During John Stewart’s recent “Rally for Sanity” there were all of the usual signs one would expect the Left wants us to forget about. Signs about “9/11 truth” and the popular “teabagger” slur to Hitler comparisons and references to McCarthy, it’s all terribly predictable and boring. If these people want to do some research about the real Senator McCarthy and what he did then maybe they would learn that many of today’s Democrats have incorporated similar tactics.

On September 10th and 11th, 2006, The Path to 9/11 aired to an audience of 28 million viewers gaining seven Emmy nominations. It was a major success for ABC and Disney. Everyone involved was proud of the unbiased portrayal they created about the lead up to 9/11 from the 1993 attack on the WTC to September 2001. However, the miniseries almost didn’t air when the leftists began to circle their wagons before even seeing the film.  It is eerily similar to when yellow journalist William Randolph Hearst rallied his troops in Hollywood to get all copies of Citizen Kane destroyed in 1941. Fortunately, you can still watch Orson Welles’ great film.

As chronicled in the great documentary, Blocking The Path to 9/11, the Clinton camp got wind of The Path to 9/11 after the first half of it aired for the National Press Club. Shortly thereafter, their machine began to chew away at the project. Pundits and policymakers who had not seen a frame of celluloid rallied against the film as some kind of right-wing propaganda. The silly accusations have been refuted on numerous occasions by people involved with the project. Cyrus Nowrasteh who wrote and produced The Path to 9/11 has commented about his approach to the film: (more…)

The brilliant Humberto Fontova tells a story in one of his books (I believe it’s Exposing the Real Che Guevara and the Useful Idiots Who Idolize Him), about guitarist Carlos Santana being confronted once about wearing the iconic Che T-shirt. After deservedly getting an earful about what a murdering coward Che was, and how the counterculture’s favorite revolutionary icon despised musicians and artists like Santana himself, an irritated Santana reportedly sputtered, “You’re just hung up on the facts, man.”

In a recent article entitled “Washington-Set Films May Fudge Facts, But Good Ones Speak To Larger Truths,” the Washington Post’s Ann Hornaday discusses how D.C. audiences composed of political insiders scrutinize Hollywood’s D.C.-based historical dramas for fidelity to the facts. “Myth or reality?” she asks. “That’s the question posed by movies based on true events, and it’s a conundrum that Washington officialdom seems to have a perennial problem in reconciling.” As examples, she references such films as Charlie Wilson’s War, Thirteen Days, All the President’s Men, and of course, Oliver Stone’s controversial oeuvre: JFK, Nixon, and W. (I can’t tell you how long I’ve been wanting to use the word “oeuvre” in one of my blogs).

History buffs and D.C. insiders may nitpick about such films, but as Ms. Hornaday writes, “You don’t have to support Stone’s signature brand of revisionism to agree that overweening literalism can sometimes obscure a larger truth.” (more…)

“We sent a clear message to the West regarding the red lines that should not be crossed.”

That was the arrogant declaration of victory from the Organization of the Islamic Conference nearly two years ago, regarding the shrewdly orchestrated Muslim mayhem around the world protesting such infidel abominations as the Danish Muhammad cartoons and Geert Wilders’ short film Fitna.

“Red lines” indeed – a phrase chillingly reminiscent of Samuel Huntington’s famous observation that “Islam has bloody borders.” Except that the red lines the OIC is referring to aren’t geographical – they are the ever-tightening limits that Muslim fundamentalists are imposing to choke off our freedoms.

The influential OIC is the world’s largest Muslim assembly, consisting of 57 member states (you know, the same number of U.S. states candidate Obama campaigned in). Its primary aim is “conducting a large-scale worldwide effort to confront Islamophobia.” (As I’ve written here before, Islamophobia is a mythical beast that the OIC and collusive groups like CAIR, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, use to intimidate us into craven appeasement.) Their goal is to abridge our free speech by making criticism of Islam an international crime; their strategy works because the West has been so emasculated by multiculturalism that we’d rather embrace cultural suicide than offend the tender sensibilities of such violent barbarians as the Danish cartoon rioters. (more…)

Want to relive season five of Paris Hilton’s reality show The Simple Life? No problem, it’s on DVD. The complete first season of Jane Curtin’s sitcom Kate & Allie? It’s just a click away on Amazon.com. Oliver Stone’s surreal 1993 miniseries Wild Palms? Get it on Netflix. Virtually any miniseries or TV show you can think of, from any season, no matter how insipid, forgettable, or obscure, is readily available and continues to earn profits (often inexplicably). 

But you will look in vain for a DVD of the extraordinary and controversial Disney/ABC miniseries The Path to 9/11. 

Disney President and CEO Robert Iger

A $30+ million project that aired without sponsors on two September nights in 2006, The Path to 9/11 dramatized the historical thread that connected the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, Islamic attacks on American interests throughout the ‘90s, and the terrorism of that fateful morning in 2001. 

Prior to its premiere, the producers at ABC were so proud of the impending project that they had high hopes of airing Path every 9/11 anniversary and showing it in schools across this country as an engaging educational tool – until an accusation of “conservative bias” (horrors!) on the part of the filmmakers quickly spun into liberal hysteria that the project was actually a “well-honed propaganda operation” on the part of a secretive, right-wing network-within-a-network.  (more…)

“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…)

Note: Part 1 of this 2 part interview can be found here.

The execution scene at the heart of “The Stoning of Soraya M.“ is all force and little subtlety. Some audiences might flinch at the visuals, while others may draw parallels to the violence at the core of “The Passion of the Christ.”

But director/co-screenwriter Cyrus Nowrasteh says a version of the film featuring a shortened stoning sequence didn’t test as well as the full-length movie.

“This movie is a ticking clock to an execution. That execution is a primitive rite we’re witnessing, and we need to go through each stage of it,” he says. ”It’s almost a catharsis.”

Not all audiences are ready to take the journey.

He says about five or so people typically leave the theater during test screenings once the execution starts – but roughly half return to watch the film’s finale.

Nowrasteh, who is of Iranian heritage, has been watching the news reports coming out of Iran in recent days as intensely as any viewer.

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As the world watches and waits for the political uprising in Iran to either succeed in toppling the brutal Khomeinist regime or be crushed by it, a movie by the name of The Stoning of Soraya M.  opens in limited release today. Far from being your typical summer fun film fare, Soraya depicts the ugliest, most brutal side of human nature and one woman’s crusade to keep it from being swept under the rug.

Directed by Cyrus Nowrasteh (The Path to 9/11) and written by Nowrasteh and his wife Besy Giffen-Nowrasteh, Soraya is based on the 1995 non-fiction book of the same name by Freidoune Sahebjam. Soraya takes place after the Islamic revolution in Iran and centers around Soraya (played by Mozhan Marnò), a woman whose husband, Ali (played by Navid Negahban), has tired of her after 20 years of marriage and wishes to discard her for a younger woman. Actually, “younger” is an understatement, as Ali lusts after a 14-year-old girl. Soraya knows about Ali’s plans, but won’t agree to a divorce because she knows she will be unable to provide for her two young daughters (the two sons will stay with Ali, of course). Ali must then come up with another scheme for getting rid of his uncooperative wife, and he uses guile, cunning and good old-fashioned blackmail to get the key players in place for what is passed off as a religious cleansing rite. (more…)

Director Cyrus Nowrasteh has news for people who think the public execution scene at the heart of “The Stoning of Soraya M.” is too long, too graphic or too uncompromising in its horror. The real thing is worse. Much worse.

Nowrasteh’s “Stoning,” which debuts in select cities June 26, tells the true story of an Iranian woman accused of adultery by her narcissistic husband and subsequently stoned, per Sharia law, for her crime. The film, based on the book by journalist Freidoune Sahebjam, reveals its critical sequence via the title. But audiences will still recoil at the monstrous behavior on display.

“I want people never to forget what a stoning is,” Nowrasteh says. “I’ve seen it on tape, and it’s much worse.”

Nowrasteh, who wrote the ABC miniseries “The Path to 9/11,” read Sahebjam‘s book back in 1994 but figured no one would green light a film based on the harrowing true story. The story stuck with him all the same, and years later he and his wife, screenwriter Betsy Giffen Nowrasteh, decided to try to make such a movie themselves. Wresting the legal rights to the book took time, but they had very little competition, he says. Only two Italian directors flirted with the notion of making the book into a movie, as did, briefly, director Costa-Gavras (“Missing”). (more…)

Directed and co-written by Cyrus Nowrasteh, “The Stoning of Soraya M.“ is based on Freidoune Sahebjam’s novel and stars Jim Caviezel and Shohreh Aghdashloo. According to a press release, it opens June 26th “in New York, Los Angeles and other key markets, with a national roll out to follow.”

More information is available at the official website.

Big Hollywood will likely contain plenty of stories dealing with and (hopefully) overcoming the hardships associated with being a “conservative” in and around Hollywood. I want to commend those who have been able to hold on to their principles and have had the courage to share their true convictions in the face of obvious and insidious prejudice.

However, coming from an area of the “entertainment” world (talk radio and documentary films) where expressing a strong opinion is not only allowed, it is mandatory; I come at this challenge from a different perspective than many of the writers for this site. I believe that a complementary relationship between those who are just now slowly “coming out” and those of us who are already battle scarred and hardened is absolutely vital to our side having any chance in the message/information war which is currently raging, and in which we have been getting creamed, for far too long.

And make no mistake this is a war we are in. One of the many reasons we are losing so badly is that their side gets this, our side does not.

When you are in a battle like this (even one that usually doesn’t involve real bullets, but rather only the verbal variety) you need generals, infantry and diplomats all working in coordination and in the best interest of the team. In my experience, our forces are largely disorganized, discouraged and in disarray. Consequently, our soldiers, through little fault of their own, are forced to act out of their own survival instincts rather than out of what might be good for the cause.

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