Starting today, America has a chance to see Iran through a simple yet fascinating prism, as the Iranian submission for Best Foreign Film Oscar consideration – “A Separation” – opens in select theaters.

While it is only playing in New York and Los Angeles this weekend, it should prove to be compelling viewing for art-house film lovers as it expands to more theaters nationwide in the weeks to come.

The film, written and directed by Asghar Farhadi, starts out with the deceptively simple premise of a young couple sitting before a judge and arguing over whether they should be granted a divorce. The wife, named Simin, wants to move with her husband Nader and 11-year-old daughter Tamreh to a foreign land where their daughter can have an unspecified “better life.” The couple is afraid to admit it in front of a judge who represents either the government or Islamic rule or both, but the implication is that they know their daughter will never have a truly free and happy life under the oppressive Iranian system.

The reason that Simin needs to consider divorce is that Nader feels he can’t move with her because he is caring for his own Alzheimer’s-afflicted father and is afraid the move could kill him. When the judge won’t grant a divorce because Nader won’t agree to one, Simin calls his bluff and moves out under the guise of having a separation, which leads Nader to seek a day-care nurse for his father.

So far, so simple – and seemingly boring. But it is here that things start to spiral out of control, as the new nurse, Razieh, is not only inexperienced and afraid to fully attend to his father’s care like washing him due to her fear of breaking Islamic rules, but she’s also hiding the fact that she’s pregnant because she’s afraid Nader won’t hire her if he knows she’s physically limited.

When Nader comes home early one day, he finds his father nearly dead on the floor of his room, with one arm tied to his bed and the nurse nowhere in sight. When she tries to sneak back into the apartment as if nothing happened, the normally cool-headed Nader loses his temper and orders her out. And in an expertly shot moment designed to leave viewers guessing about what happens next, he pushes her out of the apartment.

Razieh claims that the push caused her to fall and miscarry her baby, which drives her husband into a rage-fueled lust for revenge and drags Nader into a complex investigation in which everyone around him seems to have conflicting opinions of not only what actually happened between him and Razieh, but about his very character himself. With seemingly every character hiding a motive and revealing their true natures with one plot twist after another, “A Separation” grows into a psychological thriller of quiet but unforgettable power.

I’m normally not a big fan of foreign films and didn’t have any idea that “A Separation” was headed into such involving and exciting directions. The film is being poorly described on IMDB.com and elsewhere as a mere portrait of a marriage and the stresses of caring for an elder, when in reality its final 90 minutes are nearly Hitchcockian in their portrait of an average man having to prove himself innocent in a nightmare situation.

Adding to the film’s many pleasures is the fact that its cast is completely unknown to American viewers. If Brad Pitt had been caught in Nader’s situation, audiences would be predisposed to think how he’ll get out of the situation. But as played by the magnetic Peyman Maadi, Nader’s motivations and reactions to one terrible twist of fate after another are utterly unpredictable. Is he innocent? Guilty? Both?

Farhadi manages to keep viewers guessing nearly all the way to the end before bringing things to a close with a quiet emotional wallop that returns the story to the marriage. While his characters are all believing Muslims and swearing on the Koran becomes central to some of the plot threads, the film offers a quiet critique of the extent that strict Islamic rules pervade every aspect of Iranian life.

After all, the entire plot kicks into gear because Nader’s wife Simin wants out of the country so badly. Her desire for basic rights and freedoms and the ability to live out her dreams on equal footing as a woman in that male-dominated society is a universally relatable one. And the fact that “A Separation” puts a human face on its average citizens who have nothing to do with the insane pronouncements of their leader (which in itself is parallel to America these days), is what makes it must-see viewing for any American who hopes we can effect change in that society without resorting to war.

In “The Twelfth Imam,” David Shirazi is an undercover CIA operative whose assignment is to investigate and confirm the extent of Iran’s nuclear program. The American son of Iranian immigrants, he was a teenager when 9/11 took the life of the mother of the girl he loved. Thanks to his background, he is recruited by the CIA to infiltrate Iran’s government and report to Washington regarding Iran’s nuclear capabilities.

Meanwhile, in Iran, a man is traveling across the nation, performing miracles and calling followers, among them the leaders of Iran’s government and the Ayatollah. He is believed to be Muhammad Ibn Hasan Ibn Ali – the Mahdi, or Twelfth Imam, the Islamic Messiah. Iran’s leadership vows to follow wherever he leads, including nuclear weapon capability and war. Only one of Iran’s nuclear physicists sees any danger on the horizon, and tries to defect to the United States.

As Iran gets closer and closer to realizing her nuclear ambitions, David repeatedly encounters believers in the Mahdi, who tell him the end times are near and he needs to make sure he is on the right side. He becomes convinced that understanding the religious motivations of Iran’s leadership is essential to America’s foreign policy and national defense, but can he get Washington to believe him?

In “The Tehran Initiative,” released in October, David has helped one of Iran’s top nuclear physicists defect to America and returned to Iran to continue his mission. He confirms that Iran has, indeed, developed nuclear weapons and that Tehran is now under the control of the Mahdi. After an assassination attempt on the leaders of America, Israel and Egypt, Tehran begins to take aim at the Little Satan, Israel.

The Mahdi is traveling around the Middle East building his Caliphate. He declares on international news that he is working to build a great Islamic empire. Privately, he informs the leaders of the Arab world that only those who join his empire will be held harmless.

David repeatedly warns his superiors that world war is upon them, but America’s President Jackson, afraid of going down in history as yet another president caught up in a war in the Middle East, refuses to order military activity and threatens to cut off support to Israel if they act to defend themselves pre-emptively.

Will America recognize the threat in Tehran? Is war avoidable? Will David live long enough to make it back to Marseilles, his childhood sweetheart, and will he be able to come to terms with his own beliefs on the brink of a war fueled by religious superstition and seemingly supernatural influence?

Rosenberg is a master storyteller. His gripping writing style keeps you turning pages well past midnight, and the characters he creates, both American and Iranian, are full-bodied and believable. From the White House to a Palestinian refugee camp in Lebanon, every scene surrounds you, putting the reader in the center of the action. Rosenberg is a Conservative Christian, and that worldview is present in the books. Unlike niche Christian novels, however, the storyline doesn’t revolve around a conversion narrative.

The world Rosenberg creates is believable because he is so knowledgeable about the subject. Rosenberg has been following the “Twelver” movement, as it’s called, for a long time now. FoxNews.com recently posted one of his columns, “Why Iran’s Top Leaders Believe That the End of Days Has Come,” detailing the significance of the religious belief’s of Iran’s leadership on international security.

The “Twelver” movement refers to the belief in the Twelfth Imam, a figure in Islam’s history prophesied to return and restore an Islamic empire. Twelvers believe the Mahdi will come at the end of days to bring “righteousness, justice, and peace,” with Jesus as his lieutenant. In order for this to happen, it is taught, the entire world must be in chaos. From this chaos, the Mahdi will bring peace, purify Islam and rule the world. In the process, 60-80 percent of the world’s population will be killed, primarily for refusing to convert to Islam.

Rosenberg details in the FoxNews.com column how Iran’s Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad are Twelvers and believe the last days are upon us. The situations he writes about in “The Twelfth Imam” are not outside of the realm of possibility. And the prospect of a nuclear Iran headed up by individuals who believe that their Messiah desires the entire world to be at war, even for a season, should be a cause of concern for everyone, but particularly presidential candidates who may one day be in President Jackson’s position of having to face the reality that diplomacy won’t work with someone called to destroy you.

Action-packed and fast-paced, “The Twelfth Imam” paints a clear picture of the nuances of the current and potential political climate with Iran and in the Middle East in a way that is engrossing, educational and will leave you reading the headlines with a new understanding.

Rosenberg is author of eight New York Times best-selling novels and non-fiction books, with more than two million copies in print. Rosenberg previously worked as an aide to several U.S. and Israeli leaders, including Steve Forbes, former Israeli Deputy Prime Minister Natan Sharansky, and then-former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. He has been interviewed on hundreds of radio and TV shows, including ABC’s “Nightline,” CNN, CNN Headline News, C-SPAN, Fox News, MSNBC, The History Channel, the Rush Limbaugh Show, the Sean Hannity Show and the Glenn Beck Show. He has spoken to audiences throughout the U.S. and Canada and all over the world, including Israel, Iraq, Turkey, Jordan, Egypt, Russia, and the Philippines. More information on his books and political analysis is available at joelrosenberg.com.

Meanwhile, inside a secret nuclear facility, the evil German billionaire, Emanuel Skorzeny is about to make the deal of a lifetime with the Iranians

CHAPTER 44

Qom

“Why are you alone, sister?”

These were not words Maryam wished to hear, especially from a member of the morality police.  The Iranian vice cops – “vice” in this case applying to the very existence of women – were not as notorious as the mutaween of Saudi Arabia, or the Taliban of Afghanistan, but they were plenty dangerous.

She tensed as she answered.  “But I am modestly dressed, worshipping at the sacred mosque.”

They moved closer to her, boxing her in, forcing her into an alley.  Maryam glanced around and saw there was nobody else in sight.  Whatever was going to happen was going to have to happen fast.

“Where is your husband sister?”

“I have… he is away, on state business.  But he will be here soon, that I can assure you.”

“Then where is your father?”

“My father, may Allah bless him, is dead.”

“Your brother?”

“Alas, I have no brothers.”

The two police looked at each other.  In Iran, with one of the highest proportions of young people in the world, everybody had brothers and sisters.  She was obviously lying.

“Sister,” said the first cop, “I am afraid we are compelled by force of holy law to request that you accompany us.”

Maryam kept edging backward, into the alley, away from the crowds.  She knew the religious police were lightly armed, with knives for protection and sticks with which to beat helpless women.  This is what came of a country that had reduced some of the proudest, most glamorous women in the world into servile, cringing slaves.  They had no fear.

They were about to learn different.  They were about to take a very fast trip from the seventh century to the 21^st.  And they weren’t going to like it very much.

“Perhaps,” she said, “we can discuss this in a more private place.”

One of the dirty little secrets of Iran was that whores flourished everywhere.  Probably not since Dickensian London had the world’s oldest profession commanded such a large part of a nation’s economy, or its attention, or its fantasy life.  She need not say anything, merely hint.  They would get the message.  They would take the bait.

The men grinned at each other.  Fringe benefits were part of the job.  A doorway would be good enough.

Maryam took a deep breath and said a silent prayer.  This would have to be fast and lethal.

She moved back into a doorway, letting them come to her, feeling their hands on her body.  She needed them to do just that, to drop their guard, to reach for her with a repressed passion that would dull their other senses until it was too late.

Closer… closer…

She raised her veil as one of them moved in to kiss her, and her hand strayed to the privates of the second cop.  She could feel his mouth on hers, his tongue seeking hers, feel the tumescent excitement of the second man…

Now.

She bit the tongue off and wrenched the other man down, hard.  They both screamed, but their screams were immediately cut off as she drew the knife from the scabbard of the first cop and slashed his throat.  Gurgling, he fell into the second man, who was still in agony.  As he put up his hands to fend off the falling body, she plunged the knife into his heart.  As he died, she saw the look of disbelief in his eyes, that a woman had done this to him, and then a look of bliss, as if all his suspicions of the evil sex were, by his death, finally justified.

“Fuck you,” she said in English.

She pulled both the bodies into the doorway as best she could.  They’d be found almost immediately, that she knew.  She wiped the knife clean of fingerprints and placed it back in its sheath.

She was wet with blood, but the blood would not show against the back of the chador, and in this heat it would dry quickly.  She just had to stay away from people for a while.  And wait… wait for him.

And then, in the greatest miracle of her life, for which she would forever give thanks and praise to Allah, there he was.  She knew him immediately, saw right through his disguise, knew by the cock of his head and the way he walked, the way he moved, that it could be no other.  That at last he was come, and that she was whole again, and that no matter what now happened she knew the truth.

He moved toward her quickly but without haste.  Still nobody around.

“Hello, Frank,” she said quietly.

“My name’s not Frank,” he said.

“I know it isn’t,” she said.  “Everything you’ve told me since the day we met was a lie.”

“Would you have had it any other way?”

“Do I have to answer that question now?  How did you find me?

In answer, he reached inside her chador, until he found what he was looking for.  The smart phone with which she’d signaled him.  “Thank Allah for GPS,” he said.

“You’re late.”

“And they’re dead,” he said, looking at the corpses.  “So let’s ankle.”

“Home?”

He gave that look of his that she loved so well.  The one that said, are you kidding?  “You are home, remember?  And he’s here.”  She didn’t have to ask who “he” was.

“He’s looking for her,” she replied.  He didn’t have to ask who “she” was.

“Then I guess we both have jobs to do.”

“I’m not going to leave her.”

“That’s what I just said.”

“There’s more to it, right?”

“Would I be here if there wasn’t?” That was the answer she expected, but didn’t want.  “We haven’t got much time and we have a lot to do, including not getting ourselves killed and saving the world, not necessarily in that order, so let’s get a move on.”

“Where?”

He brought his face close to hers.  “As long as we’re together,” he said, “Qom is as good a place as any.”

*****

“You double-crossed me, you infidel bastard,” said Col. Zarin.

“I am an infidel in many faiths,” replied Skorzeny coolly, “so please do not think that your cheap superstitious imprecations can frighten me.”

They were in the heart of the nuclear complex on the outskirts of Qom, deep inside a mountain, where the uranium enrichment process had been taking place right under the noses of the U.N. inspectors, who preferred to look in the direction of the known facility at Natanz, rather than anywhere else, just in case they might find something.  Emanuel Skorzeny had no illusions that he was allowed admittance because he was a welcome guest of the Islamic Republic.  He was here because they were business partners, and the minute they ceased being business partners, his privileges would be revoked with extreme prejudice.

And he had a business deal for Col. Zarin.

“I have a proposition for you,” he said.

“I am not interested in your proposition,” replied the colonel.  “You have used me, and jeopardized my future and the future of my family.  They have my voice on tape, threatening this detective Saleh, may Allah curse him and his seed.  I should kill you for what you have done.”

“Not for what I have done, Col. Zarin.  For what he has done.  And I am about to deliver him – and her – to you.”

“Why should I believe you?”  Col. Zarin looked at the clock on the wall.  That, thought Skorzeny, was a measure of just how backward this country was – not only that one would look at a clock on the wall to see what time it was, but that there even were clocks on the wall.

Skorzeny ignored the question.  “I propose a trade.  One that will enrich us both.”

Col. Zarin’s glance fell upon Mlle. Derrida.  “Why do you bring your whore to a meeting of men?” he snarled.

“Because she’s not my whore,” Skorzeny answer levelly.  “And I’ll thank you not to talk about her in such a disrespectful manner.  You savages are simply going to have to learn that not all the world subscribes to your Dark Ages notion of right and wrong.  Your entire civilization is not worth a Mass, although Paris is.”

“Then why are you giving us Paris?” laughed Col. Zarin.

“Because Paris no longer worth a Mass, either.  But do not think you have triumphed.  It is I, Emanuel Skorzeny, who has triumphed, and you are a mere instrument of my will.  I am greater than any God, greater than your Allah, and I shall have my revenge.”

Col. Zarin’s hand stole toward his sidearm,  “This is blasphemy.  I should kill you for it.”

“You wouldn’t dare,” replied Skorzeny coolly.  “Because my death makes you a dead man.  It makes your wife a widow and your children orphans.  It brings down the full wrath of the West upon your pitiful heads.  For there will come a time, and soon, when your breast-beating and braggadocio will be as nothing.  I am all that is standing in the way of the West’s vengeance upon you.  So listen.”

He opened his briefcase, and took out the computer.  “This is the very latest example of NSA/CSS technology.  It was designed by their top operative, a man with whom I have come into contact, both personally and professionally, on several occasions, each of them unpleasant in the extreme.  I am prepared to make you a present of it, in exchange for Miss Harrington, who can be of absolutely no use to you at this point.”

“Do you love her that much?”

“Yes,” said Skorzeny.  It was the simplest answer her had ever given to any question in his life.

“And what does love mean?”

For the first time in his life, he felt old, tired, nearing the end. No, it could not be possible.  All his life had been devoted to one thing, to one purpose – him – and suddenly came this realization.  That there was something beyond him.  Not the ritualistic rote of some alien liturgy, but something more elemental, something more primitive than even religious superstition.

Her.

“I don’t know,” he replied.

Mlle. Derrida could sit silent no longer.  She had no use for these Iranians and their imported desert faith.  She was a Frenchwoman, the heiress of Voltaire and Descartes, Rousseau and Rimbaud and Sartre and Becket and her namesake, Derrida.  She believed in rational thought.  Cogito ergo sum. That was her faith, and that was why she had faith in him.  “Of course you do,” she said.

“Love is what is left when thought has fled – not religion, not faith, but love.  Love is what drives us.  If there is a God, and like you I do not believe that for a moment… but if there is, then love is what brings us closer to him.  Not haste.  Not vengeance.  Neither orders, nor rituals.  Nothing from above, or below.  Just us, humanity – what we French fought and lost our Revolution for.  We sacrificed our ideals on the altar of the guillotine, and we learned never to do that again.  And now here were are.”

She turned to Skorzeny.  “Ger her back, sir,” she said, “and then let’s go home.  I want to go home. Take me home.”

Skorzeny indicated the laptop.  “Very simple,” he said.  “The computer for the girl.  You get – if you can reverse-engineer it, and get past its built-in defenses – a glide path into the heart of the Great Satan.  With this, you can destroy them.  No need for bombs, nukes, Shahab missiles.  No need for the permanent war against the West.  You can end it all now, right here, right now.  Break their Black Widow, corrupt her, seduce her, turn into the whore you’ve always known she was.  I don’t care.  In fact, I endorse it.

He pushed the laptop across the table at Col. Zarin.  “But give my own Black Widow back to me.  Give me Miss Harrington.”

Col. Zarin looked at the laptop.  He looked at Skorzeny. He looked at Mlle. Derrida.

Skorzeny looked at him.  Neither of them blinked.

On the wall, the clock kept ticking. At last –

“I will take you to her,” Col. Zarin said.

It’s the third in the series that began with Hostile Intent in 2009 and continued with last year’s Early Warning. This volume concludes what I call the Skorzeny Trilogy, after the chief bad, Emanuel Skorzeny, the shadowy German billionaire who’s waging a private war against both Devlin, the American president, Jeb Tyler, and the West as a presidential election looms.

In this excerpt, the publishing mogul Jake Sinclair, who’s also made it his mission to destroy Tyler, has just learned of a terrible accident in California, and gets his best reporter — the sexy Principessa Stanley (who figured prominently in Early Warning) — on the case:

CHAPTER ELEVEN

New York City

The news was breaking as Jake Tyler entered the offices on Sixth Avenue.  Normally he didn’t come to New York much, certainly not since they’d moved the corporate base of operations to Los Angeles in some choice Century City property he just happened to own.

He’d flown in on his private jet, and if there was one rule he had on his private jet it was that he was not to be disturbed for any reason whatsoever, short of Selenites landing at Bowling Green or, worse, Carbon Beach.  Or Elvis, reappearing in Branson.

“What is it, Benny?” he said to Ben Bernstein as he entered the editor-in-chief’s office.  Once the job had been called executive editor, and to be the executive editor of the New York Times had been the pinnacle of American journalism.  So of course that had to go – he, Jake Sinclair, was the pinnacle of American journalism, and there would never be another one of him.  Editor-in-chief was as far as he would go with people whose salaries he paid.

“Cows, Mr. Sinclair,” came the reply.  “Lots and lots of cows.”

“So what?  We got cows right here in New York State, somewhere.  Cows all over the Midwest.  Cows in India, sacred cows I think they call them.  So what’s so special about these cows?”

Bernstein kept a poker face.  He had no opinion about his new boss and he did his damnedest to make sure his expression reflected that scrupulous neutrality.  “These cows are all dead,” he said.

“Where?”

“On that big cattle ranch up near Coalinga.”

Sinclair’s visage expressed his distaste for Twenty Questions.  “Where’s that?”

“Central California, sir,” replied Bernstein, backtracking.  “I assumed that, since you’re from there, California I mean, that –“

“You think I drive to San Francisco?”  Sinclair was rapidly losing interest in the story.  “What does it mean?”  Is it news I can use?”

In Bernstein’s experience, the only story the chief was interested in was the ongoing political story, so he quickly reframed.  “It means Tyler’s got another disaster on his hands, sir.  Somebody’s poisoned the California water supply.”

That stopped Sinclair in his tracks. “What?” Then he was moving again, double-time.

Bernstein watched the boss disappear into his private office at the end of the hall.  He’d only been inside once or twice, but from what he’d seen it was more like a fortress than an office, completely secure, with dedicated phone lines and all the latest electronic gadgetry.  Not that Sinclair probably knew how to use most of it, but to men like Jake Sinclair the display of such equipment was at least as important as its actual use.

Sinclair shut the door behind him and turned to the ranks of TV monitors.  The sun may have sent on the British Empire, but it was always coming up somewhere on his.  Sure enough, Bernstein was right – dead cows everywhere.  People, too.  He didn’t much care how the paper played the story the next day – newspapers were so retro they were almost chic – but he very much cared how his news networks were handling it – and so far he was not seeing what he wanted to see.

He reached for one of the secure lines and dialed her secure number.  She answered on the second ring.  She spoke first.

“Remember what I told you about puzzles?  Ciphers?  Cryptograms?”  He did remember.  That was the day they were in the bathroom at his office in Century City, with the shower on, the day she’d pulled him toward her in the steam, kissed him and told him that if he was ever late for another meeting with her she would kill him.  “Well, this is the piece of the puzzle we’ve been waiting for.  Now use it.”

“I’m not sure I under—“

“How did you ever manage to get anywhere in this life?” came the voice at the other end of the line.  He had no idea where she was at this moment, somewhere out on the hustings, as they used to call them, whatever hustings were.  Somewhere putting her plan into action.  “Honestly, I think you are the stupidest man I have ever met in my life.”

There was nothing to say.  His job was to say nothing.  So far, so good.

“Have you got the package ready?  The October Surprise?”

“That would be the complete dossier on Jeb Tyler – every bit of dirt and mud and slur and slander and innuendo that the combined newsgathering forces of the Sinclair Empire could dig up.  And was there ever plenty of it.  It was so explosive that it would finish Tyler the month before the voters went to the polls, except that they would not be merciful.  The material would not be released all at once.  No, it would dribbled out day by day, each story more damaging than the last, some of on TV, some on the radio, some in the papers and magazines.

Beginning the first week of October, every day would be sheer misery for the incumbent president, but there would be nothing he could do about it.  He could not withdraw from the campaign, because it would be too late to replace him on the ballot.  He couldn’t concede in advance, because the propriety of elections would have to be observed.  Day after day he was going to have to sit there in the Oval Office and take his beating like a man.  And then be destroyed the first Tuesday in November.

Now that was something Jake Sinclair was really looking forward to.  And he knew two other people who would enjoy the spectacle even more than he did.  The first was the woman on the other end of the phone, Angela Hassett, the governor of Rhode Island whose meteoric rise to power was about to be crowned with the highest office in the land.

The other was a man he had never met, never seen and never spoken to – communicated with solely by cutouts and go-betweens, each similarly invisible.  But a very rich man and the man who had made him, Jake Sinclair, a modestly rich man his lofty standards.  This man wanted Jeb Tyler gone and would spend any amount of money to achieve that objective.

Anonymously, of course.  Untraceably, of course.  Electoral proprieties must be observed.

“Tell me that you have it.  Tell me that you have everything,” she commanded.  Involuntarily, he glanced over his shoulder.  Even here in his inner sanctum, he could feel her presence, and it wouldn’t have surprised him at all to learn that, somehow, she’d had him bugged.

“I’ve got it – well, almost all of it.  There’s still a couple of things we’re trying to chase down, but I have top people on it.  Top people.”

Was that a chuckle or a chortle coming through the ether.  “I’ll bet you do,” said Angela Hassett, “and I’ll bet I know just who she is, too.”

The line went dead.  He was alone.

Sinclair sat in his chair, looking out the window overlooking midtown Manhattan.  That woman did something to him.  He could feel it.  There was something deliciously erotic about fantasizing an affair with the next president of the United States.  With the first female president of the United States.  With her.  So what if they were both married.  He still hadn’t quite decided Jenny II’s fate yet, and as for Angela’s husband… well, he could be dealt with down the line.

Somewhere, a soft chime sounded, like something you’d hear in a Buddhist rock garden.  Jake Sinclair hated buzzers and refused to be interrupted by the ring of a telephone, the dull thunk of an incoming email message or God forbid one of those Twitter things.

“What is it?”  The chime automatically activated a microphone that allowed him to communicate with his secretary, whose name he could never quite remember.

“Ms. Stanley, sir.”

Just the girl he wanted to see.  “Send her in.”

The lock on the door buzzed and in walked his favorite television correspondent.  Her work during the siege of Times Square had been outstanding, and the fact that she’d gotten herself temporarily kidnapped by, well, they never did figure out exactly who, had been a career enhancer.

“Mr. Sinclair?” she said.

She was beautiful, even more beautiful than she was on television, full-figured but wholesome, sexy but innocent – just the way the viewers liked them.  About the only thing that had changed was her hair, but it was growing back nicely; on the air, she wore a wig, so nobody ever knew she had been practically scalped.

He didn’t rise.  To get up would signal weakness to the help.  She didn’t sit down   To sit down would signal servility toward the boss.

“Have you been looking into what I asked you, Principessa?” he inquired.  He loved that name, and wondered if it was really hers.

“Yes, Mr. Sinclair,” she said. She moved forward to the desk and now was standing just opposite him.  “Just a couple more pieces of the puzzle left to gather.”

He smiled.  “Very good.  How long do I have to wait?”

She smiled back.  What a smile she had.  “Won’t be long now.  In the meantime, there’s this.”

She put an old BlackBerry down on his desk.  “What I am supposed to do with this?” he asked.

“Nothing,” she said.  “Just listen.”

Who knew that BlackBerrys doubled as tape recorders?  That they had little voice-memo doohickies, what did the kids call them today, applications – yes, “apps” – and that they could record –

The babble coming out the smart phone was like no language he had ever heard before.  Arabic or Iranian, rapid-fire, and then, at the end, this:

“Because I am sending you to hell.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” he asked, reaching for the phone, but Principessa swept it back up and slipped it into her pocket.

“You wanted a puzzle, I got you a puzzle,” she said.  “Now all you have to do is figure it out.”

She was already at the door:

“That’s what I pay you for,” he said.

“Pay me more,” she replied, and then she was gone.

A second excerpt from “Shock Warning” will appear tomorrow.

In 1985, I had my first writing success in the Northwest Pacific Writers’ Conference Ferry Tales contest. They wanted a story as relates to ferries, the major source of transportation between Seattle and ports all over the San Juan de Fuca Straits, so I gave them one: “The Midnight Shuttle,” the story of a man who gets wicked heartburn and decides to get some fresh air on the last ferry ride out of Bremerton, Washington, only to discover he had died and was on Acheron, the mythic ferry to Hell. I was neck-deep in dark stuff at the time, and I wanted to share the dread. Writers and Christopher Nolan will understand.

That story took second place, and Heloise was slated to hand me my award at a dinner in Tacoma. That is, until I committed my one and only DUI in celebration of my victory and spent the weekend in county jail instead. Such are the ups and downs of life as a writer. In 1998 I decided to pursue a career in screenwriting. In 2004 my first script, Ludwig the Great, a Pythonesque twist on the life of King Ludwig II, garnered a number of prestigious award noms and an invite to a red carpet awards gala at the WGA Theater in Beverly Hills. I met stars like Andy Garcia, comedic genius Barry W. Blaustein (a personal hero and inspiration of mine), and did I say there was an open bar? What more could an aspiring alcoholic hack scribe ask for?

I must say I traveled to the event with both great excitement and great trepidation. I was concerned that politics would come up. Not being one to hold my tongue, and possessed of a very low bullshit threshold, would I say something that would sink my career before it even started? To my great relief, politics never came up once. To all the professional and aspiring writers, actors, directors and producers attending the event, it was all about The Dream and the Next Great Project. This was the real blue collar Hollywood, I told myself. I assumed from that point on that since both the MSM and some major stars were left-wing, that the squeaky left wheels got all the press grease and to forget about it.

So I did. And as always, I kept my politics separate from my work. All I wanted to do was tell great stories. In that respect, I am still that same ten-year-old punk kid looking for trouble, only on the page instead of the streets. In October 2008 I began work on what I thought would be my best and most marketable project yet: “One Night at the Oscars,” a Marx Brothers-like screwball romantic comedy that introduces comedic chaos and anarchy into the most structured and controlled event on earth. In the end, I meant Oscars to be a loving tribute to Hollywood and the Academy Awards. Or at least the golden ideal, of which you speak a whisper and it’s gone.

In all that time I blew off Hollywood politics. To quote comedy god Mel Brooks, “Without Jews, fags and gypsies there is no theater!” They tend not to be conservative in thought or deed. Nature of the beast. So what? I grew up a stone’s throw from Harvard U. What do you think I haven’t seen? I hold no animosity toward any person until I’m given reason to. Then, in late February 2009 I was given nuclear-level reason with the Team Oscar trip to Iran, and not five days after the four-hour infomercial Oscars opposing Prop 8. The backstory. I had always opposed the fascist Islamist extremist regime in Iran since it was first spawned from Hell in 1979, but began blogging on Iran in 2008 after some atrocious human rights horror stories made the news.

I became online friends at that time with activist Arsham Parsi of the Iranian Railroad for Queer Refugees, a Toronto-based NGO that helps LGBTs flee Iran or keep them from being deported back to certain death in Iran. I helped him with documents in English for his many refugee cases, and in every way I could. Why Team Oscar patronized a regime that conducts the most barbaric anti-gay pogrom in the world does not matter now. I could not be silent. I spoke my mind and my conscience is clear. If I never sell a script in Hollywood because of my many rants against such idiocy, so be it. I can live with never eating lunch in that town again. Hell, I have a Miss Canada and Miss Europe among my Iranian Facebook friends through my HR and anti-regime campaigning. I can live with that.

But IF I write a great script that is worthy of being made into a successful film which tells a great story millions will love and will make boffo box office, and I am denied work because of my strong opinions, who loses out in the end? Like I said, I care only for my co-writer and all the other creative film artists in Hollywood who do great work but stand to be shut out because of our political beliefs. What was McCarthyism again? And why is it okay for lefties and liberals to do it when Tailgunner Joe and Citizen Cohn are still reviled in Tinseltown for doing the same? I don’t ask for special treatment for my work. All I ask is the same shot every other screenwriter in town gets on the merits of their writing.

Hate me? Fine. Despise me to Hell? Great! See you there. Want to see me die screaming of rectal cancer? Come watch me in the oncology ward! Want to piss on my grave? I’ll buy the Colt 45 you can load up on, because that’s the kind of guy I am. But separate my work from my person. If I or anyone else writes a screenplay worthy of option, sale, production and release, does it really matter who writes it? Apply Mel Brooks’ famous axiom: “Great script! Thanks a lot, kid! Now get the fuck off the set!” I am not the judge of how worthy my scripts are. That is for industry professionals to decide.

But this is America, not Soviet Russia. The merits and talent of writers and other creative film artists should decide what work sells and what doesn’t, not petty tyrant political commissar gatekeepers who decide which writers work or don’t based not on the quality of their writing but their politics. Should Picasso’s Guernica never hang in a museum because he had bad things to say about the curators? Should Dylan Thomas’s poetry never be read because he may have slammed the poets of his day as morons? Should Hollywood iconoclast Harlan Ellison’s work never see the celluloid light of day because he tore the film industry new ones in his Glass Teat books? If all that happened, who would lose?

The simple answer is, all of us. I and my co-writer believe “One Night at the Oscars,” which we have just wrapped and registered with the WGA after three years and over a hundred hair-pulling rewrites, is a fresh, original, and crazy high concept, low budget, four quadrant kitchen sink screwball romantic comedy that uplifts even Academy members I have slammed in the past. Not to suck up or kiss ass to garner favor but because that’s how the story was always meant to be, and long before I went nuclear over Team Oscar’s Iran trip. See, I don’t ever let politics infect my work. Food for thought.

Should I find that that my work will never sell in Hollywood ever because of my blogging here and elsewhere, and no matter how good the storytelling and writing, so be it. I will retire to short story and novel writing, under a pen name if necessary if the publishing industry is as bad. But if any of those short story or novels achieve great success and film industry attention in the future, I’ll be damned if I ever sell the film rights to Hollywood while I live and breathe! That may sound bitter and petty, and would rob fans of being able to see a story they love on film, but what is it we were talking about here again?

Break a leg, all!

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That event is perhaps best remembered by Mr. Panahi’s empty jury chair and actress Juliette Binoche’s tearful plea. Mr. Panahi responded to Cannes’ supportive efforts to liberate him by smuggling out a thank you note from Evin. The regime’s response to that heinous offense was to sentence Mr. Panahi to an additional two months in Evin, followed by a Gestapo-like raid on his home to terrorize his family into media silence. Yet the international pressure seems to have worked then, as Mr. Panahi was freed from prison on May 25. Mr. Panahi’s liberty turned out to be short-lived. In December, Mr. Panahi was convicted of “propaganda against the system” by an Islamist kangaroo court in Tehran and sentenced to six years in prison.

Mr. Panahi was also banned from the film arts and leaving the country for 20 years. In effect, the regime issued Mr. Panahi an artistic death sentence. This time, however, Mr. Panahi had notable company. Director Mohammad Rasoulof, who had campaigned for Mr. Panahi’s freedom last year from outside Iran, was issued a matching sentence for his alleged crimes against the Islamist state. Both filmmakers are currently out on bail awaiting appeal. So once again, Cannes is neck-deep in campaigning for Mr. Panahi’s exoneration as well as Mr. Rasoulof’s now. The organization just issued a statement linked to a petition containing 17,000+ signatures that reads like a who’s who of the film world.

It remains to be seen what the Islamist regime’s response will be, but some key outside factors are now in play that weren’t last year that may harden the regime’s stance this time around. The Ahmadinejad regime’s response to the Arab Spring has been to let a crimson tide of blood at home, exemplified by its brutal repressions of the 25 Bahman protests on Valentine’s Day and an increase in the rolling executions of political prisoners. Recently the regime claimed the bloody crown of world’s most murderous state for 2010, yet the official numbers do not include de facto executions or the secret dumping of mutilated bodies of political prisoners in the Iranian desert. It’s even worse this year. Much worse.

Only time and events will determine the filmmakers’ fates, and events are moving at a very fast clip. Unlike past uprisings, the Green Revolution isn’t collapsing under the regime’s bloody iron boots as other failed rebellions have. It is also noteworthy, based on my interactions with hundreds of Iranians the past two years, that frustration with the regime is now boiling over and reaching a tipping point. It is becoming more and more apparent to freedom-loving Iranians that the only sure way to end the Islamist Groundhog Day of terror in Iran for Jafar Panahi, Mohammad Rasoulof, Mohammad Nourizad, Ahmad Zeidabadi, Nasrin Sotoudeh, Habibollah Latifi and all the other prisoners of conscience in Iran is real change that results in the lawful ruling Iran and the criminals in jail instead of the other way around, as it has been for thirty-two long hellish years under the murderous Khomeinists.

And so it is for a viewer who happens upon an alarming film called Iranium, a 60-minute window into the very real threat of a nuclear-armed Iran. Released by the Clarion fund and directed by Alex Traiman, the film is at once gritty, brutal, terrifying and hopeful. And most importantly, if the professional and political pedigrees of those interviewed in the film are any indication, frighteningly true.

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Traiman, a journalist living in Israel and covering the Middle East, says he became fully aware of the threat of a nuclear armed Iran after attending a 4 day conference that focused on the subject in Israel in 2009. “So I started reading,” he says.  “After reading ‘The Rise of Nuclear Iran’ by Dore Gold and ‘Persian Night’ by Amir Taheri, I realized that there were several components that most Westerners did not know about the threat: There is a deep ideology guiding Iran’s leaders since 1979; there is a 30 year history of killing Americans that continues today; and that Western leaders have repeatedly misread the intentions of Iran’s leaders.”

In fact, Traiman adds, Westerners have a tendency to misunderstand the true nature of the threat because we insist on filtering the events in the Middle East, from the Iranian Revolution in 1979 to the events occurring today in Egypt and Libya, through a decidedly Western value system.

“There is most certainly a huge disconnect between the nature of these oppressive regimes and how they are viewed in the West,” Traiman says. “We view events in the Muslim world, including the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, through a prism of values that is uniquely American.  But those nations across the world have a completely different system of values that were established long before America ever became a nation.”

And so Traiman has made a film that seeks to shine a light on that value system so that Westerners can begin to understand what an armed Iran actually means to the world from both a political and ideological perspective.

Narrated by the immediately recognizable voice of the award-winning Iranian-American actress Shohreh Agdashloo, the film tells the story of an Iran that has teetered on the verge of democracy for years, only to succumb to the tyrannical and power-hungry ideology of former leader Ayatollah Khomeini. In fact, the film – supported by interviews from both sides of the American political spectrum along with heavyweights in international security policy – maintains that the current Iranian leadership is nothing more than a continuation of that same Mullah-inspired cultural mandate: to wit, hatred for the West and for her allies, most notably, of course, Israel.

While Traiman might have taken the easy way out with his film and relied only on striking images of throngs of young Iranians chanting death to America at the behest of their leadership, or the almost unthinkable ways in which Iran moves ever closer to the American Southern border and how a nuclear weapon might best be deployed (hint: Electromagnetic Pulse), he wisely chooses to also include the voice of one such Iranian who can offer first-hand experience, a gentleman who goes by the name Reza Khalili.

Khalili, who uses a pseudonym because he was once employed as a Iranian Revolutionary Guard member out of patriotism and made the painful choice to begin working for the CIA when he discovered that the promise of the 1979 Revolution was being distorted and mangled to fit a worldview that seeks to dismantle the West, offers the film a credibility it may not have had without his close observation.

Khalili’s book, “A Time to Betray: The Astonishing Double Life of a CIA Agent Inside the Revolutionary Guards of Iran” is used as training material in the Joint Counterintelligence Training Academy in the Department of Defense, and so he is recognized as someone who understands the nuances of Iran’s quest for power. He is a man quick to acknowledge his love of country and quicker to acknowledge his sadness at what has become of his homeland.

“They have chosen to betray the people,” says Khalili, echoing Traiman’s film in asserting that the only remedy for a nuclear Iran is an overthrow of the currently fragile government and some sort of new rule driven by the will of the people. “[The Iranian leadership] believe Islam [must] conquer the world – a lack of understanding of this philosophy has caused failure.”

Both Khalili and Traiman are dedicated to making sure that this failure does not become the standard. For his part, Khalili is confused by the American reaction to Iran’s repeated, thinly-veiled threats. “I am confused because this administration should realize both negotiations and sanctions have failed,” he says incredulously. Further, he remains in awe that the civilized world has refused to decry the growing relationship between Iran and North Korea. “What else do we need? What else are we looking for?”

Traiman, in making Iranium, is asking the same question and, simultaneously, offering an answer. “Once we decide that it is unacceptable to us that Iran would ever get its hands on nuclear weapons, we can demand that our policy leaders take appropriate actions,” he says. “Based on events within Iran and across the Muslim world, a new Iranian revolution appears to be a best-scenario to dealing with Iran’s nuclear threat.  We can support Iran’s democratic movement in a variety of ways from financial to technical.  Verbal moral support can play a major role.”

In other words, the West needs to do something we are uniquely granted the right to do: speak up.

Catch screenings of the film by visiting the website at www/iraniumthemovie.com/news/premieres/

The American rebels with a cause in “From Here To Eternity,” the heroes of that 1941, Pearl Harbor drama, are all, in some sense, a replica of Lt. Col. West. The Colonel’s individual freedom and individual integrity, his truth to himself and responsibility to his enlisted men were fulfilled in the clearest and most unswerving manner.

—–

In my opinion, he saved the lives of American servicemen and drew a line in the sand before the likes of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, homicidal bully of Iran.

In the eyes of Col. West’s military superiors, he was considered the villain in “From Here To Eternity.”

To the contrary, he belongs with the characters played by Burt Lancaster, Montgomery Clift, and Frank Sinatra. Three distinctively American integrities.

Why was the Colonel singled out for an enforced “resignation”?

The collective bargaining and cronyism of the Third Millennium, American Army-at-War was seen spitting on its own best soldiers because of the New World Order’s increasingly Marxist agenda.

In the film translation of that always surprising novel by James Jones, From Here To Eternity, individual freedom and individual responsibility are the heroes battling the community organizing pressure and collective bargaining going on under the guidance of Captain Dana “Dynamite” Holmes. That officer is, in short, the villain, played by Phillip Ober with perfect contempt for anyone or anything but himself.

Does such elitism sound familiar?

There are prophetically Marxist-style cabals and pressures existing to both force Prewittt, the Montgomery Clift character, to box, and to “transform” Frank Sinatra’s Maggio into a coward and someone ashamed of his Italian roots. Maggio would rather die, be beaten to death, than succumb to any bully.

Neither effort succeeds, of course, and both Maggio and Prewitt, true to themselves, die as heroes, fighting not only their enemies abroad but the very “community organizers” and “collective bargainers” that can so obscenely crop up in any military setting.

With prophetic irony, the villainous officer of “From Here To Eternity” is given the same sentence which a whole new, politically correct military – during President George W. Bush’s militarily ambitious administration – felt obliged to give our contemporary hero, Lt. Col. West a forced resignation.

Obama’s “fundamental transformation of America” had already begun during the previous Presidency. Decades before that, the soul of the American identity died with the legalized murder of Roe v Wade: Again, as in slavery days, all men and women are no longer created equal.

No wonder the likes of the Soros/Obama New World Order arrived. The enemy to the essence of American identity already had 30-some years of a homicidally corrupted law and order.

Therein lies our President’s stated view of his mission: to save the collective. The undeniably Marxist collective.

Before the American military had to even face confronting the Soviet Union, James Jones’s “From Here To Eternity” captured the basic heart of our dilemma now: Community Organizing and Collective Bargaining versus Individual Freedom and Individual Responsibility.

The Soviet Union and Red China are clearly a child of the former disciplines and America the proud and resilient offspring of the latter.

How odd that the Marxists abort millions of the very collective they claim to be protecting while traditional America feels obliged to ensure the life of every child conceived within the United States.

The title, “From Here To Eternity,” is ultimately the most hopeful thing about James Jones’ novel. That, of course, and the fact that we eventually, after huge sacrifice of the Free World’s lives, won World War II.

My last article for Big Peace set America in the classically tragic mould of Oedipus and a potential family bloodbath. That, of course, then inspired this week’s ESR article on America’s Second Civil War.

Do the murderous feelings within “From Here To Eternity” still remain in today’s America.?

I feel those American identity nightmares are worse now than ever.

Perhaps the character closest to Lt. Col. Allen West in “From Here To Eternity” is Burt Lancaster’s First Sergeant Milton Warden. This sergeant knows the entire universe of enlisted life and, yes, miraculously he treads a clear but complicated path of moral rectitude. He’s the strongest of the heroes in that film and I suspect that Lt. Col. Allen West is neck and neck with the Lancaster character and, with his officer’s credentials, will indeed stand with Sergeant Warden in the best tradition of American manhood and heroism.

No, the Sergeant of “From Here To Eternity” is hardly a saint, nor should we expect Col. Allen West to be one during his long and inevitable pilgrimage to the White House.

Am I that sure of his destiny?

Yes.

Col. West may not become our President – though circumstances may very well make him that – but he will serve in some very important role in our next President’s cabinet, that team of advisers which President Obama has so cavalierly ignored.

Aside from the obviously worn-out and beleaguered Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, who or what traipses through or calls the Oval Office more often than the labor union bullies running things in Wisconsin?

This bully, played with divinely crafted sadism by Ernest Borgnine, won’t mess with the likes of Burt Lancaster’s Sgt. Warden. Fatso ultimately drops his knife.

The increasingly Fatted Marxists of the Obama Nation, in turn, won’t mess with Lt. Col. West.

What do you think?

In truth, it is. The various Islamist regimes of Iran have been at total war with their Hollywood for a very long time now. In 2001 director Tahmineh Milani was sentenced to death for her film The Hidden Half, and well after approval for general release by the regime’s religious censors. Only international and heated domestic outrage spared Tahmineh’s life. Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese were howling back then too, as was the Academy. In February 2007, documentarian Mehrnoushe Solouki was thrown into the hell of Evin for the crime of stumbling across a regime mass grave during a shoot. Again, only international pressure freed her from her now-recurring nightmare.

SSDD in Iran’s film industry. Consider yourself lucky if you only get the McCarthy treatment. But the regime doesn’t stop its war on film and filmmakers at its borders. Last June, suspected Iranian operatives kidnapped exiled filmmaker and regime nemesis Daryush Shokof in Cologne, Germany for daring to screen his film Iran Zendan (Iran Prison), a brutal reenactment of the rape and torture of Green protesters inside an Iranian prison. Again, only international heat and intense pressure from the German government somehow made Mr. Shokof magically reappear on the banks of the Rhine in Cologne soaked, dazed and incoherent after twelve days missing.

It is much the same kind of war regime operatives now seem to be waging on the film Iranium in Canada. Originally scheduled to be screened at Canada’s National Archives, Iranium was canceled by the director due to Iranian embassy pressure and violently threatening anonymous phone calls (it should be noted here that Mr. Shokof received a number of similar dialed-in threats himself over Iran Zendan before his abduction). Canada’s Heritage Minister James Moore bravely ordered the screening back on, and despite all the threats and official Iranian protests. That scheduled screening of Iranium is now on the verge of causing a major diplomatic row between Canada and Iran.

Unfortunately for the regime, Canada has an inconvenient public policy called freedom of speech and someone with the balls to back it up in James Moore. The only question that remains for me is, just how far is the Islamist regime in Iran willing to go in a Western nation like Canada to suppress a film and/or filmmakers they very much don’t like? Time will tell. But if time has told us anything, it’s that the current plights of Jafar Panahi and Mohammad Rasoulof are only scratching the surface of Islamist Iran’s long sad history of persecuting even unto death its best and brightest, and of reaching beyond its borders to enforce Islamist whims or seek violent revenge for perceived offenses. Is that not the Islamist Way in a nutshell? Is it not the way of all totalitarians, given the tragic histories?

In closing, I would like to bring attention to yet another extremely brave Iranian filmmaker who is suffering the tortures of the damned in Iran: Mohammad Nourizad. A former regime filmmaker who turned after the Green Revolution, Mr. Nourizad was imprisoned and sentenced to 3-1/2 years in prison and fifty lashes for the crime of writing extremely heated letters to Ahmie and Khamie and three Mad Mullahs over the bloody post-election crackdowns. Late last year, he was taken to the hospital from prison following a severe beating that reportedly blurred his vision permanently. A filmmaker’s vision, I might add. He is now in the hospital again following a hunger strike. Please wish him well.

By the way, Mr. Nourizad still awaits his fifty lashes. As soon as he’s well enough, I reckon. The best we can do at the moment is continue to support the brave and longsuffering Iranian filmmakers (not to mention the Greens), and to take our own brave stands in defense of freedom in the face of real violent incivility by the Iranian regime and its agents in Canada. That is how we fight back: defiantly, and with no uncertain terms or equivocation. The Iranian regime does not dictate the terms of our freedom to us, or what films we can and cannot watch. I say let Iranium flow to the outer boundaries of cyberspace. Cheerfully enough, it will on February 8th. The regime would rather we not watch it, which is reason enough to. Screw ‘em! It’s not like they haven’t screened a few unpleasant films in their day.

Today’s Incredible Shrinking Los Angeles Times:

Haggis, the director of “Crash,” and others are urging Hollywood stars to pin on white lapel ribbons to register their opposition to the Iranian government’s treatment of acclaimed director Jafar Panahi (“Offside”) and fellow filmmaker Mohammad Rasoulof, who were sentenced last month to six years in prison and banned from making movies for 20 years. …

Though Haggis does not know Panahi and Rasoulof personally, and the Iranian government is notoriously resistant to outside pressure, he said he felt compelled do to something when he heard the news.

“When I see something like this, it hits pretty close to home,” said Haggis, who with Sean Penn, Martin Scorsese and producer Harvey Weinstein joined with Amnesty International to condemn the sentence and sign Amnesty’s petition calling for international pressure on Iran to lift it.  

“We just can’t point the finger over here. Intolerance is growing in our country as well, so it may be absurd to say what is happening there couldn’t happen here,” says Haggis, founder of Artists for Peace and Justice, an anti-poverty and social justice effort that has been particularly active in Haiti relief efforts. “It has happened here before” with the 1950s Hollywood anti-Communist blacklist, he noted.

Is there an older or more pathetic violin than the one marked “Hollywood Blacklist”?

No.

Regardless, comparing the blacklist to what’s happening in Iran is not only the height of a rank narcissist exploiting what’s happening to Panahi in order to paint himself as a millionaire victim, it’s like comparing “Crash” to a good movie.

Furthermore, this isn’t the Oscar-winner’s first Academy Award ribbon campaign. In 2008, as American troops were fighting and dying in two different countries, orange ribbons were the Haggis’ cause du jour, ribbons in solidarity with the terrorists at Guantanamo Bay.