Ben Nelson: Legislator of the Year

This is beggar-my-nation legislating.

By Rich Lowry
http://www.nationalreview.com
December 22, 2009, 0:00 a.m.

Too bad Barack Obama hasn’t followed through on his promises of legislative transparency. Then we all could have watched Harry Reid live on C-SPAN handing an oversized Publishers Clearing House–style $100 million check to Nebraska Sen. Ben Nelson.

The highest-profile Democratic hold-out on Obamacare, Nelson said last week, “My vote is not for sale.” He obviously meant that in the sense that he’d be righteously indignant at any suggestion that his vote could possibly be bought for anything less than the low nine digits.

Nelson got the feds to pick up forevermore 100 percent of the additional Medicaid spending that will be imposed on Nebraska by the bill. In stereotypically Orwellian fashion, the provision is called “Equitable Support for Certain States.” That, naturally enough, translates into special, inequitable support for three states, totaling $1.2 billion over ten years. Vermont and Massachusetts argue they are due the funds for prior expansions of Medicaid, but what’s Nebraska’s excuse?

By the standards of Washington, Nelson deserves to be named “legislator of the year,” with distinction in gross backroom dealing. His plunder perfectly encapsulates the current Democratic project in all its shameless audacity.

The Nebraskan is touted as a conservative Democrat. The Democratic leadership went out of its way to recruit Nelsonesque candidates in the 2006 and 2008 congressional races. These “majority makers” from Red States are supposed to represent the ideological diversity of the Democratic party, although they somehow always vote in numbers sufficient to enable Nancy Pelosi and Reid’s governmental adventurism.

Many of the Blue Dogs rely on a simple electoral formula: Sound moderate at election time, then vote with the liberal priorities of the national party, repeat as necessary. Obama hopes to replicate this strategy on a grand scale. He wants to pivot to portraying himself as a fierce fiscal hawk next year, despite all the debt he accumulated this year, notwithstanding all he said about fiscal restraint last year.

This is the larger dishonesty in which all the smaller subsidiary ones are embedded. Obama has maintained all along that the health bill doesn’t fund abortion. He accused those who maintained otherwise of bearing “false witness,” a deliberately fraught phrase.

Nelson’s resistance to this allegedly nonexistent abortion funding was at the core of his long-running objection to the bill. During the weekend, he signed off on a weak compromise denounced by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops that still allows the bill’s subsidies to go to abortion coverage. In a Christmas miracle, Nelson’s principled opposition to the abortion-funding stream vanished precisely as the $100 million check arrived.

Governors across the country have inveighed against the bill’s expansion of Medicaid because, eventually, they will be left with part of the bill. Seized with the problem, Nelson crafted a farsighted legislative compromise of the sort Daniel Webster or Henry Clay might be proud — exempt Nebraska. This is beggar-my-nation legislating, and the health-care bill is shot through with it.

The New York Times reports that the bill cracks down on doctors referring Medicare patients to hospitals in which they have a financial interest. Not everywhere, though. The bill offers an exemption for certain doctor-owned hospitals, the deadline for which Reid extended to Aug. 1, 2010, specifically to include Bellevue Medical Center — in Bellevue, Neb.

Logrolling has always been with us. As Ronald Reagan said, politics is the second-oldest profession and closely related to the first. But, in keeping with the new scale of Obama-era spending, the price tag of the payoffs has grown. If a fence-sitting Democrat didn’t get a handout of a hundred million or more, he is a rank legislative incompetent. Mary Landrieu scored $300 million in Medicaid funding for Louisiana even before crunch time arrived.

The route to 60 Senate votes went through Harry Reid’s favor factory. Democrats will pass a new $2.5 trillion entitlement out of the Senate and will disgrace themselves doing it. Witness their pliable, self-interested legislator of the year.


— Rich Lowry is the editor of National Review. © 2009 by King Features Syndicate

Film Reviews: 'Avatar'

BY ROGER EBERT / December 11, 2009
http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/

"Avatar" is not simply a sensational entertainment, although it is that. It's a technical breakthrough. It has a flat-out Green and anti-war message. It is predestined to launch a cult. It contains such visual detailing that it would reward repeating viewings. It invents a new language, Na'vi, as "Lord of the Rings" did, although mercifully I doubt this one can be spoken by humans, even teenage humans. It creates new movie stars. It is an Event, one of those films you feel you must see to keep up with the conversation.

The story, set in the year 2154, involves a mission by U. S. Armed Forces to an earth-sized moon in orbit around a massive star. This new world, Pandora, is a rich source of a mineral Earth desperately needs. Pandora represents not even a remote threat to Earth, but we nevertheless send in the military to attack and conquer them. Gung-ho Marines employ machine guns and pilot armored hover ships on bombing runs. You are free to find this an allegory about contemporary politics. Cameron obviously does.

Pandora harbors a planetary forest inhabited peacefully by the Na'vi, a blue-skinned, golden-eyed race of slender giants, each one perhaps 12 feet tall. The atmosphere is not breathable by humans, and the landscape makes us pygmies. To venture out of our landing craft, we use avatars--Na'vi lookalikes grown organically and mind-controlled by humans who remain wired up in a trance-like state on the ship. While acting as avatars, they see, fear, taste and feel like Na'vi, and have all the same physical adeptness.

This last quality is liberating for the hero, Jake Sully (Sam Worthington), who is a paraplegic. He's been recruited because he's a genetic match for a dead identical twin, who an expensive avatar was created for. In avatar state he can walk again, and as his payment for this duty he will be given a very expensive operation to restore movement to his legs. In theory he's in no danger, because if his avatar in destroyed, his human form remains untouched. In theory.

On Pandora, Jake begins as a good soldier and then goes native after his life is saved by the lithe and brave Neytiri (Zoe Saldana). He finds it is indeed true, as the aggressive Col. Miles Quaritch (Stephen Lang) briefed them, that nearly every species of life here wants him for lunch. (Avatars are not be made of Na'vi flesh, but try explaining that to charging 30-ton rhino with a snout like a bullet head shark).

The Na'vi survive on this planet by knowing it well, living in harmony with nature, and being wise about the creatures they share with. In this and countless other ways they resemble Native Americans. Like them, they tame another species to carry them around--not horses, but graceful flying dragon-like creatures. The scene involving Jake capturing and taming one of these great beasts is one of the film's greats sequences.

Like "Star Wars" and "LOTR," "Avatar" employs a new generation of special effects. Cameron said it would, and many doubted him. It does. Pandora is bevy largely CGI. The Na'vi are embodied through motion capture techniques, convincingly. They look like specific, persuasive individuals, yet sidestep the eerie Uncanny Valley effect. And Cameron and his artists succeed at the difficult challenge of making Neytiri a blue-skinned giantess with golden eyes and a long, supple tail, and yet--I'll be damned. Sexy.

At 163 minutes, the film doesn't feel too long. It contains so much. The human stories. The Na'vi stories, for the Na'vi are also developed as individuals. The complexity of the planet, which harbors a global secret. The ultimate warfare, with Jake joining the resistance against his former comrades. Small graceful details like a floating creature that looks like a cross between a blowing dandelion seed and a drifting jellyfish, and embodies goodness. Or astonishing floating cloud-islands.

I've complained that many recent films abandon story telling in their third acts and go for wall-to-wall action. Cameron essentially does that here, but has invested well in establishing his characters so that it matters what they do in battle and how they do it. There are issues at stake greater than simply which side wins.

Cameron promised he'd unveil the next generation of 3-D in "Avatar." I'm a notorious skeptic about this process, a needless distraction from the perfect realism of movies in 2-D. Cameron's iteration is the best I've seen -- and more importantly, one of the most carefully-employed. The film never uses 3-D simply because it has it, and doesn't promiscuously violate the fourth wall. He also seems quite aware of 3-D's weakness for dimming the picture, and even with a film set largely in interiors and a rain forest, there's sufficient light. I saw the film in 3-D on a good screen at the AMC River East and was impressed. I might be awesome in True IMAX. Good luck in getting a ticket before February.

It takes a hell of a lot of nerve for a man to stand up at the Oscarcast and proclaim himself King of the World. James Cameron just got re-elected.

A New Eden, Both Cosmic and Cinematic

This movie has been designated a Critic's Pick by the film reviewers of The Times.

By MANOHLA DARGIS
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/
Published: December 18, 2009

With “Avatar” James Cameron has turned one man’s dream of the movies into a trippy joy ride about the end of life — our moviegoing life included — as we know it. Several decades in the dreaming and more than four years in the actual making, the movie is a song to the natural world that was largely produced with software, an Emersonian exploration of the invisible world of the spirit filled with Cameronian rock ’em, sock ’em pulpy action. Created to conquer hearts, minds, history books and box-office records, the movie — one of the most expensive in history, the jungle drums thump — is glorious and goofy and blissfully deranged.

The story behind the story, including a production budget estimated to top $230 million, and Mr. Cameron’s future-shock ambitions for the medium have already begun to settle into myth (a process partly driven by the publicity, certainly). Every filmmaker is something of a visionary, just by virtue of the medium. But Mr. Cameron, who directed the megamelodrama “Titanic” and, more notably, several of the most influential science-fiction films of the past few decades (“The Terminator,” “Aliens” and “The Abyss”), is a filmmaker whose ambitions transcend a single movie or mere stories to embrace cinema as an art, as a social experience and a shamanistic ritual, one still capable of producing the big WOW.

The scale of his new movie, which brings you into a meticulous and brilliantly colored alien world for a fast 2 hours 46 minutes, factors into that wow. Its scope is evident in an early scene on a spaceship (the year is 2154), where the passengers, including a paraplegic ex-Marine, Jake (Sam Worthington, a gruffly sensitive heartthrob), are being roused from a yearslong sleep before landing on a distant inhabited moon, Pandora. Jake is woken by an attendant floating in zero gravity, one of many such aides. As Jake himself glides through the bright cavernous space, you know you’re not in Kansas anymore, as someone soon quips (a nod to “The Wizard of Oz,” Mr. Cameron’s favorite film). You also know you’re not in the gloom of “The Matrix.”

Though it’s easy to pigeonhole Mr. Cameron as a gear head who’s more interested in cool tools (which here include 3-D), he is, with “Avatar,” also making a credible attempt to create a paradigm shift in science-fiction cinema. Since it was first released in 1999, “The Matrix,” which owes a large debt to Mr. Cameron’s own science-fiction films as well as the literary subgenre of cyberpunk, has hung heavily over both SF and action filmmaking. Most films that crib from “The Matrix” tend to borrow only its slo-mo death waltzes and leather fetishism, keeping its nihilism while ditching the intellectual inquiries. Although “Avatar” delivers a late kick to the gut that might be seen as nihilistic (and how!), it is strangely utopian.

It doesn’t take Jake long to feel the good vibes. Like Neo, the savior-hero of the “Matrix” series played by Keanu Reeves, Jake is himself an avatar because he’s both a special being and an embodiment of an idea, namely that of the hero’s journey. What initially makes Jake unusual is that he has been tapped to inhabit a part-alien, part-human body that he controls, like a puppeteer, from its head to its prehensile tail. Like the rest of the human visitors who’ve made camp on Pandora, he has signed on with a corporation that’s intent on extracting a valuable if mysterious substance from the moon called unobtainium, a great whatsit that is an emblem of humanity’s greed and folly. With his avatar, Jake will look just like one of the natives, the Na’vi, a new identity that gives the movie its plot turns and politics.

The first part of Jake’s voyage — for this is, above all, a boy’s rocking adventure, if one populated by the usual tough Cameron chicks — takes him from a wheelchair into a 10-foot, blue-skinned Na’vi body. At once familiar and pleasingly exotic, the humanoid Na’vi come with supermodel dimensions (slender hips, a miniature-apple rear); long articulated digits, the better to grip with; and the slanted eyes and twitchy ears of a cat. (The gently curved stripes that line their blue skin, the color of twilight, bring to mind the markings on mackerel tabby cats.) For Jake his avatar, which he hooks into through sensors while lying in a remote pod in a semiconscious state, is at first a giddy novelty and then a means to liberation.

Plugging into the avatar gives Jake an instant high, allowing him to run, leap and sift dirt through his toes, and freeing him from the constraints of his body. Although physically emancipated, he remains bound, contractually and existentially, to the base camp, where he works for the corporation’s top scientist, Dr. Grace Augustine (Sigourney Weaver, amused and amusing), even while taking orders from its head of security, Col. Miles Quaritch (Stephen Lang), a military man turned warrior for hire. A cartoon of masculinity, Quaritch strides around barking orders like some intransigent representation of American military might (or a bossy movie director). It’s a favorite Cameron type, and Mr. Lang, who until this year had long been grievously underemployed, tears into the role like a starved man gorging on steak.

Mr. Cameron lays out the fundamentals of the narrative efficiently, grabbing you at once with one eye-popping detail after another and on occasion almost losing you with some of the comically broad dialogue. He’s a masterly storyteller if a rather less nimble prose writer. (He has sole script credit: this is personal filmmaking on an industrial scale.) Some of the clunkier lines (“Yeah, who’s bad,” Jake taunts a rhinolike creature he encounters) seem to have been written to placate those members of the Michael Bay demographic who might find themselves squirming at the story’s touchier, feelier elements, its ardent environmentalism and sincere love story, all of which kick in once Jake meets Neytiri, a female Na’vi (Zoë Saldana, seen only in slinky Na’vi form).

Mr. Cameron has said that he started thinking about the alien universe that became Pandora and its galactic environs in “Avatar” back in the 1970s. He wrote a treatment in 1996, but the technologies he needed to turn his ideas into images didn’t exist until recently. New digital technologies gave him the necessary tools, including performance capture, which translates an actor’s physical movements into a computer-generated image (CGI). Until now, by far the most plausible character created in this manner has been slithery Gollum from Peter Jackson’s “Lord of the Rings” cycle. The exotic creatures in “Avatar,” which include an astonishment of undulating, flying, twitching and galloping organisms, don’t just crawl through the underbrush; they thunder and shriek, yip and hiss, pointy teeth gleaming.

The most important of these are the Na’vi, and while their movements can bring to mind old-fashioned stop-motion animation, their faces are a triumph of tech innovation, with tremors and twitches that make them immediately appealing and empathetic. By the time Neytiri ushers Jake into her world of wonders — a lush dreamscape filled with kaleidoscopic and bioluminescent flora and fauna, with pink jellyfishlike creatures that hang in the air and pleated orange flowers that snap shut like parasols — you are deep in the Na’vi-land. It’s a world that looks as if it had been created by someone who’s watched a lot of Jacques Cousteau television or, like Mr. Cameron, done a lot of diving. It’s also familiar because, like John Smith in “The New World,” Terrence Malick’s retelling of the Pocahontas story, Jake has discovered Eden.

An Eden in three dimensions, that is. In keeping with his maximalist tendencies, Mr. Cameron has shot “Avatar” in 3-D (because many theaters are not equipped to show 3-D, the movie will also be shown in the usual 2), an experiment that serves his material beautifully. This isn’t the 3-D of the 1950s or even contemporary films, those flicks that try to give you a virtual poke in the eye with flying spears. Rather Mr. Cameron uses 3-D to amplify the immersive experience of spectacle cinema. Instead of bringing you into the movie with the customary tricks, with a widescreen or even Imax image filled with sweeping landscapes and big action, he uses 3-D seemingly to close the space between the audience and the screen. He brings the movie to you.

After a few minutes the novelty of people and objects hovering above the row in front of you wears off, and you tend not to notice the 3-D, which speaks to the subtlety of its use and potential future applications. Mr. Cameron might like to play with high-tech gadgets, but he’s an old-fashioned filmmaker at heart, and he wants us to get as lost in his fictional paradise as Jake eventually does. On the face of it there might seem something absurd about a movie that asks you to thrill to a natural world made almost entirely out of zeroes and ones (and that feeds you an anticorporate line in a corporately financed entertainment). But one of the pleasures of the movies is that they transport us, as Neytiri does with Jake, into imaginary realms, into Eden and over the rainbow to Oz.

If the story of a paradise found and potentially lost feels resonant, it’s because “Avatar” is as much about our Earth as the universe that Mr. Cameron has invented. But the movie’s truer meaning is in the audacity of its filmmaking.

Few films return us to the lost world of our first cinematic experiences, to that magical moment when movies really were bigger than life (instead of iPhone size), if only because we were children. Movies rarely carry us away, few even try. They entertain and instruct and sometimes enlighten. Some attempt to overwhelm us, but their efforts are usually a matter of volume. What’s often missing is awe, something Mr. Cameron has, after an absence from Hollywood, returned to the screen with a vengeance. He hasn’t changed cinema, but with blue people and pink blooms he has confirmed its wonder.

“Avatar” is rated PG-13 (Parents strongly cautioned). Gun and explosive violence, death and despair.

AVATAR

Opens on Friday nationwide.

Written and directed by James Cameron; director of photography, Mauro Fiore; edited by Mr. Cameron, John Refoua and Stephen Rivkin; music by James Horner; visual effects supervisor, Joe Letteri; production designers, Rick Carter and Robert Stromberg; produced by Mr. Cameron and Jon Landau; released by 20th Century Fox. Running time: 2 hours 46 minutes.
WITH: Sam Worthington (Jake Sully), Zoë Saldana (Neytiri), Sigourney Weaver (Dr. Grace Augustine), Stephen Lang (Col. Miles Quaritch), Michelle Rodriguez (Trudy Chacon), Giovanni Ribisi (Carter Selfridge), Joel David Moore (Norm), C C H Pounder (Mo’at), Wes Studi (Eytukan) and Laz Alonso (Tsu’Tey).


REVIEW: Cameron’s ‘Avatar’ Is a Big, Dull, America-Hating, PC Revenge Fantasy

by John Nolte

http://bighollywood.breitbart.com/

Absent from the big screen for over a decade now, Oscar-winning director James Cameron returns armed with a reported half-billion dollars, a story he’s been desperate to tell for 15 years, and the very latest in cutting-edge visual technology. The result is “Avatar,” a sanctimonious thud of a movie so infested with one-dimensional characters and PC clichés that not a single plot turn – small or large – surprises. I call it the “liberal tell,” where the early and obvious politics of the film gives away the entire story before the second act begins, and “Avatar” might be the sorriest example of this yet. For all the time and money and technology that went into its making, the thing that matters most – character and story – are strictly Afterschool Special.

AP Photo/20th Century Fox, Mark Fellman

In this image released by 20th Century Fox, writer-director James Cameron, foreground right, reviews a scene with actors, from left, Sigourney Weaver, Joel David Moore and Sam Worthington during the filming of, "Avatar."

What a crushing disappointment from one of our most original and imaginative filmmakers.
Set in 2154, “Avatar” is a thinly disguised, heavy-handed and simplistic sci-fi fantasy/allegory critical of America from our founding straight through to the Iraq War. Sam Worthington is Jake Sully, a paraplegic Marine Corporal sent to the planet Pandora after the untimely death of his brother. In a plot-thread built up to promise much that never pays off, Sully has none of the training his brother benefitted by: years of schooling in the Avatar Program to prepare him to infiltrate the indigenous species of Pandora called the Na’vi, who are the only things between Earth’s RDA (Resources Development Administration) and a precious energy resource “ironically” called Unobtainium.

Because the air on Pandora is toxic to humans, the RDA developed the Avatar Program to create clone-like avatars from both Na’vi and human DNA (which is why they need the untrained Sully) that allow for a human to transfer their consciousness into the 10-foot native blue beings and safely explore the planet. The scientists want to use the program to study Pandora, the military wants to conquer it, and the RDA wants to strip mine it. At first Sully’s unconcerned with these dueling tensions and agendas. Once a marine always a marine, and when his commanding officer, the beefed up genocide-happy Col. Quaritch (Stephen Lang), asks him to infiltrate the Na’vi and do recon for a probable attack, Jake is more than ready. Hoo-rah.

But before you can say I’ve seen this movie a thousand times before, Jake enters his Na’vi avatar and in a tired action scene straight out of the “Jurassic Park” trilogy, gets lost in the dangerous Pandoran forest only to be rescued by something else he’d like to enter, the beautiful (if you go for ten-foot tall gaudy blue females) Neytiri (Zoe Saldana) – a walking cliché of the tough, earthy, compassionate, oh-so wise love interest who can somehow speak English … but in that halting way that’s so gosh darned endearing.

And so begins the real Cliché-A-Thon…

***SPOILERS COMING***

Does Neytiri just happen to be the Chief’s daughter? Check! At first, does the tribe not trust Sully and want to kill him on the spot before Neytiri intervenes with wise explanations as to why it’s their tribal custom to take in strangers as one of their own? Chuh-eck! Is Sully then immersed in the native culture and put through a series of tests to prove his worthiness beginning with the sort of clumsiness that brings hoots of derisive laughter from the male warriors but endears him to Neytiri? Double check! Does Sully eventually become one of their strongest warriors and on the day he’s to be initiated as a full member of the tribe—GOD this movie’s tedious.

There’s nothing wrong with a simple, boilerplate plot. They’re boilerplate for a reason. But within that well worn template complicated characters involved in complicated and surprising relationships are an absolute necessity, and this is where “Avatar” fails miserably.

Within 15 minutes, the “liberal tell” spoils every story beat of Sully’s character arc. He’s as dull a protagonist as you’ll ever see. Sigourney Weaver plays a gruff-talking, cigarette smoking scientist with … wait for it, wait for it … a heart of gold. Giovanni Ribisi’s sweaty weasel of a corporate executive never moves beyond that and Col. Quaritch is all ‘roid rage, no humanity and his Big Speech about the necessity of “a pre-emptive attack to fight terror with terror” was as surprising as Cameron‘s use of a military “shock and awe” campaign to level the Na’Vi’s precious “Home Tree” as a tacky metaphor for the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center.

Oh yeah, he went there…

In supporting roles, Michelle Rodriguez and Joel Moore bring a whole lot more to their underwritten roles than the film deserves — you’d like to spend more time with them — but it’s always back to the film’s dullest characters: the one-dimensional Na’vi. You would think that with 15 years and a half-billion dollars, Cameron could come up an alien species that doesn’t drip with every Indian and African sacred-cow cliché imaginable. These are creatures who worship the Great Mother Eywa, have a sacred relationship with the earth, shoot bow and arrows, ride horse-like animals, whoop it up in battle, and talk like this: “It has only happened five times since the time of the first songs of our ancestors.”

The Na’vi also apologize to animals after killing but before butchering them. So I guess that’s okay. Maybe if Quaritch had gotten on the loudspeaker and spoken a little mumbo-jumbo before dropping a daisy cutter on Home Tree all would be forgiven.

On top of that, the Na’vi are an awfully stupid species. After years of dealing with the “Sky People,” for some reason they still haven’t figured out that arrows are useless against giant military aircraft. And is it okay to mention how hard it is to keep track of who’s who, because the Na’vi, uhm … all look alike? Twice I was sure Sully’s avatar had been killed. Twice I was disappointed.

Cameron’s brainchild tribe is boringly perfect and insufferably noble … I wanted to wipe them out.

Visually “Avatar” doesn’t break any new ground. It looks like a big-budget animated film with a garish color palette right off a hippie’s tie dye shirt. Never for a moment did I believe the Na’vi or the world of Pandora was something organic or real. The fairly pointless use of 3-D certainly doesn’t help, but Steven Spielberg’s sixteen year-old dinosaurs are light years ahead of “Avatar” in the reality department.

The one thing Cameron has always done well is to create busy, energetic, brilliantly choreographed action scenes that allow the audience to follow what’s going on. That’s not a small thing because it’s becoming a lost art in Hollywood as more and more filmmakers lazily trade coherence for the artless shaky-cam and hyper edits. And while none of Cameron’s big battle set-pieces is ever able to overcome the “liberal tells” pre-ordained outcome and create a sense of suspense or peril, at least you don’t get lost in the precious wonder of it all.

Think of “Avatar” as “Death Wish 5” for leftists. A simplistic, revisionist revenge fantasy where if you freakin’ hate the bad guys (America), you’re able to forgive the by-the-numbers predictability of it all and still get off watching them get what they got coming.

And if Cameron is able to make a profit spending a half-billion dollars on a little liberal bloodlust, more power to him.

UPDATE: More on “Avatar” vs. “Jurassic Park” here.

Crummy Script, Glorious Method

James Cameron has an artist’s eye. If only he had a sense of plot and dialogue!

By Frederica Mathewes-Green
http://www.nationalreview.com/
December 23, 2009

In Avatar’s opening moments, hero-to-be Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) is waking up on the planet Pandora after a cryogenic journey, and reflecting on the twists of fate. Here he is, a paraplegic Marine, filling in for the twin brother who actually trained for this mission. But right before Tommy was due to ship out, “a guy with a gun put an end to his journey, for the paper in his wallet.”

Sounds like a line from a Forties detective movie, doesn’t it? Or how about this one: Evil Col. Miles Quaritch (Stephen Lang) barks at his troops, “You are not in Kansas any more, ladies and gentlemen. If there is a hell, you might want to go there for some R&R after a spell on Pandora.” (The colonel, you may be sure, has a trace of a Southern accent.) Later, he tells Jake, “You got some heart, kid, showing up in this neighborhood.”

Jake replies offhandedly, “I figured it was just another hellhole.”

I think you get the picture. In this film, though, there are two pictures. Later on, Jake walks among the Na’vi, the gentle people of Pandora, by means of an avatar — that is, a Na’vi body that was grown in a test tube, which he remote-controls from a high-tech pod at the base camp. His lovely tutor, Neytiri (excellently portrayed by Zoë Saldaña), explains that he, too, will one day ride the enormous mountain banshees — something like tie-dyed pterodactyls — which in the native lingo are called (I think) “eclans.” “You must choose your own eclan, and he must choose you,” says Neytiri.

“When?” Jake asks.

“When you are ready,” she replies.

Later, Neytiri watches approvingly as Jake goes through the ritual that accompanies killing for food. “I see you, brother,” Jake says as he delivers the final blow, “and I thank you. Your spirit will depart, and your body stay here to become part of the People.”

Sorry to put you through that, but there’s really no way to describe just how inane this dialogue is. The plot it is meant to sustain is every bit its equal. You see, humans have destroyed the earth’s ecology. (“You will find nothing green there,” Jake tells the Na’vi tribe. “They killed their mother.”) Now they seek the resources of other worlds, in particular the rich lode of a priceless mineral under Pandora’s crust.

This mineral is called “unobtainium.” It really, truly is. And the richest reserves of unobtainium lie beneath the giant, ancient tree where the Na’vi live. The bad colonel intends to get at it, one way or another (insert sound of knuckles cracking here). He tells Jake, “I need to find out how to force their cooperation, or hammer them hard if they don’t.”

Yet in presenting the apparently eternal conflict between gentle people with flowers in their hair and technology-crazed meanies, Avatar comes to us by means of the most advanced technology available. Director James Cameron took 14 years to make the movie, inventing a new process for 3-D in order to film it. He took the motion-capture technology that gave us Gollum in the Lord of the Rings trilogy, and advanced it several major steps forward. This film was not made by folks who live in a giant tree.

And it’s unclear how this plaintive call to live in tune with nature is supposed to be implemented by the viewers who take it to heart. Should we demand that our popcorn be made over a campfire? Then hoof it home in a Fred Flintstone car?

I don’t need to tell you that, at 161 minutes, Avatar is far too long for material this thin. This story has been told plenty of times before, and better. You can also expect that a hectic, noisy battle scene is surely on the way, one that consumes great quantities of film in showing us what looks like a video game.

What I didn’t expect was the sheer beauty of the film. It won me over. I think it was the forests of Pandora that first broke through my grumpy attitude — the graceful trees, plants with enormous fan-like leaves, curious twisted ferns that shyly retract when touched. Everything is glowing in lavender, blue, and aqua; it could have been painted by Maxfield Parrish.

The highly anticipated 3-D process is most successful, I think, with the “seeds of the sacred tree,” a cross between a butterfly, a spider, and a dandelion puff. When these seeds begin drifting down, they really do seem to leave the screen and float over the heads of the audience.

Yet more beautiful were the Floating Mountains. These enormous floating rocks, crowned with trees and trailing vines, are truly awe-inspiring; they are worthy, I thought, of J. R. R. Tolkien.

So, yes, you need to see this movie, and see it while it’s in theaters, full-screen and in 3-D. Yes, you can take the kids, but only if they can handle some violent moments. The most graphic, I thought, came when a Na’vi spoke his last words with a shattered tree limb through his chest. There’s no nudity (though the cat-like Na’vis’ costumes are quite scanty) and the single love scene is swift and discreet.

Avatar is a perplexing mix of glorious method and crummy material, and it left me wondering why, in the hands of one artist, a familiar tale can move us even more profoundly because of those earlier links, and we call it a “classic” — while in the hands of another artist it seems derivative and stale. Why, in the hands of one artist, can a work express childlike wonder, while another’s reveals childish immaturity? The characters pushed around in this story seem like something thought up by a twelve-year-old. This is most ludicrous in the climactic battle, when bad Col. Quaritch survives a series of death-dealing blows that are increasingly hard to believe; at one point, his shoulder is literally on fire. I pictured Cameron killing Quaritch off with great satisfaction each day, then coming back the next day saying, “But I can’t let him die yet!”

Some artists remain in touch with the inspirations and enthusiasms of their twelve-year-old selves, and produce something fresh and moving. There’s no reason that this script had to be as flat as it is. But, oh, the beauty. James Cameron may have a tin ear for dialogue, but he indisputably has an artist’s eye. Go see it on the big screen, and let yourself be dazzled.

— Frederica Mathewes-Green writes regularly for Beliefnet.com, Christianity Today, and other publications. She is the author of Gender: Men, Women, Sex and Feminism, among other books.

Sayyid Qutb and the Virginia Five

by Robert Spencer
http://frontpagemag.com/
18 December 2009

When five young Muslims from northern Virginia were arrested in Pakistan for trying to join jihadist groups, the local Muslim community professed to be puzzled as to how it could have happened. Ashraf Nubani, an attorney for the mosque the five attended, said of their relatives and fellow worshippers: “There’s shock and disbelief in these families and in this mosque.” Mahdi Bray of the Falls Church-based Muslim American Society, sounded a plaintive note: “We want to know: What did we miss? We saw these kids every day. In hindsight, what could we have done?”

If Mahdi Bray saw these young men daily, that might have been a clue right there as to what went wrong. For the Muslim American Society (MAS) is the American arm of the international Islamic supremacist organization known as the Muslim Brotherhood, the forefather of Al-Qaeda and Hamas. A captured internal Brotherhood document says that the Brotherhood’s mission in the U.S. is “a kind of grand Jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and sabotaging its miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers so that it is eliminated and God’s religion is made victorious over all other religions.”

And according to a 2004 Chicago Tribune expose of Brotherhood activity in the U.S., “to be an ‘active’ member” of the Muslim American Society, “–the highest membership class–one must complete five years of Muslim community service and education, which includes studying writings by Brotherhood ideologues al-Banna and Qutb.” These are the Muslim Brotherhood’s two great theorists, its founder Hasan al-Banna and Sayyid Qutb, “the father of modern [Islamic] fundamentalism.”


Greeley Tribune

Future spiritual godfather of radical Muslims, Sayyid Qutb poses in Greeley, Colorado, with Colorado State Teacher's College president, William R. Ross in 1949.

Of these, Qutb is the more influential today. His writings can be found easily in Islamic bookstores in the U.S. And Americans, particularly law enforcement officials, should know what’s in them.

Sayyid Qutb actually lived in the United States from November 1948 to August 1950, and wrote about his experiences in revealing ways. While hospitalized for a respiratory ailment in Washington, D.C., in February 1949, he heard of the assassination of al-Banna, an event which, he later claimed implausibly, set the hospital staff to open rejoicing.

His disgust with the gaudy materialism of postwar America was intense. He wrote to an Egyptian friend of his loneliness: “How much do I need someone to talk to about topics other than money, movie stars and car models.” Moving to Greeley, Colorado, he was impressed by the number of churches in the city, but not with the piety they engendered: “Nobody goes to church as often as Americans do. . . . Yet no one is as distant as they are from the spiritual aspect of religion.” He was thoroughly scandalized by a dance after an evening service at a local church: “The dancing intensified. . . . The hall swarmed with legs . . . Arms circled arms, lips met lips, chests met chests, and the atmosphere was full of love.” The pastor further scandalized Qutb by dimming the lights, creating “a romantic, dreamy effect,” and playing a popular record of the day: “Baby, It’s Cold Outside.” He regarded American popular music in general with a gimlet eye: “Jazz is the favorite music [of America]. It is a type of music invented by [American] Blacks to please their primitive tendencies and desire for noise.”

Ultimately he concluded: “I fear that when the wheel of life has turned and the file on history has closed, America will not have contributed anything.” He didn’t find American prosperity to be matched by a corresponding wealth of spirit. “I am afraid that there is no correlation between the greatness of the American material civilization and the men who created it. . . . In both feeling and conduct the American is primitive (bida’a).”

When he returned to Egypt, he characterized the influence of the West in the Muslim world as an unmitigated evil. He derided “American Islam,” a counterfeit of the religion that was designed only to combat Communism in Egypt. (In this he may have been referring to the Egyptian dictator Nasser’s 1964 overtures to the Muslim Brotherhood, which he hoped would join an anticommunist alliance.) Even before his stay in the United States he cautioned that “Islam is a comprehensive philosophy and an homogeneous unity, and to introduce into it any foreign element would mean ruining it. It is like a delicate and perfect piece of machinery that may be completely ruined by the presence of an alien component.”

This chief alien component was secularism. Qutb regarded Western secularism not as the solution to the problems of the Islamic world (as many have proposed) but as the chief source of the problem: it destroyed the fundamental unity of Islam by separating the religious sphere from that of daily life.

Qutb saw the West’s two dominant political and social philosophies, capitalism and Communism, as bankrupt and valueless. With notable and often moving passion and vigor, Qutb’s influential book Milestones explicitly positions Islam as the true source of societal and personal order, as opposed to both capitalism and Communism. “Mankind today is on the brink of a precipice,” he asserted in this Cold War-era manifesto, “not because of the danger of complete annihilation which is hanging over its head — this being just a symptom and not the real disease — but because humanity is devoid of those vital values which are necessary not only for its healthy development but also for its real progress.” Perhaps with his time in America in mind, he went on: “Even the Western world realizes that Western civilization is unable to present any healthy values for the guidance of mankind. It knows that it does not possess anything which will satisfy its own conscience and justify its existence.”

To Qutb, both capitalism and Communism were spent forces: “Democracy in the West has become infertile to such an extent that it is borrowing from the systems of the Eastern bloc, especially in the economic system, under the name of socialism. It is the same with the Eastern bloc. Its social theories, foremost among which is Marxism, in the beginning attracted not only a large number of people from the East but also from the West, as it was a way of life based on a creed.”

With admirable prescience for a man writing in 1964, when Marxism looked to many observers to be still positioned at the vanguard of history, Qutb proclaimed that “now Marxism is defeated on the plane of thought, and if it is stated that not a single nation in the world is truly Marxist, it will not be an exaggeration.” He asserted that Marxism was doomed to fail because “on the whole this theory conflicts with man’s nature and its needs. This ideology prospers only in a degenerate society or in a society which has become cowed as a result of some form of prolonged dictatorship.” A quarter-century before the fall of the Soviet Union, he described “the failure of the system of collective farming” as just part of “the failure of a system which is against human nature.” Qutb concludes: “It is essential for mankind to have new leadership!”

That new leadership would come from Islam. To Qutb, what the Muslim umma needed was a restoration of Islam in its fullness and purity, including all the rules of the Sharia for regulating society. “If we look at the sources and foundations of modern ways of living, it becomes clear that the whole world is steeped in Jahiliyyah [Ignorance of the Divine guidance], and all the marvelous material comforts and high-level inventions do not diminish this ignorance. This Jahiliyyah is based on rebellion against God’s sovereignty on earth. It transfers to man one of the greatest attributes of God, namely sovereignty, and makes some men lords over others.”

True freedom could come to man only by restoring the divine sovereignty — that is, the Sharia. To further this end he formally joined the Muslim Brotherhood shortly after his return to Egypt from the United States.

In articulating his vision for a resurgent Islam that would lead the way to a restoration of civilization and true values in the world, he made one great departure from the thought of other Muslim intellectuals of his day: he classified not only non-Muslim lands but also large portions of the Muslim world as lands of jahiliyyah, the Muslim term for the pre-Islamic period of unbelief, ignorance, and darkness. He based this assessment on the fact that most Muslim lands did not follow the Sharia either in whole or part, writing in Milestones that “it is necessary to revive that Muslim community which is buried under the debris of the man-made traditions of several generations, and which is crushed under the weight of those false laws and customs which are not even remotely related to the Islamic teachings, and which, in spite of all this, calls itself the ‘world of Islam.’“

He advances Islam as “a challenge to all kinds and forms of systems which are based on the concept of the sovereignty of man; in other words, where man has usurped the Divine attribute. Any system in which the final decisions are referred to human beings, and in which the sources of all authority are human, deifies human beings by designating others than God as lords over men.”

Islam, says Qutb, in response to this wrongful deification of human beings, must “proclaim the authority and sovereignty of God” and thereby “eliminate all human kingship and to announce the rule of the Sustainer of the universe over the entire earth. In the words of the Qur’an: ‘He alone is God in the heavens and in the earth.’ (43:84) ‘The command belongs to God alone. He commands you not to worship anyone except Him. This is the right way of life.’ (12: 40)”

In practice, this meant implementation of the Sharia. Qutb therefore despised democracy for subjecting society to manmade laws that were the product of deliberation by the electorate or the legislature. The laws of Allah were not a matter for majority vote. He advocated active and all-encompassing resistance to governments in Muslim lands that did not implement the Sharia. He insisted: “We must also free ourselves from the clutches of jahili society” — that is, society ordered according to human laws (literally, those of ignorance) rather than divine ones — “jahili concepts, jahili traditions and jahili leadership. Our mission is not to compromise with the practices of jahili society, nor can we be loyal to it. Jahili society, because of its jahili characteristics, is not worthy to be compromised with. Our aim is first to change ourselves so that we may later change the society.”

This resistance must be international, in accord with the traditional Islamic view that religion transcends nationality: “A Muslim has no country except that part of the earth where the Shari’ah of God is established and human relationships are based on the foundation of relationship with God; a Muslim has no nationality except his belief, which makes him a member of the Muslim community in Dar-ul-Islam; a Muslim has no relatives except those who share the belief in God, and thus a bond is established between him and other Believers through their relationship with God.”

The idea that Muslim governments lose their legitimacy if they don’t enforce the Sharia has recurred throughout Islamic history. The famous medieval scholar Ibn Taymiyya (1263-1328) “declared that a ruler who fails to enforce the shari’a rigorously in all aspects, including the conduct of jihad (and is therefore insufficiently Muslim), forfeits his right to rule.” Nevertheless, such a view was relatively unheard-of among the secularized, Western-influenced Muslims of Qutb’s day; thus it has led numerous analysts of Islamic radicalism to label him an innovator and contrast his views with those of “traditional Islam.”

But Qutb’s views of the Sharia were not innovative at all. And he argued that they were not extremist, but simply the rule of Islamic law. “The way to establish God’s rule on earth is not that some consecrated people — the priests — be given the authority to rule, as was the case with the rule of the Church, nor that some spokesmen of God become rulers, as is the case in a ‘theocracy’. To establish God’s rule means that His laws be enforced and that the final decision in all affairs be according to these laws.”

Of course, the distinction between the rule of the Sharia and that of a theocratic ruling elite is exceedingly fine, as one can see in Iran today. Egypt’s Arab Socialist ruler, Gamel Abdel Nasser, was well aware of the theocratic implications of Qutb’s writings and had him subjected to ten years of imprisonment and torture, and finally ordered him executed in 1966. A year before that Qutb wrote from his prison cell: “The whole of Egypt is imprisoned. . . . I was arrested despite my immunity as a judge, without an order of arrest . . . my sole crime being my critique of the non-application of the Sharia.”

Nasser might have been most concerned with Qutb’s exhortations to jihad. These were predicated on the idea that the establishment of Allah’s rule would not be without obstacles. “Since this movement [that is, Islam] comes into conflict with the Jahiliyyah which prevails over ideas and beliefs, and which has a practical system of life and a political and material authority behind it, the Islamic movement had to produce parallel resources to confront this Jahiliyyah.”

Chief among those resources was jihad. “This movement uses the methods of preaching and persuasion for reforming ideas and beliefs and it uses physical power and Jihaad for abolishing the organizations and authorities of the Jahili system which prevents people from reforming their ideas and beliefs but forces them to obey their erroneous ways and make them serve human lords instead of the Almighty Lord.”

Armed struggle, jihad, was a necessity. “The establishing of the dominion of God on earth, the abolishing of the dominion of man, the taking away of sovereignty from the usurper to revert it to God, and the bringing about of the enforcement of the Divine Law (Shari’ah) and the abolition of man-made laws cannot be achieved only through preaching. Those who have usurped the authority of God and are oppressing God’s creatures are not going to give up their power merely through preaching; if it had been so, the task of establishing God’s religion in the world would have been very easy for the Prophets of God! This is contrary to the evidence from the history of the Prophets and the story of the struggle of the true religion, spread over generations.”

Muslims, Qutb says, must not only preach, but also “strike hard at all those political powers which force people to bow before them and which rule over them, unmindful of the commandments of God, and which prevent people from listening to the preaching and accepting the belief if they wish to do so. After annihilating the tyrannical force, whether it be in a political or a racial form, or in the form of class distinctions within the same race, Islam establishes a new social, economic and political system, in which the concept of the freedom of man is applied in practice.”

Qutb’s reference to the history of the prophets is one indication of how firmly his view of jihad is based on a close and careful reading of the Qur’an and study of the example of the Prophet Muhammad. In Milestones he quotes at length from the great medieval scholar Ibn Qayyim (1292-1350), who, says Qutb, “has summed up the nature of Islamic Jihaad.” Ibn Qayyim outlines the stages of the Muhammad’s prophetic career: “For thirteen years after the beginning of his Messengership, he called people to God through preaching, without fighting or Jizyah, and was commanded to restrain himself and to practice patience and forbearance. Then he was commanded to migrate, and later permission was given to fight. Then he was commanded to fight those who fought him, and to restrain himself from those who did not make war with him. Later he was commanded to fight the polytheists until God’s religion was fully established.”

Qutb summarizes the stages: “Thus, according to the explanation by Imam Ibn Qayyim, the Muslims were first restrained from fighting; then they were permitted to fight; then they were commanded to fight against the aggressors; and finally they were commanded to fight against all the polytheists.”

That these stages of jihad can be found in Qutb, as well as in the writings of the contemporary jihadis and medieval Muslim scholars, underscores the traditional character of today’s jihad. Modern mujahedin are not “hijacking” Islam; they are — at least in their own view — restoring it. Ibn Qayyim, as quoted by Qutb, goes on to outline the conditions of post-jihad society, i.e., dhimmitude: “After the command for Jihaad came, the non-believers were divided into three categories: one, those with whom there was peace; two, the people with whom the Muslims were at war; and three, the Dhimmies. . . . It was also explained that war should be declared against those from among the ‘People of the Book’ who declare open enmity, until they agree to pay Jizyah or accept Islam. Concerning the polytheists and the hypocrites, it was commanded in this chapter that Jihaad be declared against them and that they be treated harshly.”

Ultimately, he explains, those with whom the Muslims were at peace or had treaties became Muslims themselves, “so there were only two kinds left: people at war and Dhimmies. The people at war were always afraid of [Muhammad]. Now the people of the whole world were of three kinds: One, the Muslims who believed in him; two, those with whom he had peace and three, the opponents who kept fighting him.” In line with this, Qutb says that if someone rejects Islam, “then it is the duty of Islam to fight him until either he is killed or until he declares his submission.”

Qutb speaks harshly of modernist and moderate Muslims who would recast jihad as a struggle for self-defense. Even while they “talk about Jihaad in Islam and quote Qur’anic verses,” he says, they “do not . . . understand the nature of the various stages through which this movement develops, or the relationship of the verses revealed at various occasions with each stage.” In other words, they don’t understand that Allah gradually revealed the Muslim’s responsibility to wage jihad, as outlined above by Ibn Qayyim.

This leads to further errors: “Thus, when they speak about Jihaad, they speak clumsily and mix up the various stages, distorting the whole concept of Jihaad and deriving from the Qur’anic verses final principles and generalities for which there is no justification. This is because they regard every verse of the Qur’an as if it were the final principle of this religion.” This is probably something like what Qutb would say to contemporary Muslim spokesmen who quote the Qur’an’s “tolerance verses” without making any mention of the stages of development in the holy book’s teachings about jihad.

Qutb ascribes the growth of the idea that jihad is only a struggle for self-defense to a defeatist attitude. “This group of thinkers, who are a product of the sorry state of the present Muslim generation, have nothing but the label of Islam and have laid down their spiritual and rational arms in defeat. They say, ‘Islam has prescribed only defensive war’! and think that they have done some good for their religion by depriving it of its method, which is to abolish all injustice from the earth, to bring people to the worship of God alone, and to bring them out of servitude to others into the servants of the Lord.”

He inveighs against attempts by “these defeatist-type people [who] try to mix the two aspects,” that is, forced conversion and the struggle to establish the sovereignty of Allah alone, and who try to “confine Jihaad to what today is called ‘defensive war.’ The Islamic Jihaad has no relationship to modern warfare, either in its causes or in the way in which it is conducted.” Anyone who understands that jihad is actually a struggle to establish Allah’s sovereignty “will also understand the place of Jihaad bis saif (striving through fighting), which is to clear the way for striving through preaching in the application of the Islamic movement. He will understand that Islam is not a ‘defensive movement’ in the narrow sense which today is technically called a ‘defensive war.’“

Who is ultimately responsible for this misrepresentation of jihad? Qutb blames “orientalists,” Western interpreters of Islam. (Ironically, this is the very same camp blamed by Edward Said–the famous Princeton professor, Palestinian activist, and author of Orientalism–for caricaturing jihad as a struggle on the battlefield.) “This narrow meaning,” says Qutb, “is ascribed to it by those who are under the pressure of circumstances and are defeated by the wily attacks of the orientalists, who distort the concept of Islamic Jihaad. It was a movement to wipe out tyranny and to introduce true freedom to mankind, using resources according to the actual human situation, and it had definite stages, for each of which it utilized new methods. If we insist on calling Islamic Jihaad a defensive movement, then we must change the meaning of the word ‘defense’ and mean by it ‘the defense of man’ against all those elements which limit his freedom. These elements take the form of beliefs and concepts, as well as of political systems, based on economic, racial or class distinctions.”

In other words, Qutb will allow for a “defensive jihad” if that means defending mankind from democracy, capitalism, Communism, racism, and so on. His views on offensive and defensive jihad are not innovative: he follows the Shafi’i school of Sunni jurisprudence, which mandates that “jihad had for its intent the waging of war on unbelievers for their disbelief and not merely when they entered into conflict with Islam.” This Shafi’i school still holds sway at Cairo’s prestigious al-Azhar University.

Orientalists, says Qutb, have distorted the idea of jihad by confusing it with forced conversion; but Muslim scholars have not responded properly. “The orientalists have painted a picture of Islam as a violent movement which imposed its belief upon people by the sword. These vicious orientalists know very well that this is not true, but by this method they try to distort the true motives of Islamic Jihaad. But our Muslim scholars, these defeated people, search for reasons of defensive [war] with which to negate this accusation. They are ignorant of the nature of Islam and of its function, and that it has a right to take the initiative for human freedom.”

To support his contention that jihad is not solely for the defense of Muslim lands, Qutb again invokes the early Islamic period. “As to persons who attempt to defend the concept of Islamic Jihaad by interpreting it in the narrow sense of the current concept of defensive war, and who do research to prove that the battles fought in Islamic Jihaad were all for the defense of the homeland of Islam — some of them considering the homeland of Islam to be just the Arabian peninsula — against the aggression of neighboring powers, they lack understanding of the nature of Islam and its primary aim. Such an attempt is nothing but a product of a mind defeated by the present difficult conditions and by the attacks of the treacherous orientalists on the Islamic Jihaad. Can anyone say that if [the first three Caliphs] Abu Bakr, ‘Umar or ‘Othman had been satisfied that the Roman and Persian powers were not going to attack the Arabian peninsula, they would not have striven to spread the message of Islam throughout the world? How could the message of Islam have spread when it faced such material obstacles as the political system of the state, the socio-economic system based on races and classes, and behind all these, the military power of the government?”

After quoting a number of Qur’anic verses on jihad, Qutb adds: “With these verses from the Qur’an and with many Traditions of the Prophet — peace be on him — in praise of Jihaad, and with the entire history of Islam, which is full of Jihaad, the heart of every Muslim rejects that explanation of Jihaad invented by those people whose minds have accepted defeat under unfavorable conditions and under the attacks on Islamic Jihaad by the shrewd orientalists.”

Those who fall for such ideas are (at best) too soft and (at worst) traitors to Islam: “What kind of a man is it who, after listening to the commandment of God and the Traditions of the Prophet — peace be on him — and after reading about the events which occurred during the Islamic Jihaad, still thinks that it is a temporary injunction related to transient conditions and that it is concerned only with the defense of the borders?”

Qutb’s disgust for this point of view shows through in many passages of Milestones. He contrasts it with the internationalist outlook that Muslims should have. “Those who would say that Islamic Jihaad was merely for the defense of the ‘homeland of Islam,’“ Qutb asserts, “diminish the greatness of the Islamic way of life and consider it less important than their ‘homeland.’ This is not the Islamic point of view, and their view is a creation of the modern age and is completely alien to Islamic consciousness. What is acceptable to Islamic consciousness is its belief, the way of life which this belief prescribes, and the society which lives according to this way of life. The soil of the homeland has in itself no value or weight. From the Islamic point of view, the only value which the soil can achieve is because on that soil God’s authority is established and God’s guidance is followed; and thus it becomes a fortress for the belief, a place for its way of life to be entitled the ‘homeland of Islam,’ a center for the movement for the total freedom of man.”

Perhaps with the pan-Arab movements of Nasser and others in mind, Qutb emphasized Islam’s universal character and call: “This religion is not merely a declaration of the freedom of the Arabs, nor is its message confined to the Arabs. It addresses itself to the whole of mankind, and its sphere of work is the whole earth. . . . This religion wants to bring back the whole world to its Sustainer and free it from servitude to anyone other than God.”

But what about the Qur’an’s command to Muslims not to “begin hostilities”? In his monumental, multi-volume commentary on the Qur’an, In the Shade of the Qur’an, completed in Nasser’s prison, Qutb explains Sura 2:190 (“begin not hostilities. Lo! Allah loveth not aggressors”) not as a command to Muslims to avoid attacking their opponents, as it was interpreted by many who taught that jihad was only defensive. “‘Aggression,’“ says Qutb, “implies attacks on non-combatants and peaceful, unarmed civilians who pose no threat to Muslims or to their community as a whole. This includes women, children, the elderly, and those devoted to religious activity, such as priests and monks, of all religious and ideological persuasions. Aggression would also entail exceeding the moral and ethical limits set by Islam for fighting a just war.” He pointedly avoids saying that this verse limits jihad to self-defense.

In fact, according to Qutb the very nature of the call to Islam rules out the idea that jihad could only be for self-defense. “Since the objective of the message of Islam is a decisive declaration of man’s freedom, not merely on the philosophical plane but also in the actual conditions of life, it must employ Jihaad. It is immaterial whether the homeland of Islam — in the true Islamic sense, Dar ul-Islam — is in a condition of peace or whether it is threatened by its neighbors.”

What then of non-Muslim countries that do not attack the Muslims? Can they be left alone? Only if they pay the non-Muslim poll-tax (jizya), the crowning symbol of dhimmitude and submission: “It may happen that the enemies of Islam may consider it expedient not to take any action against Islam, if Islam leaves them alone in their geographical boundaries to continue the lordship of some men over others and does not extend its message and its declaration of universal freedom within their domain. But Islam cannot agree to this unless they submit to its authority by paying Jizyah, which will be a guarantee that they have opened their doors for the preaching of Islam and will not put any obstacle in its way through the power of the state.”

Indeed, it is “a basic human right to be addressed with the message of Islam. No authority should deny mankind that right and under no circumstances should any obstacles be allowed to prevent that Divine Message from being delivered.” Commenting on Sura 2:191 (“persecution is worse than slaughter”), Qutb says: “Islam considers religious persecution and any threat to religion more dangerous for the future stability and existence of Islam than actual war. According to this great Islamic principle, the survival and prosperity of the faith take precedence over the preservation of human life itself.” Christianity and other faiths, of course, would say the same thing, but none except Islam enjoin in response not the sacrifice of one’s own life, but the killing of others.

For Qutb, violent jihad is a necessary part of establishing true peace, which equals the supremacy of the Sharia: “When Islam strives for peace, its objective is not that superficial peace which requires that only that part of the earth where the followers of Islam are residing remain secure. The peace which Islam desires is that the religion (i.e. the Law of the society) be purified for God, that the obedience of all people be for God alone, and that some people should not be lords over others. After the period of the Prophet — peace be on him — only the final stages of the movement of Jihaad are to be followed; the initial or middle stages are not applicable.”

That is, as Ibn Qayyim put it, there are now only two kinds of non-Muslims: those at war with Islam and those who have submitted to it. In a report on “the roots of jihad,” BBC Middle East analyst Fiona Symon implied that Qutb was breaking with tradition by classifying “all non-Muslims [as] infidels — even the so-called ‘people of the book,’ the Christians and Jews.” But Ibn Qayyim (and other authorities I’ve quoted throughout this book) make it clear that in this Qutb was in full agreement with Islamic tradition.
Not only is the call to Islam universal; it is eternal. “This struggle,” says Qutb, “is not a temporary phase but an eternal state — an eternal state, as truth and falsehood cannot co-exist on this earth.”

While he insists that jihad is not solely for self-defense, Qutb doesn’t deny that defense of Islam is a part of the Muslim’s duty — especially given the contemporary state of world affairs: “Today, Muslims continue to be the target of religious persecution under a host of Christian, Zionist and secular regimes in many parts of the world. This situation makes jihad an incumbent duty on Muslims.” But the goal of this jihad, as he makes clear in Milestones and elsewhere, is not simply the ending of persecution, but the establishment of the Sharia everywhere.

This absolutist perspective is the view of jihadis today. Qutb is a widely revered figure and his books are easily available in Islamic bookstores even in the United States. Milestones is offered for sale by most online Muslim bookstores. The Muslim Brotherhood counts Hasan al-Banna and Sayyid Qutb as its two leading lights. The Brotherhood, as well as Muslims around the world today, hail al-Banna, assassinated under mysterious circumstances, and Qutb, executed by Nasser, as shahids, martyrs. Some Muslims even consider Qutb the leading Sunni thinker of the twentieth century. Zafar Bangash, Director of the Institute of Contemporary Islamic Thought in London, calls Qutb “a man of impeccable Islamic credentials [who] made an immense contribution to Muslim political thought at a time when the Muslim world was still mesmerised by such western notions as nationalism, the nation-State and fathers of nations.” Qutb’s biographer claims that his subject is “the most famous personality of the Muslim world in the second half of the 20th century.”

The Brotherhood, meanwhile, was banned by the Egyptian government in 1948 for its participation in terrorist activities, but al-Banna reacted to the ban by declaring, “when words are banned, hands make their move.” In the ensuing years the Brothers were reinstated and banned again, tried to assassinate Nasser several times, and were promised by Anwar Sadat in 1970 that Sharia would be implemented in Egypt. On October 6, 1981, with the Sharia still not Egypt’s sole source of public order, Sadat was assassinated by four Muslim Brothers. The Brotherhood is still a presence in Egypt, continuing a wary give-and-take with the Mubarak government and spreading far and wide the message of Qutb.

Today the Brotherhood proudly takes credit for “liberating Muslim lands from colonialist powers in almost every Muslim country. The ikhwan [Brothers] were active amongst Muslims in Central Asian Muslim republics since the ‘70s, and their involvement can be seen recently in such republics as Tajikistan. More recently they had a major role in the struggle for Afghanistan and Kashmir.” They proclaim: “Allah is our objective. The messenger [Muhammad] is our leader. Quran is our law. Jihad is our way. Dying in the way of Allah is our highest hope.”

And in America, we should remember that when spokesmen for American Muslim groups talk about peace and jihad as purely defensive war, they are likely to have read Qutb or at least be conversant with his ideas. Thus: Peace means a society under Sharia law. Jihad is war in defense of Allah’s law. The imposition of Sharia is the liberation of mankind. Those who currently live under what Qutb would have regarded as the tyranny of the Bill of Rights should take careful note of this.

Historic rally

By Gordon Brunskill
Centre Daily Times
http://www.centredaily.com/sports/colleges/penn_state/volleyball/
20 December 2009

TAMPA, Fla. — It turned out to be destiny, not Destinee.

After withstanding an early onslaught from Texas’ stellar senior Destinee Hooker, the Penn State women’s volleyball team pulled off a rally for the ages.

The result was a third straight national championship and the completion of two spectacular careers.


For the CDT/Brian Blanco

Penn State’s Megan Hodge Spikes the ball past Texas’ Michelle Kocher (4) for one of her 21 kills in the Nittany Lions’ 3-2 win over the Longhorns on Saturday.

With one final huge swing from senior Megan Hodge, drilling the ball into the floor, the Nittany Lions made history by rallying from two sets down in the national championship match Saturday night at the St. Petersburg Times Forum

“We had to fight,” Hodge said. “It was the hardest fight I think we’ve ever had in our lives.”

Behind 21 kills from Hodge and 13 kills each from Darcy Dorton and Blair Brown, Penn State (38-0) finished off the Longhorns 22-25, 20-25, 25-23, 25-21, 15-13.

“This is the stage you want to be on, that great players want to play on,” said Hodge, who also had 13 digs and was a freshman the last time Penn State rallied from 2-0 down — also against Texas. “But I never in my wildest dreams thought this would happen.”

The victory added even more milestones to the steamer trunk of history the Nittany Lions will be hauling back from Tampa. They became the first team to win three straight titles after nine other programs had failed on their third try, the first to win two straight with perfect seasons, the third team to rally from two sets down in the championship game, extended their NCAA record to 102 straight

match victories and gave head coach Russ Rose his fourth career coaching title, joining Stanford coaches Don Shaw and John Dunning as the only mentors to do so.

“The seniors left an incredible mark on the program and at the beginning of the year I told them they would be judged by the end of the season, not to their career to that point in time,” Rose said. “I kept urging (Alisha Glass and Hodge) to understand that they could still do it, they could still do it.”

All of that was almost history thanks to Hooker, the NCAA high jump champion who was making life miserable for the Nittany Lions. The tournament’s Most Outstanding Player finished with a career-high 34 kills to go on a .316 hitting night and added 17 digs as her team was seeking its first title since 1988.

“She just kept going hard the whole time,” Rose said. “The scouting report indicated she was going to get hers and we needed to limit some of the other people so they didn’t have big nights as well.”


For the CDT/Brian Blanco

Texas’ Destinee Hooker (21) goes through Penn State’s Alisha Glass (6) and Arielle Wilson for one of her 34 kills in the the Nittany Lions’ 3-2 win.

While offense gets the highlights, it was defense that played the biggest role in the comeback. The Nittany Lions began to track Hooker a little better in the final three sets and finished with a 14-12 edge in blocks, led by nine from Fatima Balza and five each from Hodge and Arielle Wilson.

Then there was the backrow of Alyssa D’Errico and Cathy Quilico, who were covering the court like a canvas. D’Errico led with 22 digs and Quilico had 12, and each had a pair of aces. Brown added 14 digs and Glass had 12 to go with her 53 assists as she and Hodge finished their careers with a 142-5 record — the best four-year mark in Division I history.

Rachael Adams added 11 kills for the Longhorns (29-2), Julianne Faucette had 10 and Ashley Engle had 36 assists and 14 digs. Libero Heather Kisner also was mopping the court with 26 digs.

The first set was littered with scoring runs, and the Nittany Lions appeared headed for a 1-0 lead when it ripped off five straight points and 7 out of 9 for a 22-19 lead. They were cooled by a timeout, however, as the team suddenly had some trouble with its serve-receive and the Longhorns pounded down the final six points. Engle had a key ace, Texas built a triple block on a backrow spike by Hodge and Hooker put down the final point after Kisner made a diving dig of another Hodge attack.

It got even worse for Penn State in the second set. Hooker pounded down 11 of the team’s 17 kills in the set, including a run of 8 out of 10 points finished with her terminations. Penn State had just 10 put-aways as a team in the frame.

“We were playing pretty perfect,” Engle said. “I think we stunned Penn State a little bit.”

It marked the first time the Nittany Lions had dropped the first two sets of a match since a 3-0 sweep by Nebraska on Sept. 2, 2007. Rose did say he reminded his team of the last comeback from a 2-0 deficit, at Texas in the eighth match of the careers of Hodge and Glass, during the break between sets.

Penn State finally found its offense in the third set, building an early 11-5 lead as Hodge and Brown finally started putting the ball away with more frequency and their serving put pressure on the Longhorns.

The Nittany Lions built an early five-point lead and looked ready to cruise in the fourth, but Hooker and Adams got hot as the Longhorns got on a 7-1 run. Penn State clung to a lead again late, with D’Errico and Quilico each making spectacular diving digs to keep the ball alive and Hodge finally put the ball away with her seventh kill of the frame.

The teams then traded blows through the fifth, though Penn State never led until Wilson put away a Longhorn overpass as the team took five of the last seven points, setting up Hodge’s 2,142nd and final career kill.

“I blacked out,” Hodge said. “I was asking everybody after the match, ‘What happened on the last play?’ It’s unbelievable.”


Intangibles made the difference

By Andrew J. Cassavell
The Daily Collegian Staff Writer
December 20, 2009
http://www.collegian.psu.edu/

This one was different.

In 101 straight matches, the Penn State women's volleyball team was the better squad on the court. The Nittany Lions weren't on Saturday.

In 101 straight matches they had the best player on the court. They didn't on Saturday.

In 101 straight matches they were in control from start to finish. They weren't on Saturday.

But trailing two sets to none and going up against one of the greatest single-match performances of all-time by Texas' Destinee Hooker, the Nittany Lions wanted one thing by the end of the night: to be national champions.

On Saturday they were, one more time.

In one of the greatest comebacks in the history of collegiate athletics, the Penn State women's volleyball team rallied from two sets to none down to earn its 102nd straight win and a third consecutive national title - the first team to do so in the history of NCAA women's volleyball.

Mark it up as 101 straight wins on talent. One-straight win on desire, emotion and maybe even a bit of fortune. Head coach Russ Rose wouldn't have wanted it any other way.

"When it gets to a fifth game anything can happen," Rose said in his post-match press conference. "This is one of those examples where you don't win the statistics war, but we found a way to win at critical times."

For 37 matches this season the Lions had won the statistics war and had proven to be simply the better team, in the early stages of the first set.

But heading into Saturday's title bout, they knew No. 38 wouldn't come so easily.

Which is why the match wasn't about AVCA player of the year Megan Hodge procuring a powerful kill to clinch the win, or three-time All-American Alisha Glass providing the near-perfect set to Hodge to even the match at two sets apiece. Destinee Hooker and Ashley Engle could have done that for Texas.

It was about freshman Darcy Dorton scoring and then screaming at the top of her lungs in the second set despite trailing by seven. The point meant nothing. The pure passion and the message sent - everything.

It was about junior libero Alyssa D'Errico diving to the floor three times in one forgotten point in the fourth set. The Lions would lose it when her third diving attempt at a pancake fell short.

But in the point D'Errico let the Horns know Penn State wasn't going to lose the match. Texas would have to win it.

It was about Blair Brown, who struggled to stop Hooker early in the match and had trouble serving, being able to compose herself after each error and respond --13 times. The junior middle blocker finished with 13 kills - on an off night.

Had it been best-of-seven sets, it would have gone seven. Best of nine?
Well, you get the picture.

Maybe the Lions weren't the better team on Saturday. There was no better team.

Just a deserving champion and a valiant, yet unfulfilled runner-up.

Because of effort like D'Errico's, emotion like Dorton's and, yes, also the talent of a team with four first-team All-Americans - on Saturday night Penn State was that deserving champion.

Again.

More Women's Volleyball News
Column: Underclassmen lead team to title
PSU comes from behind to claim third-straight title
Hooker, Horns stand in way of title
Hodge honored as player of the year

It's settled; climate circus was a fairy tale

By MARK STEYN
The Orange County Register
http://www.ocregister.com/sections/opinion/columns/
2009-12-18 11:23:22

The best summation of the UN climate circus in Denmark comes from Andrew Bolt of Australia's Herald Sun: "Nothing is real in Copenhagen – not the temperature record, not the predictions, not the agenda, not the 'solution'."

Just so. Reuters, for example, carried a moving account of the speech by Ian Fry, lead negotiator for Tuvalu, the beleaguered Pacific island nation soon to be under water because of a planet-devastating combination of your SUV and unsustainable bovine flatulence from Vermont farms. "The fate of my country rests in your hands," Fry told the meeting. "I make this as a strong and impassioned plea ... I woke this morning and I was crying and that was not easy for a grown man to admit," he continued, "his voice choking with emotion," in the Reuters reporter's words. Who could fail to be moved?

"My country, 'tis of thee
Sweet land near rising sea
Of thee I choke!"

Alas, nowhere in this emotionally harrowing dispatch was there room to mention that Ian Fry's country is not Tuvalu but Australia, where he lives relatively safe from rising sea levels given that he's a hundred miles inland. A career doom-monger, he's resided in Queanbeyan, New South Wales for over a decade while working his way, in the revealing phrase of his neighbor Michelle Ormay, to being "very high up in climate change." As to whether the emotion-choked lachrymose pleader has ever lived in "his" endangered country of Tuvalu, his wife told Samantha Maiden of The Australian that she would "rather not comment." Like his fellow Copenhagen delegate Brad Pitt, Ian Fry is an actor: He's not a Tuvaluan, but he plays one on the world stage.

Whether he's an Aussie or a Tuvaluan, Fry's future king is Welsh, since under the British Commonwealth's environmentally responsible king-share program, the Prince of Wales is simultaneously heir to the thrones of Britain, Australian, Tuvalu and a bunch of other countries. His Royal Highness was also in Copenhagen last week, telling delegates that there were now only seven years left to save the planet. Prince Charles is so famously concerned about the environment that he's known as the Green Prince. Just for the record, his annual carbon footprint is 2,601 tons. The carbon footprint of an average Briton (i.e., all those wasteful, consumerist, environmentally unsustainable deadbeats) is 11 tons. To get him to Copenhagen to deliver his speech, His Highness was flown in by one of the Royal Air Force's fleet of VIP jets from the Royal Squadron. Total carbon emissions: 6.4 tons. In other words, the Green Prince used up seven months' of an average Brit's annual carbon footprint on one short flight to give one mediocre speech of alarmist boilerplate.

But relax, it's all cool, because he offsets! According to The Sydney Morning Herald, the Prince will be investing in exciting new green initiatives. "Investing" as in "using your own money", you mean? Not exactly.

Apparently, it will be taxpayers' money. So he'll "offset" the cost of using up seven months of an average peasant's carbon footprint on one flight by taking the peasant's money and tossing it down some sinkhole. No wonder he feels so virtuous. Oh, don't worry, though. He does have to pay a personal penalty for the sin of flying by private jet: Seventy pounds. Which is the cost of about six new trees, or rather less than the bill for parking at Heathrow would have been.

So just to recap: The Prince of Wales, a man who has never drawn his own curtains, ramps up a carbon footprint of 2,601 tons while telling us that western capitalist excess is destroying the planet. Dr. Rajendra Pachauri, the railroad engineer who heads the International Panel on Climate Change and has demanded that "hefty aviation taxes should be introduced to deter people from flying," flew 443,226 miles on "IPCC business" in the year and a half before the Copenhagen summit. And Al Gore is a carbon billionaire: He makes more money buying offsets from himself than his dad did from investing in Occidental Petroleum.

All of the above are, as that ersatz Tuvaluan delegate's neighbor would say, "very high up in climate change". But what about all the non-high-ups? Not just the low-level toadies like Associated Press "science" reporter Seth Borenstein, who dutifully pooh-poohed the idea that the leaked Climategate e-mails were of any significance and for his pains was rewarded by having to stand in line with thousands of other no-name warm-mongers for seven hours in the freezing streets of Copenhagen. All because the IPCC accredited 45,000 delegates to a space that accommodates 15,000 – but don't worry, when it comes to recalibrating the planet's climate, I'm sure they'll run the numbers more carefully.

But forget Borenstein and other hangers-on. Even making allowances for the stupidity of youthful idealism, the protesters in the streets of Copenhagen seem especially obtuse. Far from sticking it to the Man, they're cheerleading for the biggest Man of all: they're supporting a new globalized feudalism in which Prince Charles, Prince Al, Prince Rajendra and others "very high up in climate change" jet around the world at public expense telling the rest of us we need to stay put. A British parliamentarian recently proposed that everyone be issued with an annual "carbon allowance" that would be drawn down every time he booked a flight, or filled up his car, or bought a washer and dryer instead of beating his laundry on the rocks down by the river with the village women every week. You think the Prince of Wales or any other member of the new global elite will be subject to that "allowance"?

If you're young and you fall for this, you're a sap. Indeed, you're oozing so much sap the settled scientists should be measuring your tree rings. Remember that story a couple of weeks ago about how Danish prostitutes were offering free sex to Copenhagen delegates for the duration of the conference? I initially assumed it was just an amusing marketing cash-in by savvy Nordic strumpets. But no, the local "sex workers' union" Sexarbejdernes Interesseorganisation was responding to the municipal government's campaign to discourage attendees from partaking of prostitutes. The City of Copenhagen distributed cards to every hotel room showing a lady of the evening at a seedy street corner over the slogan "BE SUSTAINABLE: Don't Buy Sex."

"Be sustainable"? Prostitution happens to be legal in Copenhagen, and the "sex workers" were understandably peeved at being lumped into the same category of planet-wreckers as Big Oil, car manufacturers, travel agents and other notorious pariahs. So Big Sex decided they weren't going to take it lying down. Yet, in an odd way, that municipal postcard gets to the heart of what's going on: Government can – and will – use a "sustainable" environment as a pretext for anything that tickles its fancy. All ambitious projects – Communism, the new Caliphate – have global ambitions, but, when the globe itself is the cover for those ambitions, freeborn citizens should beware. Nico Little, a Canadian leftie at the Rabble Web site, distilled the logic into a single headline:

"Hookers Are Killing Polar Bears And Now You Can't Water Your Lawn."

Write that down. And next time the Prince of Wales, Al Gore, Dr. Pachauri or the delegation from Tuvalu give an "impassioned" speech, keep it handy as a useful précis.

©MARK STEYN