DANA VALLEJO: THE LOONY LEFT PALESTINIAN HORROR SHOW READ IT ALL
http://www.thecommentator.com/article/1320/loony_left_palestinian_horror_show
1. CHILDREN OF THE GAZA?
2. HAPPY HOUR OVER AT THE GUARDIAN
3. OBAMA’S SMOOTH GROOVES
4. TOM AND JERRY WOLFOWITZ?
5. GREENPEACE PORKY-PIES (OR GREENCEASE)
Being something of a horror/thriller movie connoisseur (call it a guilty pleasure) I’m well accustomed to the full spread of tried and tested formulae: claustrophobic camera angles that suggest the baddy is creeping right behind the goody; foolhardy leads who are apparently allergic to light switches when searching for axe-wielding psychopaths hiding under their stairs; people who promise to “be right back”, only to meet their doom in a violent flash; little girls with long black hair in white dresses; and generally anything to do with puppets, clowns, and children’s toys.
So what of the latest work from the Palestinian organisation, Burj Luq-Luq Community Center and Society, which features evil puppets that encourage children to kill with machine guns?
They only get 4/10 for concept – as we’ve seen, using puppets and children’s toys in the horror genre is a tired cliché (see Dead Silence, Child’s Play, Puppetmaster etc.)
I’ll raise to 8/10 for potential story development – children waving machine guns around is a terrifying prospect, though, sadly for Burj Luq-Luq, the violent child plot has also been done to death – no pun intended (see We Need to Talk about Kevin, Funny Games, Children of the Corn etc.)
But I’ll have to give them 10/10 for general chill factor. Why? Because it’s real. Not “real” in the marketing sense of, say, the Blair Witch Project or Cannibal Holocaust. No, real, real. As in, you know, real.
Because the following isn’t a trailer for Burj Luq-Luq’s newest movie (you’ve probably figured out by now that they don’t make movies…) – it’s footage from an “educational” puppet show held for Palestinian children in East Jerusalem.
Repugnant? Yes, of course. But the most frightening aspect of this psychotic, brain-washing horror story is the fact that Burj Luq-Luq has “strategic ties” with UNICEF and UNESCO amongst others.
Sadly, the UN’s involvement in terrorist horror stories is becoming a cliché of its own in that particular sub-genre.
2. HAPPY HOUR OVER AT THE GUARDIAN
With England due to play their second Euro 2012 game tonight against Sweden, there’s an unusually relaxed feeling surrounding the national team. Perhaps it’s thanks to a collective and long overdue realisation that, actually, despite pioneering the modern game, we’re not much good at it. Pressure off; go out and do your best; no talk of potentially winning.
Or maybe it’s down to the rare nationalistic boon we’ve witnessed of late thanks to Her Majesty’s Diamond Jubilee. Sure, many of the Union Jacks have been replaced with a St. George’s Cross, but, as a nation, we seem to be hanging on to the feel-good wave, perhaps causing us to ditch the tension and to simply get on with supporting our country instead. Forget being crap, we’re proud to be so as long as it’s red and white.
Unless of course you read the Guardian.
“I’d like to be an England fan. But even though I’m English, it’s hard” starts Nooruddean Choudry in a piece called “Euro 2012: I want to be an England fan and a Muslim. Why is that so hard?” for Comment is Free.
“For a start, as a British Muslim, I am unsettled by the sight of England supporters dressed as Christian knights and jovially waving Crusader shields at the European Championships in Poland and Ukraine. Footage of last night’s cagey opener with France was interspersed with close-ups of young men dressed in the armour of Knights Templar hordes.”
“[To] brandish a sword and recall the brutal and bloody invasion of Muslim lands is portrayed as harmless banter.”
“I wonder how England supporters would react to scenes at the 2022 World Cup Qatar, were masses of Arab fans to dress up in Saladin turbans and brandish Saracen swords emblazoned with Qu’ranic verse.”
First of all, though I hate to say it, I think Choudry gives England fans too much credit — in assuming they’re aware of the history of the crusades and in assuming that they’d recognise the proposed Qatari gesture. My honest opinion is that they’d be more likely to equate the situation with scenes they’ve seen in Indiana Jones: Raiders of the Lost Ark or David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia and simply assume that Arabs hadn’t advanced much.
And second of all: has Choudry never heard of St. George?
3. OBAMA’S SMOOTH GROOVES
Love him or hate him, you have to admit Obama is a pretty smooth customer. He can sing; he can dance; he can slow-jam the news.
But the latest ad churned out by his campaign team pushes this reputation to the very limit while making it pretty clear that they believe a) Obama’s target demographic to basically be a bit thick (the sound bites seem more like an after thought than the crux of the ad itself) and b) that this demographic needs little more than a less-than-subtle reminder that they share cultural and racial ties with the President in order to turn out for him.
I don’t doubt that it will work; I don’t doubt that it’s remarkable how divisive American politics remain along racial lines; I don’t doubt that we’d all love to see what the reaction would be if Romney responded by circulating an ad campaign in the same region focused on a slogan of: “Waddup playas? Romney da man yo“. But it makes for awkward listening to say the least.
I suppose we ought to just be grateful they didn’t use the “N word”.
4. TOM AND JERRY WOLFOWITZ?
The dastardly brainwashing antics of the pesky lot at Burj Luq-Luq are not unprecedented. Not if you believe Sudanese professor Muhammad Waqi’Ullah anyway who claims that there is a sinister side to Superman movies and Tom and Jerry cartoons. Specifically, Waqi’Ullah claimed that a neoconservative agenda, which allegedly promotes the survival of the fittest and the destruction of the weak, is subliminally infused within the famous American works of fiction…
First of all, let’s get the biggest faux pas out of the way: white socks with a suit — don’t do it kids.
Now, to the stuff of secondary importance. If Waqi’Ullah had ever actually seen an episode of Tom and Jerry, he’d be fully aware that the ostensibly “weak” character, Jerry, runs rings around the Great Satan Tom in every episode. What are we to deduce from this? That Tom and Jerry is in fact a sophisticated piece of al-Qaeda propaganda which is designed to teach little ones the ways and means of asymmetrical, insurgency warfare? The game is up, Waqi’Ullah! Your secret is out!
And another thing: has he ever read Thomas Hobbes, who he accuses of asserting that the weak must be crushed by the strong? (the very thing Hobbes warned against in Leviathan)
Somebody chuck this guy some Ayn Rand and get the camera rolling…I smell a YouTube hit…
5. GREENPEACE PORKY-PIES
One of Greenpeace’s favourite smears is to claim that anybody not on side is by definition a sadistic, cigar-smoking fat-cat who brushes their teeth with toothpaste made from crushed orangutan skull and has their cornflakes with crude oil instead of milk. Or something like that.
The truth is, we are interested in just that: the truth.
Which is inconvenient for Greenpeace as when it inevitably comes out, they end up looking a little silly for scaling buildings, breaking and entering, or indeed boycotting (franchised) fast food outlets on the grounds of a bunch of half-truths, exaggerations and plain porkies.
This week, GreenCEASE has exposed the similarly-named NGO for basing its whole hoopla on KFC, and the paper it uses for its chicken buckets, on information which, at the very least, falls under the category of “half-truth” — and in fact is better suited to the status of “plain porky”.
You see, the line regularly trotted out to the media — that Indonesia loses “approximately 5 million acres of forest to logging a year” — is actually a pseudo-fact based on a report by the Orwellian-sounding Global Forest Watch (GFW) of which there is no indication of peer review and which is at least decade out of date.
The up-to-date numbers of the Indonesian government actually paint a very different picture. But, seeing as they too brush their teeth with monkey skull, who’s buying that, eh?
Dane Vallejo is Associate Editor of The Commentator. Follow him on Twitter @DaneVallejo
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