutal dictator who started as a freedom fighter, would ring a bell with anyone familiar with the recent propaganda campaign against Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe. With both black and white citizens, and a flag very similar to that of Zimbabwe, Matobo was just a politically correct alias for Zimbabwe. The bad news, at least for the script writer, is that many movie goers in the US never heard of Zimbabwe. But who knows, maybe CNN, NBC and Fox News will fix this in the near future.

Adieu Bonaparte

Was it a mere coincidence that I watched Adieu Bonaparte, Youssef Chahine's mid 80s movie, twice during the invasion of Iraq 2 years ago, and on two different TV channels? As most of Chahine's movies, Adieu Bonaparte is not that popular with the audience in the Arab world, and thus you don't see it on TV that frequently. Taking into account that all what I can get here in the US is 9 Arabic TV channels, I couldn't overlook that coincidence, if it was one.

This controversial movie tells the story of Napoleon Bonaparte's invasion of Egypt in 1798. It has been criticized heavily by Egyptian movie critics who saw it sympathetic to the invasion. Some critics blamed it to the French co-production, while others blamed Chahine's political views, especially that he was also the script writer.

Most probably critics expected a reel dedicated to vilify everything French while glorifying the brave Egyptian resistance to the invasion. At least this was the typical theme of the very few Arabic movies that dealt with colonialism. In that sense, Chahine didn't fully disappoint them. The movie showed both the brave resistance and the colonial brutality. Chahine's sin though was that he went beyond the typical clichés and tried to honestly analyze the whole situation, and that's where the real brilliance of this movie resides.

The plot focuses on a microcosm of the Egyptian society at the time: a family with three youthful sons. The eldest believes the French are waging another Crusade on Egypt, and it's the responsibility of the Egyptians to side by the Mamluks, who have been exploitively ruling Egypt on behalf of the Ottoman Sultan, in front of the French occupation. The middle brother is taken by the French culture and technology, and believes that the Mamluks are no better than the French. Between the two extremes, the youngest is always lost and distracted.

In spite of their differences, the three brothers join the Egyptian resistance in Cairo. They were all against the occupation, but they still maintained their differences when it comes to the French culture. The middle brother befriends a French officer, who is more of a pacifist intellectual than a soldier, and he frequently visits the French barracks together with his younger brother. The dialogues they have reflected the cultural intercourse that implicitly took place between the Egyptians and the French during those years.

If you replace the words "Egyptian", "French" and "Mamluks" from the previous paragraphs with the words "Iraqi", "American" and "Saddam" you will see why I watched that movie twice in a couple of weeks when I was supposed to spend that time watching the war coverage. The resemblance really struck me at the time. It's the same story of choosing the lesser of the two evils: the Mamluks and the French on one side, and Saddam and the Americans on the other. Napoleon Bonaparte claimed to the Egyptians that he came to liberate them from the injustices they suffered under the Mamluks, and he was definitely right about the injustices and suffering part. More than two hundred years later, we now know that the whole thing was about the strategic location of Egypt, and Bonaparte's campaign was just one move in his big chess game against the British empire at the time.

Now that Saddam is together with the Mamluks in the trash heap of history, do any of the three Iraqi brothers still believe that "liberation" tone? And in the 21st century superpower single-player (so far) chess game, what will be the next move? During the cold war the biggest fear in the Arab world was of becoming chess pieces, so how do we feel now being just a part of the checkered board with pieces from all over the world stepping on our necks? And the checkering continues...

Falling of Baghdad - 2 years later

Everyone who followed the invasion of Iraq must have at least one war scene pinned in her/his mind. For many, this was the dramatic scene of American soldiers toppling the statue of Saddam Hussein in front of the world press (most of which were embedded with the coalition troops). For some others it was the scene of the American flag covering the head of that same statue of Saddam, and then quickly replaced by an Iraqi flag for the sake of political correctness. For black comedy fans, the scenes of Muhammad Saeed Al-Sahhaf, the Iraqi information minister at the time of the invasion, were definitely the most remarkable.

For me, a much less popular scene summed up the whole Iraq war thing. It was the scene of some patients of a mental institution wandering in the streets in front of their looted asylum. Yes, the looting went beyond the museums, palaces and libraries; it even reached crazy houses. The doctors and nurses had to flee the place, and of course after the equipment and furniture got looted the place was left wide open for the patients, maybe for the first time since they got in there. I can't forget those baffled eyes of the patients, probably confused and asking themselves: Which side of the fence is more insane?

As everyone knows by now, by the time a whole city was being looted, the only Baghdad buildings that were guarded by the coalition forces were the ministry of petroleum and the ministry of interior. The documents in those buildings were definitely more important than thousands-of-years-old monuments, rare books and mentally retarded patients.

One more thing, a little bit off-topic though. At one of the press conferences during the war, a European correspondent asked the American forces spokesperson about the carpet bombing of several areas of Baghdad, and if the alleged weapons of mass destruction sites could be accidentally bombed. The answer of the Pentagon spokesperson was that those sites were all known and avoided.

All animals are equal..

"All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others." It's George Orwell's famous quote from his novel "Animal Farm". I couldn't agree more when I read the UN security council resolution 1593 regarding the situation in Darfur.

The resolution excluded US citizens, together with citizens of other countries that are not parties to the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, from prosecution. If it wasn't for that exclusion, the US would have vetoed the resolution all together. Now here is the joke: Sudan is not a party to the Rome Statute.

So, thanks to the veto power, some war criminals are more equal than others.

Israel's Next War?

This time it will not be against Arabs, but against right-wing Zionists who want, and totally believe in, a purely Jewish state. This is what "Israel's Next War?", a documentary aired on PBS tonight, suggests. In this film, the ideologies of right-wing Zionist groups in the colonies (referred to in the media as settlements) are presented. The threat of those ideologies to the Middle East peace process in general, and Ariel Sharon's withdrawal plan from the occupied Gaza strip in particular, is also highlighted.

So, after all extremists exist on both sides. That's one of the not very well known facts stated by this film. Watching the interviews with several Kahanists, it's difficult not to ask: What's the difference between today's extremists and the members of the Haganah and the Argon more than fifty years ago? Those so-called extremists were brought to Palestinian occupied land, given government subsidized housing on illegal colonies, and were told that this land was given to them thousands of years ago by God, so how come they are wrong?

Yeah, maybe a secular movement is growing in Israel, but isn't Israel, by definition, the homeland of the Jews? So maybe non-Jews should just go somewhere else? But wait a minute, does this include Israeli secularists? How about Israeli Arabs, who are expected to outnumber the Jews in a few decades? So the Israeli democracy - the only one in the Middle East as we always hear in American democratic preaching - will result in a Jewish minority in the Jewish state?

Lots and lots of questions that need to be answered if we are really looking for peace. I'm not sure about the only democracy thing, but I'm sure Israel is the biggest Paradox in the Middle East, and unfortunately it was a paradox by design.