|
|
|
Jewish World Review July 15, 2005 / 8 Taamuz, 5765 Today's ‘War of the Worlds’: The difference between real and make believe By Froma Harrop
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com |
I was watching "The War of the Worlds" at my local theater, but
thoughts of the London bombings kept crowding out the pictures on the
screen. And those were remarkable pictures up there. Steven Spielberg spared
no detail in showing a bloody rampage of space creatures across the American
landscape. Yet the vivid gore of the movie did not overpower the awful
images out of London. Why was that?
The best answer is that both "The War of the Worlds" and
real-life terrorism are the same story. Intelligent beings strike at
civilization for the sole purpose of killing people. Neither the space
creatures nor the terrorists have any real negotiating points. Their goal is
to commit wholesale murder of ordinary people, who are powerless to stop
them. Even the annihilators' favored targets — public buses, trains,
planes, ferries — are the same in both the real and the imagined events.
Earthquakes and tsunamis kill humans by the thousands, and
disaster movies dramatize their destruction. But these, of course, are acts
of nature. The quality of the dread changes when a thinking entity stands
behind the bloodletting. That's why when terrorists, serial killers or movie
vampires cause mayhem, the story is not just one of disaster but of horror.
What makes the London bombings extra frightening is that these
perpetrators, unlike vampires and space aliens, look normal. Sure, the
terrorists in London could be identified as ethnic Pakistanis, but they were
British-born and dressed like everyone else. In Europe, where 20 million
Muslims live, these four would seem unremarkable.
Darwin suggested that the ability to fear might have evolved as
a tool to aid survival. But how can that instinct help you when you don't
know whom to fear? The BTK killer was the ultimate average person in his
Wichita, Kan., neighborhood. Stories like his churn stomachs precisely
because the villain walks among us unobserved.
British Prime Minister Tony Blair said on Wednesday that his
government would seek stronger laws to better screen out and deport the bad
guys. These are the immigrants, he told Parliament, "who may incite hatred
or act contrary to the public good."
But how do you identify them? Mad-dog Muslim preachers are easy
to spot, but what about the bombers' families? The parents were the
immigrants here. And while the elders may have had foreign accents and
different dress, they seemed to have integrated themselves into Western
society fairly well. It was their British-born children who had adopted what
Blair called an "evil" ideology.
The dread of not knowing what activates the monster in seemingly
normal people sends many analysts on a search for root political causes.
Pull out the roots, they argue hopefully, and we can solve the problem.
Islamic radicals and their "moderate" enablers like this sort of discussion.
And to keep it going, they always have a list of root causes at the ready.
The perennial is the plight of the Palestinians. Right after the
bombing, Tony Blair stuck to the script, talking up the $3 billion that the
G-8 countries had just pledged to the Palestinian Authority over three
years. But an examination of grievances attached to each terrorist outrage
shows an ever-changing index of reasons why Muslims are angry.
Of all the reasons offered for this rage against the West, the
most likely is also the vaguest: a sense of smallness. For some young
Muslims, terrorism may seem a means to show mastery over people they feel
inferior to. The Western leaders' ritual of calling Islam a religion of
peace only enrages them further.
This is what our societies face. And that's why movies like "The
War of the Worlds" offer no cinematic escape from reality. They present just
an exaggerated version of it: Regular folk trapped in some mad plan of
extermination. For theatergoers, the truly scary part comes when you tell
yourself, "It's only a movie," and you're not entirely sure.
Every weekday JewishWorldReview.com publishes what many in in the media and Washington consider "must-reading". Sign up for the daily JWR update. It's free. Just click here.
© 2005 Creators Syndicate |
Arnold Ahlert | |||||||||||
