9/10
Jihad vs. McWorld
9 December 2009
All of the talk of terrorist threats, sleeper cells and weapons of mass destruction seem to be quietly going away now that Obama is President of the United States. Very few people are really saying that the US was wrong, or that the neo-conservatives in power made everything up, it's just simply vanished. One day the terrorist threat level in the US disappeared and wasn't mentioned again. Now that Barry is in power is everything okay? So no one ever was convicted for these crimes against the public and few people even talk about them anymore. It's all been erased from the public's memory with new episodes of So You Think You Can Dance.

This documentary is quite interesting. This is much more in depth than anything created by Michael Moore. Moore touches on a few of these topics in "Fahrenheit 9/11" but Moore himself is a political figure who supports the Democrats so can't be taken seriously.

The origins of neo-con movement are well known in political-science circles but this movie tells them quite well. Leo Strauss was a philosopher who came up with these ideas and taught them to students such as Paul Wolfowitz who applied them later to US policy with Reagan and Bush (II).

The movie also explores the fundamentalist Islamic revolution which never really swept through the middle-east and was limited to a small group of bandits who took hold in Afghanistan. Their story begins with an Egyptian man who has an epiphany about the moral corruption of western society and brings those ideas back to the middle east. They're always fringe and never widespread as the corporate media or neo-con governments would have us believe.

All the myths of the post 9/11 age are explored here and quickly debunked. The one line the movie does not cross is saying that 9/11 was an inside job. With all the other information in the movie about the false sleeper cells and bogus security, it wouldn't have been a stretch to acknowledge that maybe 9/11 was an inside job.

Comparing the neo-conservatives in the US with the Islamic fundamentalists in the middle-east isn't a new idea. Jihad vs. McWorld was a 1992 article written by Benjamin Barber which was later expanded into a full-length book.

Another interesting concept of the movie is that the terrorist myth created by the US neo-cons actually may have led to a resurgence in real terrorists. The filmmakers speculate that several of the men in these groups may have played into the hands of the US myth by giving them false information about planned bombings of the Brooklyn Bridge and Statue of Liberty.

This is a very effective documentary for anyone interested in the terrorist myth as created by America. It's hard to say if this story ends with the election of Barack Obama in 2008. The idea of terrorism is so ingrained at this point that Obama has to add thousands more soldiers simply to get out of the quagmire which is Afghanistan.
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