MICHAEL MOORE’S NEW WAR

THAT SIGN OF OUR TIMES

THE RAPES IN IRAQ

Michael Moore has a new best friend by the name of Michael Eisner.

That lesser Michael, the King of mighty Disney, who is, as we all know, now clinging to his perch at the Mouse House, under assault by angry shareholders, and besieged by the fiefdom of Comcast, has now assured that his own career will go down in Infamy. He has done that by ordering the Disney-owned Miramax affiliate to cease and desist in the distribution of Michael the first’s new film, Fahrenheit 911. That movie to come reportedly takes on the Bush Dynasty in ways that are less than flattering

Al Franken must have been the first to congratulate Moore, aware of how that law suit filed against him by Fox for mimicking the phrase “Fair and Balanced” insured him best seller status and a national platform. Disney’s diss of Michael Moore will do the same and then some. The battle lines are just being drawn.

Which Michael are you with? Which side are you on? (Remember that song?) If this is a publicity stunt hatched or provoked by the Brothers Weinstein, it is brilliant. If it’s not, Disney can’t be more stupid.

Disney’s very public stand against a film the Moore is still finishing, and the public has yet to see, will be seen for what it is: an act of capitulation before the more powerful gods of Bushdom, and a very public act of censorship.

It is the best review a still unreleased film can get, and will as a result be festooned with publicity that no Indy movie can ever afford.

FILM STILL IN EDITING

As it happens, just a few days ago, Michael Moore sent me a nice note telling he is was “chained to the Avid”(the Avid is an editing machine for the non cognoscenti) getting his film ready for Cannes, the Mother of all Film Festivals which starts next week Moore’s earlier hit, Bowling for Columbine, had won the top prize there. You can imagine how Disney’s latest decree will go down on the soil, or should we say, the sands, of a French Republic which has been at war America’s war ( and with a Disneyfied American culture for decades)

Vive la France and pass the ammunition. La Lutte Continue.

IN THE VALLEY OF THE PARANOID

Here’s Jim Rutenberg’s story from the New York Times:

“Disney Forbidding Distribution of Film That Criticizes Bush”

“WASHINGTON, May 4: The Walt Disney Company is blocking its Miramax division from distributing a new documentary by Michael Moore that harshly criticizes President Bush, executives at both Disney and Miramax said Tuesday.”

“The executives said that Disney had forbidden Miramax to distribute the film, “Fahrenheit 911,” which links Mr. Bush and prominent Saudis — including the family of Osama bin Laden — and criticizes Mr. Bush’s actions before and after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

“Disney, which bought Miramax more than a decade ago, has a contractual agreement with the Miramax principals, Bob and Harvey Weinstein, allowing it to prevent the company from distributing films under certain circumstances, like an excessive budget or an NC-17 rating.”

“Executives at Miramax, who became principal investors in Mr. Moore’s project last spring, do not believe that this is one of those cases, people involved in the production of the film said. If a compromise is not reached, these people said, the matter could go before an arbitration panel, though neither side is said to want to travel that route.”

“In a statement, Matthew Hiltzik, a spokesman for Miramax, said: ‘We’re discussing the issue with Disney. We’re looking at all of our options and look forward to resolving this amicably.’”

“But Disney executives indicated that they would not budge from their position forbidding Miramax to be the distributor, which would require the use of Buena Vista, Disney’s distribution arm.”

ttle has been shaping up for over a year and was announced by Disney’s Minister of Information, Zenia Mucha, a former staffer of New York’s Republican Governor George Pataki.

Why is a “liberal media” company like Disney doing this? Michael Moore’s agent says it is motivated by political and financial fears: He said “Mr. Eisner expressed particular concern that it would anger Gov. Jeb Bush of Florida and endanger tax breaks Disney receives for its theme park, hotels and other ventures there.”

Disney denies this and says the film is just too partisan for its family oriented image. I assume violent fare like Kill Bill and other Miramax offerings are just fine.

“THE QUESTION HAS TO BE ASKED”

Michael Moore’s comment?

“At some point the question has to be asked, ‘Should this be happening in a free and open society where the monied interests essentially call the shots regarding the information that the public is allowed to see?’”(See MichaelMoore.com)

Right on Michael Moore. This fight is just shaping up. What other distributor would not want to jump in now and bring this film to market? Thank you Michael Eisner for doing what few film makers can ever do — assure their movies will be hits before they are released.

Personally, I am just bit jealous, as I struggle to finish WMD, my own film, on the role of the media in the Iraq War which directly takes on the very information combines that Moore questions. Just yesterday I had another turndown from a distributor which makes its money selling how to dance like Britney videos. “Not for us” was the verdict. Will anyone take it or is the squeamishness of an unbrave market just destined to crush dissenting views? If only I could have persuaded Ms Spears to introduce the film rather than just be thrilled, as I was, to have Tim Robbins narrate the trailer. What say you Ms B?

I do not think that Mr. Eisner who tried to kill Nightline some years back will be interested, do you? Who will have the guts to release our still unfinished film? No answer on that front yet although it has been invited already to festivals on Nantucket and Dallas.

At the same time, I did seem to evoke some interest in the project from Robert DeNiro and others who I met last night at the Tribeca Film Festival where I attended a screening of Anant Singh’s Cry The Beloved Country, the remake of Alan Paton’s great book on South Africa. It was a great screening of an apartheid era story that is still relevant in our fear saturated culture. It should be re-released.

VIVA ARCHBISHOP TUTU

Archbishop Tutu was there to launch the film, which he did, with standing ovation eloquence. I chatted with him beforehand about the media coverage of the war too, which raised eyebrows and sent a wave of dismay over the cleric’s usually cheerful persona.

“The media in your country,” he started saying, but was then too disgusted to even finish the sentence. He actually appears in my film as one of the speakers of the great February 15th 2003 anti-war march. South Africa’s overall presence in the festival got a big hand. DeNiro, who welcomed Nelson Mandela to his Tribeca restaurant in his l990 visit to New York, was part of Marty Scorsese’s film makers against Apartheid. (I shot Mandela welcoming him in my doc “Mandela in America”)

A MODEST POPROPOSAL

It is now we who must cry for OUR beloved country. As South Africa celebrates the tenth anniversary of its democracy, we are watching the erosion of our own. Yesterday I flashed on the idea of taking that photograph we have all seen of the hooded Iraqi prisoner looking like he is being crucified, standing with arms stretched and electric wires hanging from his frame, and blow it up as a billboard.

Let’s put it up there in Times Square, perhaps next to Disney’s ABC studios or the Disney Store on 42nd Street with a simple slogan like:

SHAME ON US.

Already, that image is provoking comment worldwide as in these words written by Mike Whitney and published by Al Jazeera today:

“The now famous picture of the hooded Iraqi prisoner standing precariously on a box with electrical wires dangling from both hands is affixed to my refrigerator with the bold subtext; ‘Join the Bush War on Terror.’ There’s something otherworldly about the skeletal figure draped in sackcloth, something eerily symbolic in his pose. For many, this spectral image will undoubtedly be the foremost reminder of the ill-fated Iraqi crusade.”

Again, let’s really put that picture up in lights on Times Square, and in every city in America where so many American flags waved after 911. United We Stand.

Can we do that? Who will pay for it? Yoko Ono had a peace sign featuring a line from a Lennon song up there for months. Why not this? At least to let the world see that not all Americans will abide by disgraces at home and abroad that shames us all. BBC was reporting from Iraq this morning that it is “impossible to underestimate the damage done” to the US war in Iraq. Fox News was debating whether President Bush is right to go on Arab TV channels like Al Jazeera to try to “explain” how upset he was too. Yuk.

FYI: A reader advises: “On yesterday’s NPR ‘Talk of the Nation,’ Dr. William Schulz, Executive Director of Amnesty International USA, said that many months ago he expressly directed his agency’s concerns and findings on US military abuse of Iraqi prisoners to Donald Rumsfeld and George Bush. The abuse continued. For more on that see http://www.amnestyusa.org/home.html.”

AN ATROCITY A DAY?

Yesterday I commented on sexual abuse on Iraqi women which was apparently one of the many humiliations afflicted in that prison in Iraq. This abuse has not received adequate attention. And it is not just Iraqi women who are being victimized. What goes around comes around as the Denver Post reports:

“37 seek aid after alleging sex assaults by U.S. soldiers”

“Female troops serving in the Iraq war are reporting an insidious enemy in their own camps: fellow American soldiers who sexually assault them.”

“At least 37 female service members have sought sexual-trauma counseling and other assistance from civilian rape crisis organizations after returning from war duty in Iraq, Kuwait and other overseas stations, The Denver Post has learned. The women, ranging from enlisted soldiers to officers, have reported poor medical treatment, lack of counseling and incomplete criminal investigations by military officials. Some say they were threatened with punishment after reporting assaults.”

SLAVES IN THE KITCHEN

And if that is not bad enough, there was this report from the Kaleel Times as relayed by Germany’s DPA Agency:

“Indians claim they were abused in Iraq’s US military camps”

“NEW DELHI — A group of 20 Indians who ran away from a United States military camp in Iraq, where they worked in the kitchen, claim they were abused for nine months, it was reported on Tuesday.”

“The men from southern Kerala state paid 75,000 rupees (1,700 US dollars) each for visas to Kuwait last August. They were cheated by employment agents and landed in Baghdad.”

“One man, Hameed, said they were taken to a US military camp in Mosul where they were told that they had been bought to work in the kitchen, the Hindustan Times newspaper reported.”

“We were slaves in the American kitchens. We barely got two hours of sleep. Any slip-ups and we were tortured for days,” Hameed said.

LL KNOW THEM

Will the revelations ever cease. Here’s a shocker from Salon.com by John Dizard. It is called “How Ahmed Chalabi conned the neocons”

Sample: “When the definitive history of the current Iraq war is finally written, wealthy exile Ahmed Chalabi will be among those judged most responsible for the Bush administration’s decision to invade Iraq and topple Saddam Hussein. More than a decade ago Chalabi teamed up with American neoconservatives to sell the war as the cornerstone of an energetic new policy to bring democracy to the Middle East — and after 9/11, as the crucial antidote to global terrorism. It was Chalabi who provided crucial intelligence on Iraqi weaponry to justify the invasion, almost all of which turned out to be false, and laid out a rosy scenario about the country’s readiness for an American strike against Saddam that led the nation’s leaders to predict — and apparently even believe — that they would be greeted as liberators. Chalabi also promised his neoconservative patrons that as leader of Iraq he would make peace with Israel, an issue of vital importance to them. A year ago, Chalabi was riding high, after Saddam Hussein fell with even less trouble than expected.”

“Now his power is slipping away, and some of his old neoconservative allies — whose own political survival is looking increasingly shaky as the U.S. occupation turns nightmarish — are beginning to turn on him.”

“Chalabi’s ties to Iran — Israel’s most dangerous enemy — have also alarmed both his allies and his enemies in the Bush administration. Those ties were highlighted on Monday, when Newsweek reported that ‘U.S. officials say that electronic intercepts of discussions between Iranian leaders indicate that Chalabi and his entourage told Iranian contacts about American political plans in Iraq.’ According to one government source, some of the information he gave Iran ‘could get people killed.’ A Chalabi aide denied the allegation. According to Newsweek, the State Department and the CIA — Chalabi’s longtime enemies — were behind the leak: ‘the State Department and the CIA are using the intelligence about his Iran ties to persuade the president to cut him loose once and for all.’”

WHEN WILL POWELL GO?

This just in: “Washington, DC, May. 4 (UPI) — U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell is frustrated and wants out of the Bush administration, according to a forthcoming article in GQ magazine.”

“‘Secretary of State Colin Powell is exhausted, frustrated, and bitter, uncomfortable with President George W. Bush’s agenda, and fatigued from his battles with the Pentagon,’ GQ’s Wil Hylton writes in the forthcoming article ‘Casualty of War.”

“The article, which the magazine bills as an exclusive, results from interviews Hylton says he had with Powell ‘and his closest friends and colleagues openly and on the record.’ The magazine goes on sale May 18 on newsstands in New York and Los Angeles.”

AGAIN AND AGAIN

Helicopter gun ships have fired shells into the residential neighborhood of Al Yasemina in the Old City of Nablus. The shelling has affected several houses as well as causing significant damage to a nearby UPMRC clinic.

Dr Jihad Mashal Director of the Palestinian Medical Relief Committees denounced the attack as part of an Israeli sequence of assaults aimed at destroying the medical, economic and social infrastructure of the Palestinian people.

http://www.palestinemonitor.org/updates/nablus_shelled.htm

YOUR LETTTERS STREAM IN

Lyn Strand: “Listening to Radio Ulster this morning — I noted that several times they referred to the current battle in the States as ‘the so-called ‘War on Terror’”. Interesting! “Keep up the good work!”

Brigitta Huhnke writes from Hamburg in Germany:

“Dear Mr. Danny Schechter, as a German media scholar and journalist and as somebody who has very good friends in New York and loves the city, I am just disturbed about what is going on in Iraq. Two years ago I did a report for Standard in Vienna about what is going on in US prisons with all the hundreds of Muslim men, the so called detainees, without any lawyer, visits and so on. For example in a New Jersey jail torture definitely took place.”

“But I really want to thank you for your newsletter. I just admire your work. Every day I forward your letters to other friends. I wish you all the best, only love and peace can change the world.”

Jack Shultz writes: “You have to admit that Bush and his entourage have accumulated an amazing record of both incomparable corruption and incompetence.”

“To start with, he’s an illegitimate president who is liable for war crime charges. This regime usurped the office of the presidency, winning it through a corrupt Supreme Court process. There is a law, I’m told, which obliges a judge to recuse himself from any case in which that judge may appear to have a conflict of interest. In this case, two judges were in that position. It was through that case that I came to realize that Supreme Court justices are above the law.”

“Since their inauguration, they have driven the budget from a comfortable surplus to a massive deficit, pillaged the national treasury, eviscerated the constitution, shredded the bill of rights, knowingly lied to the Congress, knowingly lied to the American people in the State of the Union message, knowingly lied to the people of the world at the UN, taken the US into two criminal wars, destroyed international alliances that had held up in good stead for a half a century, and that was just for openers!”

WHEN DID ALL AMERICANS BECOME WHITE?

David Honig Exec. Director, Minority Media & Telecom Council

“Bush said:”

“‘There’s a lot of people in the world who don’t believe that people whose skin color may not be the same as ours can be free and self-govern…. I believe that people whose skins aren’t necessarily-are a different color than white can self-govern (emphasis supplied).’”

“Who is this “ours” that Bush was referring to? When did all Americans become white?”

Bob Johnson from Shenandoah Valley VA

“The American Military Establishment historically is well known for its poor racial record. The pre WWII military was strongly segregated by color, so no one seemed to notice. Besides that was no less than government policy (even Federal policy thanks to Woodrow Wilson). But it was also intensely anti Jewish in the officer ranks, as well as non-coms.’

“When I was in Germany (1960-63) the base and the GI town outside the gates was very racially divided and things were fine as long as Colored folk knew their place.”

“That this is often the case in our Police forces as well must say something about the mentality and psychology of those who choose these macho professions. It is way behind the right time for this subject to undergo intense study and plans to remove the bias effect.”

“I would suggest it starts with the US VS. THEM sense of those in these professions and that this sense is encouraged by those in charge, even when the same people rigorously deny such bias. Once again the seemingly natural need of the human psyche to enhance differences rather than embrace similarities makes the world dangerous.”

MEDIA WATCHING

Jean McCollister: “this morning I tried to get the full text of the US diplomats’ letter to Bush. Nearly all the hits were from non-US news sources, which had posted it hours ago. The only US source I saw was the Seattle Post-Intelligencer (15 minutes old when I checked). Interesting, eh?”

symon sanborn: “I like to keep an eye on the media outlets that I think are pretty biased, Fox News etc. So last night I turned to The O’Reilly Factor just in time to hear him say that he thought that even though the prisoners were treated inhumanly that they were in there for a reason. Nice justification. Next the guest who was on said that the militaries own investigator told in his report that up to 60% of the people detained were not terrorist but were innocent people caught up in a general sweeping of the streets. Mr. O’Reilly just flat out said he didn’t believe it, that people he had talked to ‘on the ground’ said it was much less than 60%.”

CULTURAL POLITICAL NOTE: (MORE TOMORROW)

This Thursday, three days after his 85th birthday, Pete Seeger will sing in a concert and launch a new project intended to challenge the music industry to share folk music royalties with third world countries. He will sing and speak Thursday May 6th at an event billed as “This is What Real Democracy Sounds Like” that begins at 6:30 p.m. at the CUNY The Graduate Center, 365 5th Avenue at 34th Street, New York City. Tickets are still available at the door and online at www.poclad.org/anniversary.cfm or by calling 800-316-2739

Keep your letters coming. Thanks to all the radio stations calling for interviews (Germany and Canada yesterday), and your support. Keep those ‘eees coming. Write dissector@mediachannel.org