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Pinewood Dialogues. As a film buff you can’t help but to be curious about the creative forces behind some of your favorite films. Interviews can’t tell us everything, but they’re a start. Films and filmmakers are more difficult then other artistic media to analyze  because no film is the result of one person. That shot you liked in Casablanca at the conclusion on the airport runway might have been the scenic designer’s idea and the principle photographer blocked the shot, while the director worked with the actors on the dialog. Anyway Pinewood has some interviews with some of our most notable filmmakers including Sidney Lumet, Terry Gilliam and Forest Whitaker among others. You can download the transcript or the MP3.

Why Do They Hate Us? - strange answers lie in al-Qaida’s writings.

Part of the problem has to do with the question itself. Who exactly are they? Are we referring to al-Qaida and its cohorts? Are we talking about Iran, Syria, and the other nation-states whose interests in the Middle East do not properly align with America’s? Or perhaps we mean Hamas, Hezbollah, or the myriad religious nationalist organizations across the Muslim world that share neither the ideology nor the aspirations of global, transnational groups like al-Qaida, but that have nevertheless been dumped into the same category: them. 

“Them” has become an important part of the debate that started soon after 9-11. As stomach churning as it might be a casual reading of right-wing forums and comment sections has taken up the word. al-Qaida is the stateless club of criminals that attacked us, but now in the eyes of many - and the current administration and our wonderful TV pundits do little to sort out the differences, all middle-east Muslims have become the enemy in the eyes of America’s fringe far Right. A dangerous and unjust world view.

In the most general sense, this is certainly true. But whether a hodgepodge of interviews, declarations, and exegetical arguments can be read as a sort of jihadist manifesto is debatable. While these writings provide readers with page after page of, for example, arcane legal debates over the moral permissibility of suicide bombing, they do not really get to the heart of what it is that al-Qaida wants, if it wants anything at all. Al-Qaida’s nominal aspirations—the creation of a worldwide caliphate, the destruction of Israel, the banishing of foreigners from Islamic lands—are hardly mentioned in the book. It seems the president of the United States talks more about al-Qaida’s goals than al-Qaida itself does.

Whenever we’ve had some home grown nuts kill some people or blow something up ( Timothy McVeigh, the Una-bomber etc) we might give pause to read what they said or wrote and then most of us do what we should do, shake our heads and declare them nuts. It doesn’t ultimately matter all that much why OBL hates us, he’s just a nut like McVeigh or Jim Jones or the Va. Tech killer. Sure they all say they have their reasons, but they’re just rationalizing an ill defined agenda. OBL has no more chance of establishing some world wide caliphate then Jim Jones had of creating an agricultural utopia in the jungle. By treating OBL as some clever leader of a powerful movement rather then the common murderer he is, the “them” crowd is actually giving OBL a certain level of authority and legitimacy he wouldn’t have otherwise.