Mark Tapson was the writer’s assistant and researcher for Cyrus Nowrasteh on, among other projects, the highly regarded miniseries "The Path to 9/11," an experience which led to his political conversion from liberal to conservative, as noted in John Ziegler’s documentary, "Blocking the Path to 9/11."
He is a regular contributor to Big Hollywood and his work has also appeared on websites such as JihadWatch.org, the Investigative Project for Terrorism site, and MovieGuide.org. As a screenwriter, most recently Mark has adapted a crime thriller for the big screen and is writing a documentary for renowned terrorism expert Steven Emerson.
Mark is addicted to books, has animated conversations with the television, still hopes to play the bad guy in a Bond film someday, and is married to a wonderful woman who tolerates it all.
Mark Tapson
Political Correctness, Ft. Hood, and Hollywood
by Mark TapsonAlmost before the echo of gunfire from the massacre at Ft. Hood had faded, the news media launched a pre-emptive rationalization for the slaughter committed by Muslim traitor Nidal Malik Hasan. To divert attention from the shooter’s inconvenient name (“I cringe that he’s Muslim,” said Newsweek’s Evan Thomas), the talking heads began speculating sympathetically about the fragile mental state of poor frazzled Hasan, who had never seen combat but nonetheless must have “snapped.” After all, surely there could be no rational, ideological motive for the mass murder, which President Obama labeled “incomprehensible.” And “it’s certainly not about his religion, Islam,” denied Senator Lindsey Graham. Indeed, from listening to such “experts” as irrelevant diet book author Dr. Phil (“this is not a well act”), you’d think that Hasan was the victim, not the fourteen dead* and the nearly thirty seriously wounded that he left in his heartless wake. Even as a mountain of accumulating evidence irrefutably exposed Hasan’s act as premeditated violent jihad against the U.S. military, stubborn left-leaning commentators clung to their theory of mental derangement.
George Clooney in 2005’s Syriana
Meanwhile the national discussion has segued to our own collective insanity, political correctness, which we are now discovering paved the very way for the massacre. It is this cultural and mental straightjacket that forced a U.S. Army general to say diversity is more important than losing American lives; that compelled our Homeland Security Secretary to reassure the Arab world that we’re doing everything we can to protect against a mythical Muslim backlash; that prevented people from speaking out about red flags that could have saved the lives of everyone murdered at Ft. Hood; and that prevents our officials from even naming the enemy. No such ailment afflicts the jihadists, however, who are celebrating Hasan as a hero, who have no problem acknowledging his ideological intent, and who recognize our political correctness as a self-inflicted fatal wound. Unlike our leaders and media elites, they don’t sap their wartime focus with hand-wringing and navel-gazing. (more…)
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‘The Simpsons’, Islamophobia and CAIR: The Price of Freedom
by Mark TapsonThis past January, London’s Daily Star tabloid announced urgently that an upcoming episode – “the most controversial episode ever”! – of The Simpsons on the Sky1 network “pokes fun at Islam” and “is certain to enrage Muslim fanatics.” As anyone who morbidly follows this sort of thing (as I do) knows, enraging Muslim fanatics is hardly an accomplishment of Halley’s Comet-like rarity. It doesn’t take much: books, cartoons, teddy bears named Mohammad, posters of puppies, piggy banks, a Burger King ice cream swirl and the Nike logo (both of which apparently too closely resembled the Arabic script for “Allah”), are just a few of the recent Western offenses that have sparked their frothing outrage worldwide.
Yet despite the Daily Star’s perversely hopeful tone, there was no violent reaction in the UK from said fanatics, nor was there one in the United States after the episode originally aired here last Thanksgiving weekend (in a grimly ironic twist, the same weekend as the devastating mass murder and mayhem committed in Mumbai by a band of – wait for it – Muslim fanatics, or as the culturally sensitive media preferred to call them at the time, “gunmen”). So why no Muslim fury over The Simpsons? (more…)
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Honoring September 11th: They Want Us to Forget
by Mark Tapson“The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” – William Faulkner
“We will write our own future, and the future will be what we want it to be.” – Barack Obama
In a quiet and seemingly innocuous gesture, President Obama has designated 9/11 as “The National Day of Service and Remembrance.” Personally, I liked the ring of “Patriot Day,” and what does “service and remembrance” mean, precisely ? The idea is to get Americans to “engage in meaningful service to create change…in four key areas”: education, health, energy/environment and community renewal. None of these seems to have anything to do with honoring 9/11, but that seems to be the point: in the Huffington Post, Muslim-American playwright Wajahat Ali wrote, “In the US, we are trying to move away from focusing on 9/11 as a day of horror, and instead make it a day to recommit ourselves to national service.” An excellent Spectator article provides a blunter translation: “Nihilistic liberals are planning to drain 9/11 of all meaning.” Why? ”They think it needs to be taken back from the right.”
In other words, they resent the surge of patriotism and righteous outrage stirred up by the attacks, sentiments that empower the political Right. In order to advance the leftist agenda of dismantling American exceptionalism and recasting ourselves as the villain in our history books, they need Americans to put 9/11 behind us, forget the victims, forget that our enemy danced in the streets in celebration, forget that Islamic terror plots on our very shores continue to be disrupted, and forget that our rights and freedoms are under assault by a subversive civilizational jihad. (more…)
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NBC’s Reality TV: To Catch a Terrorist
by Mark TapsonWhen I learned of a new NBC-TV series called “The Wanted,” about an elite investigative team tracking down terrorists-at-large, I naturally assumed the terrorists in question would be Homeland Security priorities: white Christian conservatives building abortion clinic bombs in church basements, anti-government Tea Partiers, and disgruntled military veterans, whose volatile mix of post-traumatic stress disorder and paranoia of big government could cause them to snap at any moment and take out the nearest Obama-appointed czar (after all, there are more czars than there are Secret Service agents to protect them).
Imagine my astonishment when I discovered that “the wanted” of the show’s first two recent episodes (you can see them here; four more have been produced but are not presently scheduled) were Islamic terrorists. This is an encouraging new development, considering that Western governments and media have increasingly made taboo any reference to a connection between Islam and acts of terror (of course, the Islamists themselves never got that memo, because they insist on quoting Islamic theology to justify their murder and mayhem). And the left-leaning entertainment industry has virtually ceased pitting heroes against the real-world threat of jihadis, falling back instead on more fashionable stock bogeymen like corporate executives, Marvel Comics supervillains, and, well, corporate executives. (more…)
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Troopathon 2009: In Praise of American Warriors
by Mark TapsonMy father Roger E. Tapson, a former United States Army Staff Sergeant and veteran of World War II, died five years ago and was buried near a small lake in the rolling, pastoral grounds of the Dallas-Ft. Worth National Cemetery alongside thousands of other veterans - their names, as poet Stephen Spender might say, “feted by the waving grass, and by the streamers of white cloud, and whispers of wind in the listening sky, the names of those who…left the vivid air signed with their honor.” It’s exactly the kind of place my dad would have described, without a hint of Oprah-fied, feminized, New Age devaluation of the word, as “spiritual,” which was the way I once heard him describe a still, brisk, early autumn morning on a gorgeously wooded golf course, his favorite place to be.
Spiritual indeed, but not in the same degree or kind as ”civilian” burial grounds. Not to diminish the final resting place of anyone interred in the latter; but to stand in a military cemetery among the unadorned, uniform white markers that stretch out in precise rows like an army-in-waiting, is to feel a spiritually heightened quality to your surroundings that demands humility, gratitude, and a more solemn reverence. The aura of a military cemetery is undeniably suffused with something extra, because it’s not merely a graveyard, but a memorial to qualities that constitute the best of humanity – honor, courage, dignity, service and sacrifice – and to the warriors who once embodied them. Those grave markers stand as a challenge to those of us who remain. (more…)
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The Whitewashing of Soraya M.
by Mark TapsonWhile Iranian-American protesters packed streetcorners in Westwood last Saturday afternoon in support of the revolution currently playing out in the streets of Tehran, an historical drama about stoning in Iran got underway at the Los Angeles Film Festival mere blocks away.
For the few who don’t know by now, The Stoning of Soraya M. is based on French-Iranian journalist Freidoune Sahebjam’s bestselling book, which relates the true story of a woman in a remote Iranian village, in the years after the 1979 Khomeini revolution, who is falsely accused of adultery and stoned to death by a mob desperate to cleanse themselves of this affront to their collective honor and to their religion. It’s not only a gripping story in its own right, but it shines a harsh spotlight on the almost unimaginable reality that the barbaric punishment of stoning still exists in the Iranian law code, despite a largely nominal 2002 moratorium, the result of pressure from Western human rights groups.
(Full disclosure, even though I’m not reviewing the film here: I’m close friends with the filmmakers Cyrus and Betsy Nowrasteh, I provided Mpower Pictures with a bit of research on the project, I’m friends with other cast and crew and producers associated with the film, and I think stoning is bad. So don’t take my word for it when I say Soraya will be the most important, affecting film you’ll see all year. Instead seek out the multitude of reviewers who recommend the film, including Big Hollywood’s John Nolte and then see it for yourself.)
Following Saturday’s screening was a panel discussion, not so much moderated as simply hosted by Iranian novelist Khaled Hosseini, author of the bestselling The Kite Runner, who personally selected the film for the L.A. Film Festival. The panel also included Soraya’s writer-director Cyrus Nowrasteh, starring actress Shohreh Aghdashloo, and Dr. Reza Aslan, billed as an Islamic scholar. (more…)
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Getting Real About Torture
by Mark TapsonSince our country’s having a heated conversation about torture, and especially since that conversation seems certain to devolve into a parade of politicized, self-flagellating show trials that will broadcast our divided weakness to the world, it’s time to get some perspective on what torture is and isn’t, and who does it and who doesn’t.
Let me state for the record that I firmly believe America should not torture. But I’m at ease about that, because America does not torture. Do we use harsh interrogation techniques? Of course we do, and why not? This is war – why should we treat captive enemy combatants to a rejuvenating stay at the Four Seasons? Some of these maniacs plotted the devastation of 9/11, all cheered it, and if given the chance, all would gleefully saw your head off and then post a video of it on the Internet as inspiration for others of their fanatical ilk. Many of them might have information that could prevent further mayhem here and abroad – information they’re not going to volunteer simply because we’re congenial hosts. (more…)
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The Post-American President
by Mark TapsonAs President Obama takes his victory lap abroad, the cheerleading media line up to shake their pompoms. The Huffington Post says “this is what real diplomacy looks like.” Slate calls it “the return of statecraft.” Here’s another way to describe it: dhimmitude, the demeaned and subordinate status of non-Muslims under Muslim rule.
Did you miss our President’s servile bow before the Saudi King in London? If you blinked you did, because the mainstream media have virtually ignored this significant gesture. The left, of course, on the rare occasion that they even acknowledge the incident, dismiss the bow as a stumble, a search for a dropped contact lens, a sudden bout of abdominal pain, anything but what it unmistakably was … a full-on deferential dip to the ruler of another country. And not just any country, but the home of the most active disseminators of the fundamentalist ideology that seeks our destruction. The left always got a big, derisive (as Obama might say) laugh out of George W. Bush’s hand-holding with the Saudi sheikhs, but while that may have been a distasteful gesture, at least it was not a subservient one. (more…)
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Mr. President: War Is Not A ‘Struggle’ Or ‘Situation’
by Mark TapsonFirst, President Obama jettisoned the admittedly empty and useless phrase “war on terror,” a label which pleased pretty much no one, primarily because it didn’t specify an enemy; it’s often been pointed out that the phrase was like calling World War II a “war on blitzkrieg.” Next, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano avoided even mentioning the word “terrorism” in her first congressional testimony. Now the Department of Justice has announced it is dropping the legal designation “enemy combatants,” which referred to suspected terrorist detainees. The aim of all this muting of the language in the War with No Name is twofold: for the Obama administration to distance itself from George W. Bush’s “politics of fear,” and to whitewash a plain fact that liberals are suicidally reluctant to acknowledge - that we are at war with radical Islam.
Earlier this year the members of MoveOn.org identified liberals’ top ten priorities for 2009 in a poll. Their agenda is very revealing: nowhere among the list of usual suspects – stopping climate change, ending the war in Iraq, “restoring” civil liberties, holding the Bush administration “accountable” – is there any mention of national security or any acknowledgement that the United States even has an enemy – unless, of course, you count climate change and the Bush administration, two threats that the left has no problem confronting fiercely. (more…)
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Hollywood Goes to Iran
by Mark TapsonInspired perhaps by President Obama’s “unclenched hand” approach to reaching out to “countries that don’t like us very much,” as his former opponent John McCain tepidly used to put it, an unofficial delegation from Hollywood’s Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (including current and former AMPAS presidents and Annette Bening, among others), has set out to visit Iran as part of a “cultural exchange.”
Bening, Iranian actress Fatemeh Motamed Aria and Alfre Woodard in Iran
Exactly what is being exchanged is unclear. Maybe Ms. Bening et al are lecturing President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and the mullahs about “the shame they will see in their grandchildren’s eyes” over their denial of equal rights to gays in Iran. Ahmadinejad memorably told a howling audience at Columbia University in late 2007 that, “In Iran we don’t have homosexuals like in your country.” That’s because they are hanged there, which certainly marks the Mormon Church as lightweights when it comes to intolerance of gays. But for their part, Iranian cultural advisor Javad Shamaghdari laid out for the Hollywood representatives exactly what Iran wants in return: “We will believe Obama’s policy of change when we see change in Hollywood too.” (more…)
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Where the hell is Peter Gabriel?
by Mark TapsonJude, Gabriel is in the audience but he refused to perform only 45 seconds of his song. It was the whole thing or nothing.
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Remembering Mumbai…
by Mark TapsonBravo, Andrew, for your comment about the Mumbai attacks…
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by Mark Tapson
I think I speak for everyone when I say I want to see Mickey Rourke beat Sean Penn – and I’m not talking only about the Oscar.
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by Mark Tapson
Yeah, Benjamin Button was a great action movie.
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by Mark Tapson
Bill Maher? Why didn’t they let Ben Stein present?
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by Mark Tapson
Greetings all, I’m another virgin live blogger here. I know you’re all curious who I’m wearing tonight… It’s, well, I can’t see the label unless I take it off, so never mind. Anyway, I’m so excited to be here tonight.
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The Worst Form of Terrorism
by Mark TapsonValentine’s Day was the 20th anniversary of the death fatwa issued against The Satanic Verses novelist Salman Rushdie by Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini, whose stern expression glowered down from many a wall-sized banner throughout his country, and whose declaration, “There is no fun in Islam,” is a masterpiece of comical understatement.
In another notable understatement (considering that the Islamist foothold in England is so great that it gave rise to the expression “Londonistan”), BBC arts correspondent Lawrence Pollard said recently that the Rushdie controversy galvanized “a stronger sense of Muslim identity in Britain.” Nothing like having a blasphemer to behead to bring some people together, I guess. “Until that time there had been assumed support for the broad principle of free speech,” Pollard adds. “The Rushdie affair introduced the question of how far free expression should be limited to avoid offending religious feelings in a multicultural society.”
No, it introduced the question of how far expression should be limited to avoid the hysterical, worldwide, lethal mob violence of Muslims, since no one in the media, especially the BBC, gives a second thought to offending the religious feelings of Buddhists, Jews, Hindus, animists, Satanists and especially Christians, because none of those groups will kill you for it. Indeed, taking pop culture potshots at Christianity is such a common pastime for the Western media that Christians can barely even muster the energy for an angry e-mail or two. (more…)
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