NO MORE GAZA U?
Hmm... I haven't felt like writing about much except cartoons** for the past week or so, but, apparently, while I was distracted by the Best Animated Feature Oscar for the overrated
Spirited Away and its shocking aftermath in the anime fanboy... er, "fandom" community, there's been other things going on in the world like the War in the Gulf***, the Quebec election campaign****, and, the most contentious issue of all, the Concordia Student Union elections.
For the past half-decade at least, the student body at Concordia by and large had been apathetic about student elections, with the result being that slates with the most radical leftist agendas (to the point of being Communist*****) got elected because the members of left-wing student clubs, "Public Interest Research Groups", and Muslim/Palestinian student groups like
Solidarity For Palestinian Human Rights voted in blocks for specific candidates on their mailing lists, and there were just more of them than the few of us that cared enough to try and vote against these jokers. Plus, some years, there were anti-radical slates, but they split the anti-radical vote, letting the Idiotarians get the power. CSUsucks.org chronicled many of the idiocies of the CSU, but the site seems to have gone defunct, though the
Internet Archive has archived
most of the CSUsucks.org site (move the cursor in the lower long bar with the missing graphics and look at the bar which displays the URL for each link at the botton of your Internet browser to navigate). Among other abuses of power (and student fees), there was the
infamous pro-Palestinian intifada student agenda, "Uprising", the
riot which prevented Benjamin Netanyahu from speaking (CSU leaders were on the escalators, throwing things at riot cops, and they backhandedly supported the riot since they're in bed with the SPHR), and the
banning of Hillel.
Campus Watch also has many insightful articles regarding the CSU archived.
But, apparently, though it took a couple of years, the sleeping giant at Concordia has finally woken and
voted in a slate that is neutral on issues such as Israel defending herself against Palestinian terrorists. And the "moderates" not only got more votes than the repackaged radicals (this year operating under the misleading banner "Clean Slate") did, they got more votes than all the other slates combined! (Wow, over 3000 Concordia students voted this time!)
"Evolution, not Revolution" is going to focus on clubs and student services... what a radical thing for a student council to do! Of course,
Sari Stein points out in the "comments" to the
Link article I linked to at the beginning of this paragraph that
their platform isn't exactly right wing either (she was responding more to a statement in the article... she wasn't really complaining that it wasn't right wing enough), but, I wear the "right wing" label with pride and there's nothing in their platform that particularly bothers me... if I was an active Concordia student, I probably would have voted for them, just to get the commie kooks out of power.
All I can request that the new CSU relinquish the previous
CSU's official support for
Mumia the cop-killer. And paint over that hideous mural of
"Guilty McCop-Killer" arm wrestling the skeleton on Loyola campus, in that lounge over the cafeteria, please!
**yes, I quite defiantly use the "c" word to describe anime, because that's what they are... Japanese cartoons. I don't see anything derogatory with the word "cartoon"... I use it to describe all hand drawn animation.
***Which I haven't been ignoring... I mean, it's all over the TV, so it's hard to ignore. I just haven't had anything particularly insightful to say; I didn't expect it to be over in a weekend, and I knew, unfortunately, some nasty things were inevitable, but the fact that the networks can devote entire segments to
each individual coalition soldier that is killed, captured or missing in action says volumes about which side has the upper hand.
****Meh, it's just Charest and Landry saying the "same old, same old"; not too much to report, though I am intending to tell you all what I think about language laws and the like at some point in the near future, though that isn't too much of an issue in the campaign this year. I'm still voting A.D.Q..
*****And I'm afraid that I'm not "Red Baiting" here; in the past, a couple of candidates for various council seats put being Communist as a
virtue on their campaign posters and won!
MY TOP 20 FAVOURITE ANIMATED SERIES
I had been pondering doing a list of animated series for a while at the
RottenTomatoes.com forum, and, for my thousandth post, I did.
Here's the list!
1-5
1) (tied) King of the Hill
1) (tied) Urusei Yatsura
3) Mobile Police Patlabor
4) South Park
5) Tenchi Muyo!
6-10
6) Yokohama Shopping Log
7) You're Under Arrest
8) Untalkative Bunny
9) Sailor Moon
10) Kevin Spencer
11-15
11) Kimagure Orange Road
12) The Simpsons
13) Gundam 0080: A War in the Pocket
14) Beavis & Butt-Head
15) Adventure of Mini-Goddess
16-20 (not ready)
16) Cardcaptor Sakura
17) Garfield & Friends/Garfield Specials
18) Futurama
19) All-Purpose Cultural Cat Girl Nuku Nuku
20) Revolutionary Girl Utena
I'm working on summaries for every entry, though this will likely take a few days to complete, though I have a number ready.
Go to the index for updates.
THE LIFE AQUATIC WITH STEVE ZISSOU?
Will this be the title of
the next film from Wes Anderson, director of
Bottle Rocket (the immensely quotable goofy heist spoof... still waiting for a Criterion DVD version),
Rushmore and
The Royal Tenenbaums, all 3 of them amongst my favourite films? This is the title given by Owen Wilson in the March 17th issue of the Univerity of Texas
Daily Texan. We know it will be about an oceanographer and star Bill Murray (Mr. Blume in
Rushmore and Raleigh St. Clair in
The Royal Tenenbaums), Owen Wilson (Dignan in
BR, Eli Cash in
TRT), Robert Musgrave (Bob Mapplethorpe in
BR), Gwyneth Paltrow (Margot Tenenbaum in
TRT), Jason Schwartzman (Max Fischer in
Rushmore) and Andersonverse newcomer Nicole Kidman (the chick from
B.M.X. Bandits... I don't think she's done much since then... just kidding), and it will be shot in Europe (before it was France, but the most recent articles say Rome... maybe both?), Mexico and, mostly, on the Atlantic aboard a boat. I'm sure it will be great, though I admit I'm cautiously optimistic since this is the first one with a script written only by Anderson; Owen Wilson will be starring in it, but he's not co-writing it this time around. Also, no Luke Wilson this time? Dammit, I like Luke as much as you can like a guy and not have it be gay!
Unlike some AnimeNation forum posters, I (as "
Kiyone") haven't exactly been bugging "
Geo" to draw "me" in his
"Unofficial AnimeNation Forum Comic Strip" but I make "my" first "appearance"
here. At least he's using my avvie pic for inspiration (the upwards pan shot of Kiyone from
Tenchi Universe episode 5) and not my
real pic on the Fanimenation.com page (self-taken with a digital camera 3 or 4 years back, sadly, it's one of the better photos of me I could find; I love to take pictures, but I'm usually behind the camera, not in front of it...).
Just adding a post about absolutely nothing because Blogger is doing crazy, kooky stuff to my archives today, and I can't seem to link properly to the "Overrated Anime FIlms" list...
EDIT: Adding this post fixed whatever was wrong. Dunno why, but it did.
OVERRATED ANIME FILMS
Just something I've been wanting to compile for a while. This might be an ongoing thing for me... I plan to update it as I see (or just remember more). It's a top 9 for now, just because I want to leave the tenth one open for the first update. I'll liberally cut-and-paste from things I wrote on the
AnimeNewsNetwork.com forum (as "
Tenchi"), the
RottenTomatoes.com forum (as "
Kiyone"), and the
AnimeNation.net board (also as "
Kiyone"), because, if I have them written out already, why type up new crap? These aren't full reviews, just my thoughts. Also,
Akira isn't on my list (although it probably would have been 2 or 3 years ago)... it's a mess, but a gloriously animated mess; I've never seen any American or Japanese cartoon feature film with animation that is both detailed and fluid for the entire length of the film. (I specified "cartoon" instead of plain "animaton" because I was talking about hand-drawn animation only... obviously, for CG features like
Final Fantasy: The Spirits Witihin detail isn't a problem, since they don't have to draw everything over and over.) And I'm just listing movies, not series... a lot of the time, I get a tingly spider sense that the latest "kewl" series is overrated, so I just don't watch it in the first place. Anyhow:
#9 Overrated:
Escaflowne: A Girl in Gaea is overrated. It's a gorgeously animated, but dull, drab and downright depressing alternate reality-retelling of the TV series. **/*****
#8 Overrated:
Grave of the Fireflies is overrated. As a look at the effects of the firebombings of Tokyo during World War II, it's okay, I suppose, but the sob factor is grossly overrated. Maybe because it's historical and I could put it in context, I didn't find it too sad. Am I one of the few people in the world that found Grave of the Fireflies forgettable? I mean that literally. I saw it once within a year or two of having joined my anime club (in 1994) and then only had vague memories of having seen it, all the time thinking that it was one of the few Ghibli films I had never seen and thinking what I saw was
Rail of the Stars until I read a plot point-by-plot point (being someone who reads spoilers) description of GotF and realized that I had indeed seen it but just wasn't nearly as emotionally moved as... pretty much everyone else that had seen it, I guess. ***/*****
#7 Overrated:
Ah! My Goddess! The Movie is overrated. (This is more a anime board thing than a film critic thing.) The manga, by Kosuke Fujishima, is about my favourite manga. (I used to say it's my absolute favourite manga, but I think Fujishima's
You're Under Arrest is underrated, and I've read a lot more of Hitoshi Ashinano's
Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou/
Yokohama Shopping Log so I think all 3 are about equal.) The anime that have been made from this series are wonderfully drawn, but the characterizations are very shallow compared to the manga. I didn't hate the movie, but I wasn't as thrilled by it as I had thought I would be, probably just because so little of
Oh My Goddess! has been animated that I wanted just a normal story of Belldandy and Keiichi, not one where Belldandy isn't herself for most of the movie. I hope they do a Mara movie sometime. The movie was a little bit of a disappointment for me in that it had been the first new installment of the true
OMG! anime in over half a decade, not counting
Adventures of Mini-Goddess (which is a blast if you like silly, absurd humour), but they wasted much of the screen time on two characters not from the manga, Belldandy wasn't really "herself", in a certain way, for most of the film, and the characters I did want to see that hadn't appeared in the OVA series (either because they hadn't yet been introduced in the manga at the time, or just because the series got cut short at 5 episodes) either got too little screen time (Peorth) or didn't appear at all (Mara, again). Not that I hate the movie or anything (of course not), it's just, had the exact same movie followed a 26 episode (non-SuperDeformed) OMG! TV series, or even just another 5 or 6 epiosde OVA series, I'd probably think much, much higher of this film than I did. On the other hand, I far prefer the manga continuity to the OVA continuity (which has gorgeous animation but characters that are pretty much the Cliff's Notes versions of the manga characters), and, as far as I could tell, there's nothing in the movie that would be out of place in the manga continuity (okay, Belldandy was wearing a different costume in a certain scene than she wore in the first volume of the manga, but it's also not quite the costume she wore at the beginning of the first OVA either). ***1/2/*****
#6 Overrated:
Princess Mononoke (Mononoke Hime) is overrated. Some scenes are great, but much of the movie are vistas that stay on the screen for way too long, and I get the idea that an entire half-hour could be cut from the movie (when they were making it... I'm not talking about hacking-and-slashing the final cut the way
Nausicaa was butchered into
Warriors of the Wind in the mid 80s) without taking away from the story. When I saw it the first couple of times, during some scenes I was indeed looking at my watch, and I'm glad I can skip ahead on the DVD. Also, while I recognize that it is a good movie, personally, the smaller, more intimate Ghibli films are more my bag than the sweeping epics. And, for anime with an environmental subtext that doesn't beat you over the head, I far prefer
Yokohama Shopping Log, where something happened to the planet, and to Japan specifically, decades before (the oceans rose, but that's not the only thing) yet it's never spoken of, just hinted at. ***/*****
#5 Overrated:
Ghost in the Shell is overrated. This is one film where I admit I never undrstood what the fuss was about... it's a fairly standard, cyberpunk story, with too much in the way of talking heads. And I like Mamoru Oshii's "talking heads" in the
Patlabor films (though I like the series more, because of the comic relief) and, of course, my favourite anime film
Urusei Yatsura: Beautiful Dreamer. I'm sure the manga's fine, and I'll have a look at the TV series if I can rent it, but this one... just, "meh". **1/2/*****
#4 Overrated:
Royal Space Force: Wings of Honneamise is overrated. As an alternate reality space race story with a fair deal of comic relief, I liked most of it up until the ending... which, well, I won't describe in any detail, but there's a fine line between "poetic" and "pretentious", and, while a lot of anime fans find themselves on the "it's poetic" side of the line (which is fine; it's their subjective opinion, neither right nor wrong), I'm on the other side of the line. It just soured the experience for me. Also, the religious aspect in the film should have been more fully explored, and the attempted rape scene was just extraneous. **1/2/*****
#3 Overrated:
Metropolis is overrated. It was a pretty movie to look at, and I had no problem with the retro-character designs. The problem I had with the film was the story was really the "same old, same old" theme of "man puts his faith in his creation, but his creation turns against him" that has been around since Mary Shelley wrote
Frankenstein, as a science fiction teacher told me once (after I had asked him to show the first
Patlabor film, another variation of the same theme, to the class but he refused for that reason; the Terminator films are yet another variant on the same theme). Also, there were scenes of protests that didn't really have much of an effect on the plot, nor were the motives of many of the characters, especially Duke Red, terribly well explained. I trust the original Osamu Tezuka manga from the Fifties explains everything a lot more fully, but if I need to read the manga to understand the context of what I see in the film, director Rintaro was not too successful. Plus, it's kind of a Sci-Fi clich� that if you have a really big tower that people compare to the Tower of Babel, chances are pretty fricking high it won't be standing by the end of the film. (I wonder if people 3000+ years from now will use the World Trade Center as an analogy the way we use the Tower of Babel?) **1/2/*****
#2 Overrated:
Jin-Roh is overrated. Saw it and didn't care for it much and I resent suggestions that the reason I didn't appreciate it was that I didn't "understand" it. Umm... no, the reason I didn't care for it much was that I didn't care about the story nor the characters nor what happens to the characters all that much. I really didn't have much of a problem understanding it... and, for that matter, there are certain anime I adore that leave me befuddled on certain levels, chief among them, my favourite anime film,
Urusei Yatsura: Beautiful Dreamer. Not enough action for me to like it as an action flick. I like counterfactual history, but we didn't see enough Nazi influences in the alternate modern Japan for it to hold my interest. I also didn't find the "Red Riding Hood" subtext of
Jin-Roh to be too profound. Just another animated "talking heads" movie, and I didn't find what the heads were talking about to be terribly interesting. And the rotoscoped animated characters just gave me a Bakshi's
Lord of the Rings headache. **/*****
#1 Overrated:
Spirited Away is overrated. If you read this blog and didn't just surf on in doing a Google search for "
Spirited Away" and "overrated", you weren't expecting anything else, were you? As a
Lilo & Stitch fan, obviously I can't possibly put anything else in the number one overrated spot now, can I? Certainly, I don't think it's as overrated as most of the stuff in this list, but the fact is, it has an Oscar and the rest of them don't, so that cements it here until another anime wins an Oscar. (I don't think it's terribly likely that an anime without the Ghibli moniker will ever win the Best Animated Feature Oscar, but who knows.) Anyhow, I expounded on my feelings a little bit in
this post, but, in a nutshell, I liked it very much as an Asian take on
Alice in Wonderland but I didn't really ever connect with it on any artistic level like the bulk of the critics did (except for ones living in Las Vegas, apparently), and I just didn't find Chihiro/Sen to be as compelling a Ghibli heroine as Kiki, Shizuku or Satsuki. I think, ultimately, my feelings aren't so much that
Spirited Away is terribly overrated, but, rather, that
Lilo & Stitch and
Kiki's Delivery Service are underrated. Anyhow, it's getting a "limited wide" re-release on a reported (but as of yet, still unconfirmed) number of 800 screens, so, at the very least, that should shut up the stupid "Disney is out to bury Ghibli" conspiracy theories once and for all (though it's going up against
Basic,
Head of State and
The Core, so don't be expecting a niche film to be breaking any box office records...).
****/*****
Goddamn it! I was doing some searches in Google using phrases found on this site, like "overrated
Spirited Away", "Middle East Needs an Enema" and, of course, "Fifth Column Update" but Google doesn't seem to have anything from me cached from beyond early February. However,
this "Johnny Come Lately" uses the term "Fifth Column Update" in a '
'blog post from last week (probably coincidentally... I'm surprised that I seem to be the first one to have thought of the term), and it shows up on Google already! And I seem to recall that one time I kept on writing "
Lilo & Stitch" and "Best Animated Feature" in a paragraph just so it would show up highly on Google, it made it after just two days. So Google seems to be losing some of my pages that used to be cached there... No idea why.
Now for something completely different: on Saturday night, NBC re-ran the Christopher Walken episode of
Saturday Night Live from about a month ago. This was the single funniest installment of the show I had seen over at least the past year or two, with the life raft captain elections, the "Continental" (the faux French paramour guy Walken plays every time he's on) refusing to serve his victim French food because of the spat with France over their refusal to vote to authourize American action against Iraq so he serves COmbos and Bugles as hors d'oeuvres, Walken as Jacques Chirac, and, of course,
the "Colonel Angus" sketch, the best
SNL sketch in recent memory with some southern women on a plantation mansion during the Civil War awaiting the return of "Colonel Angus" and discussing their like or dislike of "Colonel Angus" (pronounce it with a southern drawl for the joke).
Ah well, at least
Lilo & Stitch did win the
Las Vegas Film Critc Society "Sierra" Award for Best Animated Film... one award is still better than none, and it shows that there are some critics out there that aren't part of the critical Borg Collective with opinions suspiciously similar to Ebert's when it comes to
Spirited Away, almost as thought they didn't know what to make of the film, so they just cribbed from Ebert's review.
In any event, the anti-Disney/American animation chauvinism, the "Disney wants to sink Ghibli" conspiracy theories, and the "Anime is now going to be as mainstream as
Friends or
Monday Night Football!" pipe dreams amongst certain anime fans are going to make anime boards insufferable over the next couple of weeks for those of us "realist" anime fans than know anime is going to remain a niche...
Besides Moore's disgusting acceptance speech, I'm fairly confident that I made the right choice not to watch the rest of the Academy Awards. Jack Nicholson, nominated for Best Actor in
About Schmidt, my favourite live-action film last year, lost to Adrien Brody for
the Pianist. Whilst
Adaptation was one of my other favourite films, and Chris Cooper won for his portrayal of John Laroche, I was rooting for Christopher Walken for playing Frank Abagnale, Sr. in
Catch Me if You Can. Everything else... meh. I liked
The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers okay (I think the films are overrated there too, but, unlike
Spirited Away, I'm not exactly a lone voice in the wilderness when it comes to my opinion there), but I wasn't going to watch it lose Best Picture to
Chicago, which it did as I thought it would.
Is Hayao Miyazaki a pederast? I think this article is being sarcastic, but, still, it's a fun read if you're like me and you thought
Lilo & Stitch is the better film and you need to read something, anything, to bring the overrated
Spirited Away down a notch or two.
I wasn't watching, thank God, since I was watching
Lilo & Stitch, the best animated feature of 2002 (in my opinion, even if the Academy doesn't share it) to console myself, but, still:
FUCK YOU MICHAEL MOORE! FUCK YOU UP YOUR FUCKING ASS! That is all I'll say about that.
EDIT: Well, at least the fucker was booed off stage, and Steve Martin made a joke about Teamsters loading him into the back of a limo... good one, other Steve!
So, as
as I predicted way back in January,
Spirited Away won the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature. All it means is that the plurality of Academy voters thought it was the better film in their subjective opinion; it doesn't change my own subjective opinion that
Lilo & Stitch was the better film one iota. What this award doesn't mean is that Disney was wrong only releasing it in extremely limited release; even if the crtics said it was great, I doubt the public would have responded if Disney had given it a wider release. What this also doesn't mean is that anime is suddenly more mainstream than it was yesterday; the Academy awards all sorts of esoteric stuff ignored by mainstream audiences. It will boost sales of the
Spirited Away DVDs on April 15th (as well as those of
Laputa: Castle in the Sky and
Kiki's Delivery Service, still my favourite Ghibli film and grossly underrated, relatively speaking, by many anime reviewers, at least in comparison to other Ghibli films), of that I have no doubt, but, still, I don't think this will make Miyazaki and Studio Ghibli all that much more well known outside of the "animation enthusiast" and "arthouse film buff" communities, whom pretty much knew about Miyazaki already, and he won't be a household name amongst the general public.
Feh, if anything, the win for
Spirited Away is only fortifying my opinion that
Spirited Away is overrated. I know
Lilo & Stitch wasn't exactly the most profound animated film in terms of meaning either (my support and love of it based mainly on the "fun" factor and nothing more), but I really didn't get any overwhelming profound messages from
Spirited Away either, beyond "responsibility is good" and "don't lose your identity" (the bathhouse representing Western cultural influences and Chihiro/Sen and (Ko)Haku(kawa)'s forgetting of their own names under Yubaba's magic, as well as No Face going crazy within the bathhouse, representing the younger generation of Japanese forgetting who they are and acting like westerners). I liked the film as an Asian take on
Alice in Wonderland, with a bit of
Chinese Ghost Story thrown in for good measure, but I just never connected with it on the many different levels all the critics did. (Then again, I don't understand the love for the mediocre, much more overrated
Metropolis either.)
I admit I feel a little bit of resentment that
Spirited Away won over
Lilo & Stitch, though not as much as I felt as when
Shrek beat out
Monsters, Inc. last year (the lingering resentment I feel over that has died down enough that I can watch
Shrek on The Movie Network, but I still can't bring myself to buy it on DVD, even used at Blockbuster). Come
April 15th, the only
Ghibli film I will buy right away will be
Kiki's Delivery Service, though that's more because of limited funds and the fact there's a lot more anime that I'd rather buy, like
All-Purpose Cultural Cat Girl Nuku Nuku and
Fruits Basket, not to mention new boxes of
Urusei Yatsura, being released. If I haven't gotten
Spirited Away and
(Laputa:) Castle in the Sky by September, I will ask for them for my birthday.
But, still,
LILO & STITCH RULES!!! I don't need an Academy Award to validate my opinion.
EDIT: Also, I forgot to add that maybe I'd have found Chihiro to be a little more compelling heroine if she had actually learned responsibility during the film... she always is responsible, even at the beginning of the film, only finding herself in the situation she's in because she was a lot more responsible than her parents were, eating that strange food. There's no arc, she starts off "goody-goody", and stays that way throughout the film. The only thing that changes, really, is the attitude of everyone else in the bathhouse towards her.
On a personal note: on Friday, my brother Nick returned home for the first time since visiting Hong Kong for a few days, and he brought back photos of skyscrapers and monkeys, a fan for my mother, a little Dragon sculpture, and, for me, purchased either at Tokyo Narita airport (where he switched planes) or the Hong Kong Toys R' Us, a pack of
Sailor Moon S playing cards (it's Japanese, not a bootleg... the packaging's all in Japanese, and it's from Seika Note). Woohoo! Now I can play strip poker! Yes, all I need now is to find a young woman that would play strip poker with a 28 year old guy that still lives at home and enjoys
Sailor Moon...
Also, since it's my last chance before the Oscars,
go, Lilo & Stitch!
THE MIDDLE EAST NEEDS AN ENEMA UPDATE
I don't want to be too reliant on other 'blogs for war coverage here, as I have no desire to offer complete war coverage. I frankly don't have the patience of
Glenn Reynolds to read many, many different news sources and then meticulously chronicle each new shred of info I find that I did not know before. These updates are simply what I think, because I know you get your war news elsewhere. However, there are two stories on the
Little Green Footballs blog (which I really should add to the links on the left side of the screen) where I can and do see a connection...
First, yesterday, there was
this entry about seditious and outright treasonous remarks written by the head of the Muslim Students' Association of Grand Valley State University in Michigan as seen on
the Muslim "Clear Guidance" message board and compiled on
this 'blog, which reposts the most disturbing messages. This one post in particular is especially disturbing:
El-Masri
Junior Member
Brother
Registered: Feb 2003
Location: U S of A
Posts: 58
Asalamu Alikum Wa Rahmatu Allah Wa Barakatu,
I always thought (and still think) it's a great idea to join the US ground forces for a simple reason: they're all getting shipped off to the Middle East for FREE! So, you go there, free, with US equipment and weapons, yada yada yada, then when you get there, you change sides and fight the kufar! After changing your uniform of course! And while you're at it, you can sabotage some of their stuff from the inside!
Aaah, just some thoughts that are coming to my mind!
Wa Asalamu Alikum Wa Rahmatu Allah Wa Barakatu.
__________________
BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU! ALLAH IS WATCHING YOU!
MSA of GVSU
Report this post to a moderator | IP: Logged
03-16-2003 07:59 AM
Not too long after,
LGF posted a link to
a CBS News story about a soldier held in a grenade attack on his own troops, and, *shock*, it's a black sargeant with the name "Asan Akbar", and I mention only that he's black to indicate that he likely converted to Islam at some point in his life, rather than being brought up Islamic. Obviously, he had joined the military and was shipped out to Iraq some time ago, and not in response to "El Masri"'s specific comment on the "Clear Guidance" board last Sunday, but it shows that there is an militant element within the general Islamic community (no, not remotely representative of most American Muslims) that is indeed working from within to bring down America and we ignore it at our own peril.
Whilst the domestic "Fifth Column" protests and the Black Bloc types riot in the streets of America, Canada and Britian, I think we need to pay just a tiny bit of attention to the guy that the lunatic fringe of leftists loves more than any other. Well, besides
Mumia...
I'm talking about Fidel Castro here. While the rest of the world's eyes are turned towards Iraq and so-called, self-described American "dissidents" are saying anything and everything they damn well please about Bush, Rumsfield and Blair without any fear of persecution (by the government... if I call them "morons", I'm expressing my freedom of speech in response to things they said), Cuban dissidents are being rounded up, as
this article by Anita Snow of the Associated Press can attest:
"Cuban state agents rounded up more dissidents yesterday in a campaign to root out growing organized opposition on the communist island. A nongovernmental human rights group said that 72 dissidents had been arrested.
The detainees included more than a dozen independent journalists, owners of lending libraries, leaders of opposition political parties, and prodemocracy activists who gathered signatures for a reform effort known as the Varela Project.
The Paris-based group Reporters Without Borders accused the government of taking advantage of the world's preoccupation with the US-led war in Iraq to carry out the roundup.
''Human rights in Cuba can therefore be viewed as one of the first cases of collateral damage in the second Gulf war,'' said Robert Menard, the group's secretary general. ''Human rights in other countries could also soon suffer the same fate.''
The nongovernmental Cuban Commission on Human Rights and Reconciliation reported yesterday that 72 dissidents had been detained.
Some of the island's best-known critics remained free, including veteran rights activist Elizardo Sanchez, Varela Project organizer Oswaldo Paya, and Vladimiro Roca, son of the late Cuban Communist Party founder Blas Roca.
But all three reported they had been under heavy surveillance by plainclothes security agents in recent days and said they would not be surprised if they were next."
Of course, if there wasn't a war going on, I'm sure the left would be out en masse to protest against the brutality and repression of Castro's police state, am I not right? Okay, I wouldn't place any money on that...
