Over the past several years, many major movie stars have appeared in films about the war in Iraq.  Even though many of those movies, including the recent “Green Zone,”  failed dismally at the box office, movies like that film arguably received more credibility and publicity because of the well-known stars and directors who worked on them. For the ”Green Zone”, that included stars  Matt Damon and Greg Kinnear and the movie’s director Paul Greengrass. One would only wish that these same celebrities would focus less on criticizing U.S. policy in Iraq and focus more of their attention on the stories that are not being told about what is going on today in Iran.

 I recently had the opportunity to watch a new movie that focused on Iran entitled “Atomic Jihad: Ahmadinejad’s Coming War for Islamic Revival and Obama’s Politics of Defeat.” “Atomic Jihad” is a new documentary written and directed by Joel Gilbert. Because the movie often focuses on religion and the Middle East, it is bound to be a controversial film. The movie focuses on some extremists in the region including the current leader of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. I am not as familiar with the region as Mr. Gilbert is so I cannot testify to the accuracy of everything in the movie but I can state that this film is worth watching for people who want to learn more about the history of the region.  

To me, the strongest part of the film focused on the disparity between the diplomatic rhetoric of President Obama and the harsh and demeaning rhetoric of President Ahmadinejad of Iran. (more…)

The 2010 Oscar ceremonies have come and gone without a word spoken about “The Stoning of Soraya M.” The searing drama, based on true events, follows the torture of an innocent Iranian woman charged with adultery. It’s the kind of message movie Hollywood doesn’t much care for, stories showcasing horrors that can’t be directly blamed on western culture.

But the drama, released today on DVD and Blu-ray, deserved a smattering of Oscar buzz all the same. What other movies bring the issue of Sharia law to light in such fashion? More importantly, why didn‘t Shohreh Aghdashloo’s blistering performance earn her a place in the Best Actress category?

“Stoning,” directed and co-written by “The Path to 9/11” screenwriter Cyrus Nowrasteh, takes us to a remote Iranian village under the thumb of Sharia law. Young, attractive Soraya (Mozhan Marno) is raising four children with little help from her husband, Ali (Navid Negahban). When Ali decides he’d rather be married to a 14-year-old Iranian girl, he tries to pressure Soraya into granting him a divorce. (more…)

So every other year or so a documentary bubbles up, focusing on racist groups around the world – usually skinhead types in derby jackets, Doc Martens and tight, rolled-up jeans. Essentially they look like roadies for Erasure. That’s because when it comes to neo-Nazi villains, they only come in one flavor: vanilla. Without question, Jew haters are always white, pathetic, despicable losers with tiny penises.

However most – if not all – of them – are powerless. They don’t run governments. They’re lucky if they run laundromats.

But in Iran, you’ve got a full-blown neo-Nazi running the government. You’ve got a modern day Hitler boasting about nuclear capability. He shares so much in common with Adolf it’s eerie – his envy-driven hatred, horrible hair and an irrational love for animals. All that’s missing is the funny mustache. (more…)

The situation in Afghanistan is like a poker game. There are only three options for action: raise, call or fold.  The President seems to be unable to pick one that doesn’t have Americans on both sides of the debate pulling out their hair.

During his campaign for the White House President Obama said, “We have seen Afghanistan worsen, deteriorate. We need more troops there. We need more resources there… I would send two to three additional brigades to Afghanistan.”

He promised to send another ten to fifteen thousand troops to help those already there. He also declared that the war in Afghanistan was the proper front in the war against terror. Now that he is Commander-in-Chief, his vision seems to be less clear.

The military commanders gave the President four troop deployment options earlier this week but he refused all four. Not for military reasons but because of some hooey about the corruption of the government in Kabul and their inability to run a fair election. Mr. President, if our support for governments was based on whether they are corrupt or not and could run a fair election, we would have pulled federal funding from Chicago years ago. The problem with pulling out of Afghanistan, or Chicago for that matter, is that they would fall into violent anarchy. We have already seen that happen in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. (more…)

Sheda Vasseghi in today’s World Tribune:

“The mainstream Hollywood crowd, an apologist group that enjoys traveling to Taliban-run countries such as Iran spreading their holier-than-thou “cultural understanding” of rogue regimes, has been effectively censored by Moslem clerics. Filmmaker Roland Emmerich chose not to blow up the Kaaba at Mecca in his film 2012 for fear of a fatwa (death sentence issued by Moslem clerics) being placed on his head.

“Yet, in 2005, actor Sean Penn went to cover a so-called Islamic Republic “election” wanting Americans to visit Iran and become familiar with its culture. In March 2009, director Phil Alden Robinson found that Iranians were not very different; and actress Annette Bening (surely with a headscarf given Iran’s brutal enforcement of hijab) hoped her trip to Iran would jump start a bridge between the U.S. and the mullahs in Tehran. (more…)

My ten-year-old daughter loves “So You Think You Can Dance.” I suspect most eight to eighteen-year-old girls do.  So, my question to the producers of this hit show is: “Why are you pointing my daughter to a web page asking her to work at Planned Parenthood?”

Next week the networks will coordinate their shows’ story-lines to promote volunteerism.  At the September 10 press conference in New York announcing this unprecedented message coordination, Ashton Kutcher got his famous Twitter feed displayed on the Times Square jumbo screen.  It said:  “2Day, I activate my citizenship by participating. I Participate! Do u? www.iparticipate.org.”  (Damn he’s good at this whole “Under 14o characters” thing.)

In the press release announcing the initiative, all four network execs were positively boastful about their ability to inspire their viewers to ask “How high” when told to jump: (more…)

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So while chuckleheads like Jesse Jackson and Senator Roland Burris hilariously blame George Bush for Chicago losing the 2016 Olympics, whiny columnists like Mike Lupica are up in arms that conservatives might be gloating over President Obama’s big screw-up. Apparently laughing at all this is somehow anti-American, because Obama is our President, and he was doing this for all of us.

You know… kind of like when Bush was trying win a war in Iraq – and all those left wingers stood behind him.

And that’s my first point: The right has every right to gloat over Obama’s humiliation, because, thankfully, NO ONE DIED. Unlike, say during the Iraq war, where, whenever there was a roadside bombing, the progressives did their own special victory dance – using the consequences of war to gloat over an embattled president and an unpopular country. I didn’t hear much of the smarmy press calling them out. (more…)

So the U.S. and Iran just had what’s been called “significant” talks concerning Tehran’s nuclear plans. The goal for us, was two fold: to get Iran to “shift course,” and to prove President Bush was an idiot for not negotiating with a gentleman who denies the Holocaust and wants to wipe Israel off the map.

So how tough have we been so far?

Well, while administration officials said that gaining access to Iran’s uranium enrichment facility is super important, we sure as heck won’t walk away from the table if they refuse (which they haven’t). And let’s not go too fast on those sanctions either. (more…)

“That’s the best song ever written,” Judy Garland said of “Over the Rainbow” in an interview with Barbara Walters on March 6, 1967, almost three decades after she captured countless hearts as “Dorothy” in “The Wizard of Oz,” featuring that magical song.

So, too, “The Wizard of Oz”—released 70 years ago today—is, perhaps, the best film ever made.

Or, at least, the most quintessentially American—in terms of our struggles, hopes, aspirations, dreams, and, ultimately, unshakable confidence, that “somewhere over the rainbow… dreams… really do come true.”

MGM had purchased this highly popular and imaginative children’s book written by L. Frank Baum, and published in 1900, for $75,000, specifically for Judy.  During development, the silver shoes became ruby, thus undercutting Baum’s apparent allegory to “bimetallism”—currency backed by silver, replacing “the gold standard” and favoring rural farmers; in contrast to the worthless “greenbacks” some say Emerald City represents.  (more…)

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Since the health care debate has wound down a little as a result of President Obama’s speech on Wednesday which, by the way, was pure rhetoric and seen by the general public and pundits as a failure because of its lack of new ideas and detail, I have decided to tackle a subject other than health care reform in this article.  What makes a liberal tick?  Why are there such major differences between the two parties in this country? 

The other day I was playing on Facebook and saw a number of posts from my liberal friends regarding health care.  The comments posted were all similar.  No one should go without health care in this country and no one should go broke because they got sick.  Why only liberals would post this amazes me, because there are not too many people in the world that disagree.  However, it is just not that simple.  (more…)

Several days ago, I was invited by One Jerusalem, to attend a private briefing by Dore Gold, former Israeli Ambassador to the U.N., whose important new book, The Rise of Nuclear Iran: How Tehran Defies the West, has just been published.

There were about fifteen of us—bloggers mostly, including my good friend, the brilliant blogger, Omri Ceren of Mere Rhetoric—gathered in the Montage Hotel in Beverly Hills.

Ambassador Dore Gold

Ambassador Gold, looking like a sleepy walrus, spoke in measured, diplomatic tones. But he was fiercely passionate and profoundly knowledgeable about Iranian history, culture, and diplomacy, past and present.

Point by point, Gold emphasized his main thesis: (more…)

So another Rambo flick is on its grimy, sweaty way and this time the villains are human traffickers and drug lords. To make them even more despicable, they’ve kidnapped a young girl and are probably ignoring her strict vegan needs.

Look, I applaud Sylvester Stallone’s heroic stance against human traffickers and kidnappers – for I know there will be quite an outcry especially from the large and very influential human trafficking and kidnapper lobby.

Of course, this movie comes on the heels of two other edgy ventures: The G.I Joe flick – which turned a gritty American icon into an airbrushed Benneton ad, and “Inglourious Basterds” a fantasy that has average Jews hacking Nazi soldiers to pieces.

These three movies have two things in common:
1) They avoid present, real danger in the world and instead choose villains that are not just safe, but politically correct to hate. You’d think it would be easy for Quentin Tarantino to find a present day enemy for the Jews (like, say, a terrorist group that denies the Holocaust and wants to wipe Israel off the map), but maybe none exist! And what of those guys who flew planes into the World Trade Center? I suppose in the era of the “unclenched fist,” we must be more sensitive to “backlash” than barbarism. (more…)

The news is really unbelievable these days. All that I once thought were core American values and traditions are now being washed away in a sea of propaganda and political attacks from the radical Left, which now rules supreme and knows it. The Left in power is now waging an ideological war not only against conservatives, but any dissenting Americans who get in their way. Worst of all, they are using the full machinery of the government and their Lefty media lapdogs to do it all, and in the same fashion as Ahmadinejad’s government is demonizing the Green protesters in Iran.

It is chilling to witness, in the United States of America of all places. Civil political discourse is a thing of the past. You cannot oppose ObamaCare without being a swastika-waving corporate Nazi stooge. Never mind the fact that no one will tell us exactly where all the hospitals, doctors, and nurses to treat 50 million new patients will magically materialize from, or how it will all be paid for.
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Since Iran’s Green Revolution began on June 12th we have all learned the meaning of the term Basiji, whom Matthias Kuntzel of The New Republic called “Ahmadinejad’s Demons.” Since Supreme Leader In Name Only Ali Khamenei’s son now runs the Basiji, I consider it more of an Ahmie and Khamie thing, like the election itself. We’ve seen what they’ve done: murderous beatings, motorcycle drive-by clubbings, even the shooting of innocents like Neda Soltan and Kaveh Alipour.

That violence is always blamed on those protesters by Ahamadinejad and other hardliners, as well as FARS and other state-run mouthpieces, all of whom are doing their damndest to demonize the Green protesters as enemies of the state, foreign agents, even domestic terrorists. Glad we don’t have that kind of stuff in America, huh? Ya, as if! What country are YOU living in?

What, in essence, are the Basiji? Are they not an ideologically and violently overzealous arm of the fascist Iranian thugocracy? Well, if terrorizing innocent citizens over ideology with full political backing is the key issue here, then what do you call the three menacing baton-swinging racist epithet-spewing New Black Panther Party poll watchers in Philadelphia, paid in full by Democrats, who uttered such overzealous statements as “you will soon be ruled by the black man, cracker”? (more…)

Michael Jackson died and the media cried. But don’t worry; they were tears of joy, not despair. After all, what better time to sacrifice journalistic integrity for the sake of high ratings and bloated ad revenues?

In the weeks following Jackson’s death, the level and scope of coverage was and continues to be mind-numbing. Sure, MJ’s death was tragic, but tragedy doesn’t warrant the widespread disengagement of American media outlets, nor does it permit the dumbing down of pertinent information. To borrow from John Ziegler, the obsessive coverage of Michael Jackson’s death is yet another glaring symptom of the malpractice that is all too common amongst today’s media elite.

It’s no surprise that CNN and others are jumping on the bandwagon. Jackson’s collapse and subsequent death fueled increased viewership and network interest. According to CNN co-founder Reese Schonfeld:

“Jackson’s death brought all sorts of new viewers to the cable news networks, and it’s obvious that most of them turned to CNN. CNN is still seen, by most people who are not news junkies, as the place to turn to for news they really care about.”

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It has been six months since the Administration took office and the far left have taken complete control of the government.  Has our capitalist past been improved upon?  Or, is the socialism we have had thrust upon us making us worse off?  Has the foreign policy of appeasement and apology made the world a safer place?  To put it more simply, are you better off now than you were six months ago?  Unfortunately, the answer is not only “no,” but “much worse.” 

When the President took office in January, the entire world was full of “Hope.”  The far left and moderates that put him there were hoping for “Change.”  Well, they got the change, but I do not think they were “hoping” to get the type of change they got.  (more…)

“Accompanied by thousands of women” is what Shohreh Aghdashloo told her friends about how she felt attending the Academy Awards in 2004 as the first Iranian nominated for an acting award for her performance in “House of Sand and Fog”. Since that nomination, Aghdashloo has appeared in numerous television shows and in many movies, including her newest film, “The Stoning of Soraya M.” 

Several weeks ago, I wrote an article for “Big Hollywood” about the importance of that new film and Aghdashloo’s work as an actress who speaks up for voiceless women. As a follow-up to that article, I had the opportunity to conduct a phone interview with the Oscar nominee who, one day before I spoke to her, was nominated for an Emmy award for her role in the miniseries “House of Saddam.” During the interview, Ms. Aghdashloo spoke about the current situation in Iran, her work in the film “The Stoning of Soraya M.”, and what attracts her to certain projects. (more…)