RIFLE RANGE BOY

Nile Hilton Incident (Arabic/Egyptian; 2017) Written/Directed: Tarik Saleh Every time a new law comes into force, guess who the happy people are. No, not the law-abiding citizens or the patriots who want to see rule and order respected in this country. It is the lowly local enforcers - the front-liners who are there to ensure that the law is respected. There are the first to detect any wrongdoing at the ground level and could squash a ticket, at a nominal fee, of course.  Everyone is happy. The poorly paid constables and local council employees get on by tying up loose ends - maybe a child's birthday present or that emergency trip to the hometown.  The problem is that this kind of 'closing an eye' or 'I scratch your back, you scratch mine' attitude has infiltrated all strata of the civil service. What we see now are the accusations of so-and-so of the higher pecking order being charged for siphoning off funds and dishonestly performing their civil duties. Invariably...

Lawrence of Arabia (1962) Decided to give this classic movie another shot after the recent turn of events in Jerusalem. Every group seems to be trying to garner some brownie point from the clash. Something that arose as a real estate and enforcement issue has now snowballed to another intifada of sorts. The interesting thing that caught my eye is some faction's labelling of Erdogan as Palestine's saviour and the call for him to re-establish the Ottoman Empire. If we remember well, the Ottoman was labelled as the sick of Europe towards the end of the 19th century. The Arabs were planning a revolt that appeared to go nowhere. Since the Turkish (Ottoman Empire) were aligned with the Germans in WW1, the British felt it made military sense to support the Arabs to fight the Turks. The Arabs always felt superior to the Turks as the Prophet was an Arab whilst the Turkish ancestors were originally barbaric nomads who embraced Islam.  Ottoman Empire c.1900 The Middle East then was as tum...

Infidel (2020) Written, Directed by Cyrus Nowrasteh .   They say this film reinforces the stereotype of people who profess the Islamic faith. It paints all people from Iran and the Middle East with the same brush that they are all terrorists. It compartmentalises all of them as closet sympathisers of sleeping cells. It assumes that they are all wolves in sheep's clothing. It is accused of propagating Islamophobia and accentuates the divide that the world plunging further into.   Even though their new hosts have offered a hand of friendship and accepted them to share their prosperity, the newcomers still hold their allegiance to the former countries, the countries that they destroyed and the nation that become too toxic for them to inhabit. The problem is that the newcomers all have a common bond that unites them to ruin their newfound land, religion's brotherhood.  The problem is that there is an image problem. A peaceful religion must be seen to be as one. More publ...

Mohammed & Charlemagne Revisited, The History of A Controversy (2012) Author: Emmet Scott. Warning: For mature readers only.  Discretion advised. The conventional wisdom about the antiquity and the medieval eras of Europe is the Roman empire collapsed upon his own weight, Europe went into the Dark Ages only to be shown the light by the Muslim liberators. When culture and science were being developed in the Muslim land, Europeans were barbaric and were in the dark about philosophy and technology. Emmet Scott (see here ), the controversial writer who argued against such a straightforward timeline to the evolution of civilisation in Europe, here uses the findings of Belgian Historian Henri Pirenne together with the results of archaeological discoveries to argue a different narration of European history and the terrible course that it took because of ruthless riders from Arab land. During the 1920s Belgian historian Henri Pirenne came to an astonishing conclusion: t...

What Went Wrong? Western Impact and Middle Eastern Response Bernard Lewis (2002) Warning: For mature readers only There was a time in world history when the Islamic world was like what America is today; the place of culture where people could sit down in coffee cafes to partake in intellectual discourses all day whilst the rest of the world, including Europe, was in the dark ages. Fast forward into the 21st century, one would find the situation reversed. People in the Islamic world cannot wait to get out of their toxic countries. If before, refugees used to move from the West to the East, now the tide is reversed. The author asks, 'What went wrong?'. In essence, the event that marked the beginning of the end of the heydays of the Ottoman Empire must surely be the failure at the Battle of Vienna in 1683. It was the time that the improvement in the weaponry and the military planning of the Europeans started to manifest. If before, coffee drinking was introduced by the Mus...

HyperNormalisation (2016) Written and Directed by Adam Curtis Before the infamous 2004 tsunami hit Phi Phi Island in Thailand, there was a kind of an eerie silence. The shoreline receded and thousands of fishes were washed ashore. The cockle collectors had a windfall. Everyone was in a quandary on the bizarre turns of events. Then it hit them, the towering waves and destruction. www.spectator.co.uk That is what is happening in our world. Many strange and damaging thinks are happening right before our eyes. Our leaders are telling us that everything is okay and it is business as usual or rather life goes on. However, everybody knows it is not alright but still nobody wants to do anything because things are too complicated. This, in simpler terms, is the essence of the meaning of the word 'hyper normalisation', a term coined by a Russian writer (Alexei Yurchak  in 2006 book, 'Everything was Forever, Until it was No More: The Last Soviet Generation') referring...

The Sea and the Hills  The Life of Hussain Najadi (An Autobiography; 2012) He survived the feared Bahraini intelligence who worked under the hawkish eyes of their British colonial masters as he stirred his leftist ideas after the Algiers uprising through his rebel movement at the age of 16. The Bedouin travellers took a special liking to his as he escaped to Beirut through the mirage inducing hostile environment of the Arabic desert and its scorching heat. Somehow he even escaped the infamous Iranian SAVAK police. The storm aboard the vessel along the Mediterranean Seas did not dampen his spirits. By twist of fate he missed an ill-fated Swiss flight which crashed soon after take-off. And he averted an invitation aboard a Filipino flight which later crashed. He even survived an automobile accident on the notorious Malaysian highways. To cap it all, he even endured 8 years of imprisonment in a Bahraini prison after incurring the wrath of its royalty. He raised the ladder of...

Death of a Princess (1980) It is always the same story. "Denial, this is not the true teaching, it is one person's interpretation and so on.." The reality is this. They need a major public relation exercise and re-branding. The morale is at all time low. This drama-documentary rocked the Arab-English-transAtlantic relationship when it was released. The English ambassador was sent back and millions were paid to stop its screening in US. Like a storm in a teacup, the tiff fizzled out within a few months and international trade between these countries resumed just as quickly as the tension started initially! The director got the idea of making this documentary after a tête-à-tête at a party of a certain Arabic princess and her lover who were executed publicly. Hence started an almost wild goose chase trying to find the bottom of the story. Due to pressures from above, the name of the princess, the kingdom and the name of informers were omitted but it was the reference ...

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/09/22/mosul-photos_n_5862248.html?utm_hp_ref=mostpopular&ncid=fcbklnkushpmg00000010 This combination of two photographs shows a 1932 image of the Crooked Minaret mosque next to a Yazidi shrine in Mosul, northern Iraq, from the Library of Congress, and the same site, without the shrine, on June 8, 2009. (Library of Congress/AP) At the beginning of June, Islamic State militants launched a lightning offensive in Iraq. Just four days into their campaign, they  captured the country's second largest city , Mosul, taking over roads, banks, courts, schools and hospitals. The group  issued religious decrees  governing daily life according to a rigid interpretation of Islamic law. Many of the city's Shiites were persecuted or forced to flee and their  iconic shrines and landmarks were destroyed . Since its capture, Mosul has become a symbol of the hardships people face living under the Islamic Sate. The Associated Press ha...

BBC Storyville: Mad Dog, Gaddafi's Secret World (2014) The story of a the son of a Bedouin goatherd sounds almost similar to many other leaders who initially starts a revolution with many big plans to uplift the welfare of the people. He has grand plans but some how many of the plans fall flat. People start asking questioning whilst others support him. He gains absolute power and it corrupts absolutely. His enemies become enemy of the state and witch hunt starts. One thing leads to another and things spiral out of control. Despot is killed by the same people who hailed him as king. Does it not give you the sense of deja vu? This documentary makers managed to track down some of the people who were close to the despot when the going was good. Many of them were on the FBI's most wanted list; Gary Korkala, former poison dealer; Frank Terpil; Lutz Kayser, a German rocket scientist. Muammar Gaddafi's father went out of his way to ensure that his son got some education. ...