LAIN FARHAT REVIEWS "A MIGHTY HEART"

The murder of Wall Street Journal reporter, Daniel Pearl, enraged me. The brutality of a televised decapitation and dismemberment of a young man whose only sins (in the eyes of his jihadi kidnappers in Pakistan) were that he was American and Jewish, was repulsive. That the leader of this group of thugs was a well educated British Pakistani Muslim was shocking.

The new film, A Mighty Heart, recaps the kidnapping and desperate attempts to find and rescue him by Daniel Pearl’s pregnant wife (a French journalist), the Wall Street Journal, CIA, FBI, and Pakistani security forces. The performance of Angelina Jolie as Marianne Pearl will undoubtedly secure an Academy Award nomination, which it should. However, the film itself had flaws that are troubling.

There is one excellent moral in this film, and that is the courage of Marianne Pearl. She reminds us that the only way that terrorists can prevail is if we are terrified. She was not, nor will she ever permit herself to be so. Our own government should also promote this attitude in our population while simultaneously hunting down and closing down these jihadi thugs’ organizations. Fear should not be sold to us.

However, I would have rather seen a film that contrasted the lives of Danny Pearl and Sheikh Omar, his assassin-in-chief. We could learn something from that could remind us what the stakes are between jihadi Islam and western liberal democracy. This is a bigger issue than Pearl’s murder.

I would also criticize the current film as being too subtle—and in some cases wrong headed—about this clash of cultures. In flashbacks of interviews that Pearl was conducting, we hear one bearded fanatic repeat the nonsense that 9/11 was a Mosad operation and that 4,000 Jews were warned not to go to work on 9/11. Pearl looked shocked, but did not argue. There is no attempt in the film to comment and correct this statement.

The film also posed the notion that poverty and misery promote Islamist radicalism. They repeatedly showed a maidservant with a small boychild washing the floor in the Pearls’ building with a rag. Not even wet mops are available where female labor is no problem. I suppose the purpose was to illustrate the difference between upper and lower class life in Pakistan. However, we know that these jihadis are not from the underclass, but are for the most part western educated and middle class.

In addition, the film flashes clips of the Guantanamo compound and repeats the jihadi threats that they will treat their captives as Guantanamo treats Muslim terrorists. Audiences will assume that this is the reason for jihadi brutality—whereas it is not. The jihadis were committing murder, mayhem, and bombings long before Guantanamo was opened.

source:www.dafka.org