RIFLE RANGE BOY

Fauda (Chaos, Hebrew/Arab; 2015-2019) (Miniseries S1-3) Is it not ironic that the Western nations want to police the whole world but failed miserably at finding peace at the heart of the Judeo-Christian stronghold. It seems that the brothers of the Book perform poorly when it comes to showing brotherly love. Also funny that a place that four great religions of the world look up to as their holy land cannot be protected by their Protector. A land hardly larger than 30,000 square kilometres, but this piece of land had not seen peace since time immemorial.  The feud has lasted so long that nobody can remember who drew first blood. Both parties, the Palestinians and the Israelis, claim legitimate historical rights on that piece of land. Looks like all that talk of the religion of peace, the religion of love and the religion of compassion is mere rhetoric. The reference to 'brotherhood' is only offered to the brethren of the same faith, not of the whole of mankind. I am sure God mus...

Feathered Cocaine: The Story of Money, Terrorism and Falconry (2010) Is not interesting that fifteen years after the apprehension and killing of Osama bin Laden, this documentary is making its round. Perhaps, it is the flavour of the month as the US Elections are just around the corner. Probably because Joe Biden is associated with the old administration, it is a subtle reminder of the evil deeds of the past Government. Watching this Tribeca Film Festival screened a documentary about falconry, it gave a kind of a deja vu feeling. It reminded me of the many so-called altruistic non-governmental organisation working on humanitarian cause getting a free pass into third world countries and starting to dictate how the host country should be run. Think Red Cross and the Bolshevik Revolution, think IMF and the 1997 economic crisis, think missionaries and the Nicaragua Contra rebels. Here, in 2010 documentary, Alan Howell Parrot tells the story of his life. Becoming obsessed with falc...

The Little Drummer Girl (Miniseries; 2018) Shakespeare said that the world is a stage and that we all mere actors playing our roles. It is true. The things that are allegedly happening at this very moment are actually staged and real actors play the part. This is the premise of this confusing spy saga which is based on John le Carre's novel of the same name.  It tells the tale of a clandestine Israeli spy agency that, through its covert activities, nips troublesome anti-Israeli resistance at its bud. To infiltrate through the enemy lines, university students, activists and actors are recruited to act out their roles wholeheartedly. This indoctrination process is so intense that participants lose their grip on what is reality and what is not. They are sometimes needed to play the part of double-crossing agents. Their interaction with the 'enemies' open their realisation that the people on the other side of the divide have their point of view which also makes sense....

Aylan Kurdi at Bodrum Beach It was just a picture to don the morning papers to say what reporters do best. Some of their photographs become international icons of a bygone era. Every living soul would be instantly aware of the American atrocity in Vietnam at one look of the picture of napalm struck confused girl running aimlessly with burnt clothes. This picture the dead toddler by the Turkish beach may one day be the reminder of the danger of stirring of a hornet in the highly volatile region of Middle East. For the perpetrators, the US, it is a European problem, not theirs. No rubber dinghies would traverse the Atlantic to reach their shores. You think a picture is just a picture, but you would be amazed at the dynamics and rhetoric that goes through before and after it goes to print. A dead body polluting the beach of a bourgeois beach resort. The child has no life. Death has engulfed him, but the picture is subtle enough not to appear gory. The violence and unc...

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...

TUESDAY, MARCH 1, 2011 Aljazeera: History’s shifting sands... by Mark LeVine The revolutions sweeping the Arab world indicate a tectonic shift in the global balance of people power by  Mark LeVine  Aljazeera , 26 Feb 2011  For decades, even centuries, the peoples of the Arab world have been told by Europeans and, later, Americans that their societies were stagnant and backward. According to Lord Cromer, author of the 1908 pseudo-history Modern Egypt, their progress was “arrested” by the very fact of their being Muslim, by virtue of which their minds were as “strange” to that of a modern Western man “as would be the mind of an inhabitant of Saturn”. The only hope of reshaping their minds towards a more earthly disposition was to accept Western tutelage, supervision, and even rule “until such time as they [we]re able to stand alone,” in the words of the League of Nations’ Mandate. Whether it was Napoleon claiming fraternité with Egyptians in fin-de-siècle Cairo or Ge...