By Debbie Schlussel
**** UPDATE: “O Jerusalem” REVIEW ADDED. SCROLL DOWN. ****
Because the big box office openings were last Wednesday for the Thanksgiving weekend, the only two releases that are out this weekend in wide national review are “Redacted” and “O Jerusalem,” both boring propaganda films filled with lies and other deception. “Awake,” also out today, was not screened for critics, usually a sign that it’s a clunker. And now, on to the agit-prop on film a/k/a “high quality Bin Laden cinema”. I will review “O’Jerusalem,” the other propaganda-piece, later today:

Redacted Poster By David Lunde/Lundesigns
* “Redacted“: I was the first conservative blog to expose and oppose this film, back in February. And I’m glad to see that it bombed in the major cities in which it debuted, two weeks ago. My initial thoughts on this movie were right on target, and actually an understatement of how harmful and outrageous this film is. The movie, directed by Brian DePalma, reaches most of the rest of the country today.
After I wrote about this movie, Executive Producer Mark Cuban told me it’s actually a “very patriotic movie” and invited me to host a screening of it for conservative bloggers. I am glad that I did not do it and that it never took place. This movie is an abomination. It is disgusting. It is defamatory. And it is a lie. If this is a “ver patriotic movie,” according to Cuban, I wonder what if he thinks there are any very anti-American movies, which is what this actually is.
I can see Osama Bin Laden using this movie as recruiting propaganda without the need to edit it. It is that bad. It presents every myth about America you’ve heard in Bin Laden videos, as fact.
The movie isn’t just against the troops. It tells us that the kidnapping and torture/beheading murder of our troops by Al-Qaeda is justified. The rape of a 15-year-old Iraqi girl and the murder of her and her family by two Marines is the reason they do this, we are told. But there has only been one of these anomalous actions by a few renegade troops. How many beheadings and dismemberments have there been just because the victims are Americans or Westerners? What’s your justification for that, DePalma and Cuban?
Throughout this 93 minute film, America’s soldiers are portrayed as low-class, callous, stupid losers who chose the Marines “to stay out of jail”. They are crude, inhuman, and disgusting. They are racists who most refer to Iraqis as “SandN-ggers” and perverts whose reading material consists mostly of hardcore porn. Heck, even their playing cards are naked women.
Oh, and the movie is narrated, not in English, but IN FRENCH. Figures. Whenever our soldiers speak English, there are French subtitles. That tells me for whom this movie was made–not Americans, who are avoiding this defamatory celluloid like the plague, but the French, who hate us and have a significant and growing percentage of their population (over 20%) that is Arab Muslim.
The French female narrator tells us–again, in French–that 2,000 Iraqis were killed by Americans at checkpoints and that only 60 were actually terrorists. Then, she tells us, no U.S. soldiers were ever charged for these deaths. Um, maybe that’s because the Iraqis acted like terrorists and rammed through the checkpoints without stopping. This is war, and people–innocent people get killed when they act stupid.
Instead, we are shown a car that rams through the checkpoint without stopping, the U.S. Marines shoot it up and kill a pregnant Iraqi woman being driven to the hospital by her brother to have her baby. It’s not his fault, we are told, because he thought the soldiers were waving him on.
Then, we’re shown the soldier who shot up the woman. He’s the same one who will, later in the film, rape and murder an Iraqi 15-year-old girl and murder her family. Flake, as he is called, says he is happy he just made his first “SandN-gger” kill. “Killing them is like gutting catfish . . . like stomping on cockroaches” he brags. He says he joined the Marines because before that his only life activity was “getting drunk and trying to stay out of jail.”
In several scenes, amidst prominent shots of soldiers reading porno mags, we see a prominent Confederate flag behind the bed of one of the rapist/murderer soldiers. He and the other soldiers who commit these heinous acts resemble Chris Farley and Pauly Shore. The ringleader, the Pauly Shore character, sounds so much like the comedian, if you shut your eyes, you’ll think you’re back in the ’80s watching a racist, scumbag version of his defunt MTV show. Do you think our soldiers represent Chris Farley and Pauly Shore-esque loser clowns? DePalma and Cuban apparently do.
We see various scenes of them harassing the 15-year-old Iraqi girl and her sister or friend (it isn’t clear) at checkpoints on their way to and from school. They feel them up and brush their genitals against them, and then laugh about it. One of the soldiers, the Chris Farley character takes her to a private booth to do it. Is this really how they think all of our soldiers behave at checkpoints? As murderers and child-molesters? Apparently so, because that’s what we’re shown for “checkpoints.”
Then, there is the rape/murder scene. It’s very graphic and disgusting. But before that, we’re shown that the soldiers planned it ahead of time because:

My f-cksteak needs some p-ssy . . . . There is nothing like some sweet haji ass that’s gonna get my plumbing back in order.

And this gem:

Vaporize every last SandN-gger.

Remember, we don’t really know the details of what really happened at the rape/murder, which I condemn 100%. So, all of these conversations and situations are imagined and made up, which they note at the beginning of the film. Fabricated anti-American propaganda.
Yes, “Redacted” is everything you’ve feared and worse. It is the most blatant propaganda I’ve seen coming out of a major studio in Hollywood yet.
And it’s an hour and a half of aiding and abetting the enemy. In some circles, that’s called treason.
Skip this perversion and defamation of our soldiers, AT ALL COST.
* “O Jerusalem“: This anti-Israel movie which–worse than morally equivocating Israel with Palestinian terrorists and other Muslims who went to war against Israel upon its independence–rehearses all the old anti-Israel canards. You’ve heard them before: That Israel took this Muslim’s land and that Palestinian’s land, etc., etc., etc., ad nauseam. Not a shred of the real story is involved. And the movie is long, boring, and–above all–completely silly.
And that’s no surprise, given that the movie is taken from the best-selling 1972 fiction novel of the same name, “O Jerusalem,” written by a French anti-Israel writer, Dominique LaPierre, and the anti-Israel former UPI and Newsweek Mid-East Bureau Chief, Larry Collins. No surprise, this movie is as slanted as his “news” coverage was and was written in part to negate growing support for Israel with its win in the 1967 Six Day War. And, yes, it is fiction–not just the story, but the “facts” provided throughout this clunker.
And–another non-surprise–the movie is directed by French Arab, Elie Chouraqui. The plot: Well, I’m not sure what it is, other than to propagandize against Israel’s founding and the right of the Jewish people to their historic homeland in Israel. At the beginning, we are introduced to a liberal Jew, Bobby, his extremist Jewish friend, and–of course!–the most moderate and reasonable of the three major characters, a Palestinian whose family is losing their land to the Israelis with the declaration of Israel. Also not surprisingly, he’s played by Said Taghmaoui, who played an Islamic terrorist in “Sleeper Cell.”
All three characters go to Israel, and we are shown the “unfair” bombing of the King David Hotel. It was not only “fair.” It was necessary, and adequate warning was provided. Those who blew up the hotel gave several warnings by phone and dropped leaflets that they were going to bomb it–none of which is shown in this movie (of course not). The movie, of course, does not show that prior to the bombing, the British, who were headquartered there, deliberately arrested thousands of Jews with no basis, to help the Arabs. The British had also raided the Jewish agency and shared intelligence info siezed from it with the Arabs. Finally, the British refused to let Jews immigrate in any significant numbers, while pogroms resulting in their murders occurred in Poland, etc.
Throughout the movie, and at its conclusion, we are lectured by Bobby, the Jewish lead of the movie, that war begets terrorism, killing begets killing. So, Israel should have never become a state and the Jews who’ve been there for thousands of years should just roll over and die and hand it all over to their Islamist persecuters? That’s the overwhelming message of this movie.
Major battles for Israel’s independence and heroic scenes are reduced to a few stragglers on a street duking it out with nice Arabs. Arabs Muslims are shown as friendly and loving towards Jews, until Israel declared itself a state. That’s simply false. There were Arab pogroms against Jews all before Israel became a state, including famous attacks in the 1920s, etc.
Shame on Tovah Feldshuh for portraying the late, tough Golda Meir in this false movie. Feldshuh has made a fortune honorably portraying Meir in a one-woman show on Broadway, but this more than negates that. Ms. Meir is turning over in her grave, as is David Ben-Gurion–also defamed in this silly, makeshift propaganda “film.”
Low quality HAMAS/Fatah cinema.