In God's Army?

Incendies (Great Blaze, French, English, Arabic; 2010)

Director: Dennis Villenue

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1255953/

This film has garnered numerous awards and is widely regarded as one of Denis Villeneuve's greatest directorial achievements. It is a compelling film that not only unveils the brutality of wars and conflicts driven by beliefs but also depicts the trauma that ordinary people suffer and often carry to their graves. 

Like the mother in this film, who escaped civil war in the Middle East (probably Lebanon) and spent her final years bitter, she had a strained relationship with her only remaining relatives, her twin adult children.

When her appointed trustee, her former employer, reads out her will, the mother has outlined certain conditions. For the first time in their lives, they learn of the existence of a half-brother in their mother's country of origin. The children are tasked with delivering two letters, one to their half-brother and another to their father. Reluctantly, the children undertake a journey to the Middle East. After navigating a country torn apart by civil war along religious lines, they compile a composite sketch of their mother, illustrating what she endured as a teenager. Her first love with a Muslim boy was opposed and led to her family's disapproval. She had a child out of wedlock, who was left behind when she left her home.

She tried to improve herself through education, but a civil war disrupted all her efforts. Embroiled in the underground student movement, she went on to assassinate a radical Muslim leader. She was imprisoned, tortured, and raped. Her village was bombed, and her illegitimate child ended up in an orphanage. The child was recruited as a child soldier by the Muslim rebel group. What happens at the end will leave a bitter aftertaste. There's nothing obscene about the whole thing. Such events often occur during wars and civil unrest. Moral fibre and basic decency are lost. Rape, looting, and senseless killings happen when a society is broken. Moreover, when perpetrators carry out their acts in the name of God, they believe it is justified, as God is marching alongside them.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Arm yourself, intellectually!

The Parasitic Mind: How Infectious Ideas Are Killing Common Sense

Author: Gad Saad

When the Cold War ended and the Berlin Wall came crumbling down, the world thought the leftists and their ideas were buried in the rubble of what was once considered the panacea of all of Man's woes. They were wrong. The concept of unhappy people blaming all their woes on the system continued. The leftists just went into universities and infiltrated the world media. With neologisms and complicated, contradictory coined phrases, they managed to create a world of similar thinking individuals.

It would have been fine if these new ideas were just another armamentarium to research for the ultimate truth. It instead was meant to create a herd of an unthinking population whose way of thinking permeated all layers of society. Radical militant feminists insist that being born male means toxicity oozing from all his orifices. The cancel culture practitioners literally shoot down people if their narratives do not concur with the leftists' agenda. Transgender people think gender is fluid and press for society to assign gender to young children at a tender age.

Playing victimhood is the newest game in town. The victims are actually perpetrators of mayhem but cry a river when their assault is retaliated. And they use the power of media and academic pseudo-intellectuals to justify their course. Identity politics divide and sub-divide people into combative camps.

A particular way of thinking labelled 'ostrich parasitic syndrome' by the author has emerged. Scientific thinking developed over generations of discovery has been annihilated by science deniers and denial-discarded ways of thinking. These people are cocksure about their convictions and, like wailing babies, just would not accept others' arguments, no matter how rational or scientific it is.

Prof Gad Saad is a sane voice in these insane times who encourages his readers to arm themselves with knowledge and defend the world against the attack on common sense. Saad himself was a victim of such infectious barbarity. He grew up as a Jew in the only country in the Middle East with a Christian majority around 1948 at the creation of Israel, Lebanon. The wars that flared after its inception created waves of refugees. In the spirit of humanitarianism, Lebanon took in refugees from its Muslim neighbours. Saad was born in 1964. By the late 1960s, due to disparities in population growth, Lebanon was no longer a Christian majority country. It instead had to deal with terrorist groups like Fatah, Hizballah, Hamas and many more and found itself embroiled in a Civil War by 1973. Saad's family, living as closet Jews, had to flee their motherland after being doublecrossed by the very close Muslim worker who had serviced their house for years. 

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Follow