am film renais hubbard

<div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">guard uk</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>
</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" /><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>'Invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity'</b></font></div><div>James Meek attends the world's first right-wing film festival</div><div>
</div><div>Thu 23 Sep ‘04 21.25 EDT</div><div>
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</div><div>If you are travelling to an event that bills itself as the world's first conservative film festival, it is prudent to do a little research in advance. The premise of the American Film Renaissance, held in Dallas recently, was that Hollywood is in the grip of a clique of anti-religious, gay-loving, gun-hating, foreigner-appeasing, left-wing degenerates who wilfully and foolishly fail to represent mainstream American opinion.</div><div>
</div><div>Cruising over the Atlantic on an American Airlines Boeing 777, en route to Dallas, seemed a good opportunity to test the theory, particularly since I had been seated squarely over the right wing of the aircraft. Films don't come any more Hollywood mainstream than the ones they put 20 inches in front of your face on big US airlines.</div><div>
</div><div>Fourth on American's inflight bill was Saltwater, a four-year-old foreign film, and hence immediately suspect, but not actually Hollywood's fault (it's Irish). Third on the menu was Bobby Jones: Stroke of Genius, about an amateur golfer who achieved a clean sweep of the big world golfing trophies in 1930 and went on to found the Augusta National Golf Club. I searched for a Marxist parable on the hallowed greens. I did not find one.</div><div>
</div><div>I sought, too, for the dark satanic subtext of Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, for the hidden message of evil that would draw American youngsters into a life of godlessness and vegetarianism. I sought in vain.</div><div>
</div><div>Top of the bill was a movie called New York Minute, starring the Olsen sisters, Ashley and Mary-Kate, as pretty blonde teenagers being pursued through Manhattan by a truancy officer, a criminal bungler of less than pantomime menace and a pair of lovable mussy-haired boys. Where was the sex? Where was the violence? Where were the drugs? Where, in this Desperately Seeking Susan de nos jours, was the subversion to inflame conservative America?</div><div>
</div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">"Our film festival is not really to chastise liberals, it's to chastise conservatives," said Jim Hubbard in the lobby of the Intercontinental Hotel, Dallas, next day. Hubbard set up American Renaissance with his wife Ellen. "Quit whining about Hollywood, quit threatening these meaningless boycotts, get into the market of ideas and fight for what you believe. There was just such a shortage of films and documentaries that represented a conservative world view. For some reason, conservatives don't go into film. They don't tend to be artists. I don't know why. That's just a tendency."</span></div><div>
</div><div>Hubbard has been described by the media as a wealthy Dallas attorney, although he isn't. He's from Arkansas, not long out of law school, and has done various jobs, including restaurateur and schoolteacher. He told me he and his wife slept on a $200 futon from Wal-Mart. Ellen Hubbard did not seem happy he told me this.</div><div>
</div><div>The Hubbards set up the festival - mainly, they say, with money from family and friends - after going to<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"> an arthouse cinema one night and being faced with a choice between Michael Moore's Bowling For Columbine and Frieda, a film about Frieda Kahlo - "a film about a communist artist," as Hubbard put it. "Neither of those films reflected our world view."</span></div><div>
</div><div>What upsets Hubbard and festival-goers is as much what Hollywood puts into its films as what they leave out. Why, Hubbard asks, did they change Muslim terrorists to right-wing terrorists from Europe when they filmed Tom Clancy's The Sum of All Fears? And could I name any films in which the Viet Cong were portrayed as villains? Well, there was The Deer Hunter, which won the Best Picture Oscar in 1978; in it, sweating, screaming, vicious North Vietnamese soldiers are shown dragging their US prisoners from rat-infested cages and forcing them to play Russian roulette. Hubbard hadn't seen it.</div><div>
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</div><div>The festival launch was in a small function room in the hotel that evening. It wasn't Cannes. Not that it wanted to be. There were lots of black and orange balloons, a buffet and a free bar, and about 80 film-makers, journalists, producers and hard to label individuals drawn to the scent of conservative gatherings like deer to a salt-lick, such as a well turned-out Englishman, Jonathan Boyd Hunt - there to promote his research proving "the very real threat that the BBC-Guardian axis poses to the interests of the United States".</div><div>
</div><div>Among the crowd I got talking to was a marketing executive, Matt Tibbitts, who was hoping to get his movie Echoes of Innocence accepted for Sundance. It's about a girl whose childhood sweetheart vanishes but who holds true to her promise to marry him. Tibbitts wouldn't tell me how long she waits, but I had the impression it is a very long time. "She promised a guy in seventh grade that he would be the one she married so, obviously, she's still a virgin," said Tibbitts. "We want people of all faiths, of all backgrounds to come and view it, to start the dialogue, because virginity isn't just a Christian thing."</div><div>
</div><div>To the outsider, it might appear that 2004 was honours even for the anti-war left and the pro-war Christian right in film terms in America: the former had the astonishing commercial success of Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 to enjoy, the latter the huge phenomenon of Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ. They didn't see it that way at American Film Renaissance. They were angry about Fahrenheit 9/11, certainly - surprisingly so, given that so few of them had seen it. But they were still angry that the big studios had scorned The Passion. Even their triumph at Gibson going off and showing the big players how a Christian film could make money was tinged with rage.</div><div>
</div><div><b>Michael Medved</b>, the right-wing talk radio host whose speech opened the festival, is not a Christian, as he took pains to point out; he is Jewish, which is why, he explained, he couldn't use a microphone. It was the Sabbath. "The huge success of The Passion of the Christ has changed western culture permanently and forever," he said. "The opposition to the film is not because it was anti-Jewish but because it was pro-Christian ... People who fear all religion are going to react to that movie like Dracula reacts to the cross."</div><div>
</div><div>Medved's festival oration climaxed on the struggle over the legalisation of gay marriages. "Every single image you see of homosexuality in the media is positive, saintly," he said. "When was the last time you saw some degraded [homosexual] character?" He accused the Massachusetts judges who ruled gay marriage constitutational of jeopardising America's mission in the Middle East. "We are engaged right now in trying to plant the seeds of democracy in Afghanistan and Iraq ... how do we try to teach Iraq about democracy when a handful of unelected judges dictate to the American people?"</div><div>
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</div><div>The festival opener was one of only two full-length feature films on show - DC 9/11: Time of Crisis, a dramatisation of events in the Bush administration on and after September 11 2001. Timothy Bottoms, best known for his role in The Last Picture Show, plays George Bush. The movie premiered on the Showtime TV channel and went swiftly to DVD from there. Bottoms turned out for the opening, the only remote hint of anything suggesting the glamour of Cannes, Sundance or Venice. He also had the only limousine, and offered me a ride to the screening venue, which was a mile away.</div><div>
</div><div>Bottoms distanced himself from the festival's agenda. "I'm not into that conservative-liberal stuff," he said, pointing out that the last time he played Bush, it was as a clown for the TV channel Comedy Central, in a sitcom from the creators of South Park called That's My Bush. That was before 9/11, however, and Bottoms said he played Bush serious this time so as to give something back to the survivors of the terrorist attacks on America.</div><div>
</div><div>"For that two-week period, America came together and helped pick George Bush up and gave him the spotlight and the stage to make a decision," said Bottoms, sitting in the dark interior of the limo with a stubby plastic bottle of water in one hand, as the lights on the vehicle's built-in bar changed from orange to yellow to green. "The comparison is with Peter Pan. Tinkerbell, her heart was broken, you think she's going to die, but Peter Pan tells everyone they can bring her back if they just believe in fairies. I think America did that to the president of the US, especially when he went to Ground Zero."</div><div>
</div><div>I vowed not to review the festival films, and I will be as true to that vow as a good Christian girl guarding her chastity for her missing sweetheart. Let the record show only that DC 9/11 does show Donald Rumsfeld predicting the coming attack to his marvelling generals before it happens; that Paul Wolfowitz, the real version of whom can be seen in Fahrenheit 9/11 chuckling, licking his comb and running it through his hair, is portrayed in DC 9/11 as looking like one of Samantha from Sex and the City's more attractive lovers; that when a senior Democrat was portrayed on the big screen, pledging loyalty to Bush, a moan of hate rippled through the audience, like wind in the chimney; and that DC 9/11 includes quite a lot of dialogue like this:</div><div>
</div><div>George Bush: I have faith.</div><div>
</div><div>Laura Bush: We both do.</div><div>
</div><div>GB: I love you.</div><div>
</div><div>LB: And I love you.</div><div>
</div><div>GB: Amen.</div><div>
</div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Next morning kicked off with The Siege of Western Civilisation, by Herb Meyer, a one-time minor official in the Reagan administration. "By" in this context means that Meyer is the whole film: Meyer standing there on the big screen and talking at you for 42 minutes about why Islam needs to be dragged at gunpoint towards modernity, on American terms</span>, and about why it is more important for American women to have children than to have careers. Speaking with the relish many men of his generation would reserve for discussions of a forthcoming golfing trip, he talks of a coming second American civil war, and explains how abortion is robbing America's retired people of their welfare safety net.</div><div>
</div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">"Abortion is a human tragedy but it's also an economic tragedy," he says. "If these children had been allowed to live, we would not have the problem we have now. We would have the consumer base, the tax base, and wouldn't be facing a social security and Medicare crisis. Isn't it amazing? We never think of it that way.</span>"</div><div>
</div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">In true film festival style, Roger Aronoff, the maker of Confronting Iraq, a professionally-produced documentary intended to show why the US was right to launch its invasion</span>, told the audience that he had only finished the final edit the night before. He was proud of its watertight accuracy. He challenged me to find any outright untruths in it, and, sure enough, it did not contain outright untruths. Among the interviews with Christopher Hitchens and Bernard Lewis, and the footage of Al Gore intercut with footage of the extreme fringe of the US peace movement, there were many outright truths that it didn't contain either, particularly the outright truth that no weapons of mass destruction have been found in Iraq.</div><div>
</div><div>The documentaries rolled on. Silent Victory was about the valour of a special forces unit in Vietnam. The unit's veterans spoke candidly and movingly of the horror of war. Afterwards Don Hall, one of the veterans, who co-produced the film with his wife Annette, was asked what he thought of John Kerry, who also served in Vietnam. Hall said he thought Kerry was a charlatan and a fake. I asked him later why; he said that Kerry had won more medals than he deserved in too short a time.</div><div>
</div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">"I used to be a Democrat," said Mrs Hall. "That was before I knew. Then came talk radio and the internet. The blinkers came off."</span></div><div>
</div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Next up on the big screen was another Republican woman. There she was, talking to students at a campus meeting about Iraq. "Suppose, for the sake of argument, this was a war just for oil," she told them. "We need oil. Why not go to war for oil?"</span></div><div>
</div><div><b>This was Ann Coulter, </b>the mind of Rush Limbaugh in the body of Lisa Kudrow, a witty and blazingly right-wing columnist and chat-show guest who cannot quite make up her mind whether she is a comedian or a serious political analyst - a combination that may be easier to get away with over there. As the star of the documentary Is It True What They Say About Ann? she had American Renaissance festival-goers rolling over and purring. They already knew her greatest moments off by heart: the time she called Joe McCarthy a great American patriot, those liberal media types she bested head to head on TV (in these clips, at least), and her most notorious opinion, expressed shortly after 9/11. She wrote: "It is preposterous to assume every passenger is a potential crazed homicidal maniac. We know who the homicidal maniacs are. They are the ones cheering and dancing right now. We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity."</div><div>
</div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Towards evening, the focus shifted to gun control. I watched Innocents Betrayed, a collage of archive footage devoted to the proposition that laws restricting private gun ownership were responsible for the most notorious genocides and civilian massacres of the 20th century, including Turkey's massacre of the Armenians, Cambodia, Rwanda and the Nazi slaughter. Hitler's gun control laws came in for particular attention.</span> "All over Europe, people resist the Nazis, except in Germany," the narrator intoned. The message of the film was so all-encompassing that I was surprised it didn't go for broke and argue that if Jesus had only owned a gun, he might still be alive today.</div><div>
</div><div>Earlier, I'd spoken to the film's director, Aaron Zelman, who is also executive director of an organisation called Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership. "It's a warning to human beings on how to stay alive," he said. "Our film is a warning to people to be on their guard, to be alert, to watch out for when governments go bad."</div><div>
</div><div>I asked Zelman about something that had been bothering me: that traditionally film festivals welcomed film-makers who considered that their films were, in some way or another, artistic, whatever political message they might have; that, traditionally, polemics of any stripe didn't make great films. I asked Zelman if he considered himself an artist. I might as well have asked him if he considered himself a cross-dresser. "This is my first effort at making a film," he said. "I'm not going to put the whole artist label on myself, put on a beret, you know. Our documentary is based on a book called Death By Gun Control. We adapted our book into a film: that I would not consider to be artistic."</div><div>
</div><div>Surely Hollywood was only interested in making money? Could he give an example of a left-wing Hollywood movie? He could. "The one Michael Douglas had; he was the stockbroker. I forget what it was called. That was a message showing how evil capitalism is ... Forget about the movies they make, just their politics, look at who they support. Hollywood is famous for, 'If you want to make money, everything else is secondary.' But the perception of the leftists in Hollywood is based on their political activities." (I checked later: Oliver Stone's Wall Street was released 17 years ago, and proved such a setback to capitalist values that the Republicans stayed in the White House for five more years.)</div><div>
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</div><div>It was at around 7pm that I broke. I cannot pinpoint the precise time. It may have been the moment when, in<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"> Larry Elder's anti-gun control documentary Michael & Me (made as a response to Bowling For Columbine) he reveals how safe children really are with guns in the home by pointing out that, in 2001, only 50 kids died in firearms accidents in America.</span> All I know is that when I came out and saw a line of Texans queuing up to see a non-festival film, the unpleasant horror movie Resident Evil, I envied them.</div><div>
</div><div>I asked Hubbard why, when the festival was so preoccupied with Michael Moore, he hadn't been to see either Fahrenheit 9/11 or Bowling For Columbine. That wasn't fair, said Hubbard; he'd seen bits of Bowling, and had read Stupid White Men. "I know what he said in public," said Hubbard.</div><div>
</div><div>The last film of the night, To End All Wars, the second of the festival's two features, starred Kiefer Sutherland and Robert Carlyle as Allied prisoners of the Japanese during the second world war. Neither actor was present; the picture was, after all, three years old. It shows how Christian faith helps the POWs endure their ordeal, which is not without crucifixions. The movie never got a full distribution deal. Introducing it, Dave Ellswick, a talk radio host from Arkansas, said this was because of its Christian content, rather than because it wouldn't have sold tickets.</div><div>
</div><div>"Conservatives have given up Hollywood and movies to the liberals and the left," he said. "That's got to stop. We've got to be in the arena of ideas because our ideas are right, they are the correct ones. They are not teaching our kids these things; it's not on TV, it's in hardly any of the books any more. You and I and that big silver screen and talk radio can really start a renaissance. Enjoy the film!"</div></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">crc bs vadum:</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em; background-color: rgb(253, 250, 243);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Not too many commentators seem to have noticed that George Soros is slowly but surely <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">becoming</em> the mainstream media that is the focus of the analysis we do at NewsBusters. The liberal billionaire-turned-philanthropist has been buying up media properties for years in order to drive home his message to the American public that they are too materialistic, too wasteful, too selfish, and too stupid to decide for themselves how to run their own lives.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em; background-color: rgb(253, 250, 243);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">As we <a href="http://www.capitalresearch.org/app/uploads/pubs/pdf/v1204311857.pdf" style="box-sizing: border-box; background-color: transparent;">reported</a> in a recent paper, three years ago Soros acquired 2.6 million shares of the huge diversified media company Time Warner. In 2006 his companies, Soros Strategic Partners and Dune Capital Management, paid $900 million to buy the DreamWorks SKG film library from Viacom, a move that gave Soros the DVD and rebroadcasting rights to films such as <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120815/" style="box-sizing: border-box; background-color: transparent;">Saving Private Ryan</a> (1998), <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0172495/" style="box-sizing: border-box; background-color: transparent;">Gladiator</a> (2000), and <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0169547/" style="box-sizing: border-box; background-color: transparent;">American Beauty</a> (1999). As James Hirsen noted, the transaction gives Soros “some highly desirable film rights at a time when the marketing and distribution model is changing to video on demand, video iPods and other forms of digital distribution.” But more importantly, it gives Soros “a presence in Hollywood where likeminded libs are ready, willing and able to collaborate in cinematic social engineering.” Soros is also a<a href="http://www.capitalresearch.org/app/uploads/pubs/pubs.html?id=561" style="box-sizing: border-box; background-color: transparent;">funder</a>, whether directly or indirectly, of <a href="http://mediamatters.org/" style="box-sizing: border-box; background-color: transparent;">Media Matters for America</a>, the reflexively liberal noise machine and pretended media watchdog whose modus operandi is to mau-mau the media into mouthing the politically correct platitudes that pass for profound insights on the far left.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em; background-color: rgb(253, 250, 243);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Soros is also venturing into media overseas. Earlier this year Soros Fund Management plunked down $100 million for 3% of India’s Reliance Entertainment, a $3 billion conglomerate that aims to provide Internet-based TV programs in India. Reliance also churns out movies and owns movie houses, radio stations and social networking websites in the country with one of the fastest growing economies in the world. When in the 1980s Soros set up offices in Eastern Europe for his philanthropy, the <a href="http://www.soros.org/" style="box-sizing: border-box; background-color: transparent;">Open Society Institute</a>(OSI), he helped to finance publishers, independent TV and radio outlets, and political parties.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em; background-color: rgb(253, 250, 243);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Soros has long been a player in Hollywood. As Rondi Adamson reported in “George Soros, Movie Mogul: ‘Social Justice’ Cinema and the Sundance Institute,” (<a href="http://www.capitalresearch.org/app/uploads/pubs/pubs.html?id=629" style="box-sizing: border-box; background-color: transparent;">Foundation Watch</a>, March 2008), OSI has been underwriting “social justice” documentaries since 1996, and in 2001 Soros let actor-director <a href="http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000602/" style="box-sizing: border-box; background-color: transparent;">Robert Redford</a>‘s Sundance Institute take over his Soros Documentary Fund (since rechristened the Soros/Sundance Documentary Fund).</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em; background-color: rgb(253, 250, 243);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Why is Soros so interested in film? “Documentary films raise awareness and inspire action,” he said. “The Open Society Institute gave vital support to filmmakers working to expose human rights abuses and helped the films find the widest possible audience.” Adamson writes:</font></p><blockquote style="box-sizing: border-box; padding: 14px 28px; margin: 0px 0px 28px; border-left: 5px solid rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.1); font-style: italic; border-top-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.1); border-right-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.1); border-bottom-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.1); background-color: rgb(253, 250, 243);"><p dir="ltr" style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Soros, who has given away an estimated $5 billion to various causes since 1991, started his documentary fund as a form of political activism. <a href="http://www.atlanticphilanthropies.org/about/management/staff_listing/staff/lamarche_gara" style="box-sizing: border-box; background-color: transparent;">Gara LaMarche</a>, former vice president and director of U.S. programs for OSI, explained his boss’s motives: “Nonfiction film can spur awareness and action, sometimes touching audiences beyond the reach of other methods.” Movies “teach us about the world, what is happening to our fellow travelers on the globe-what is happening to us-and what we might do about it.” Using the well-worn language of political correctness, LaMarche, who left OSI in April 2007 to head the Atlantic Philanthropies (2006 assets $3.2 billion, grants $748 million), notes that a decade of work by Soros and the Sundance Documentary Fund has helped highlight “marginalized groups and their quest for rights and recognition from one end of the globe to the other.”</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Soros’s lieutenant praises the political impact of films like Al Gore’s 2006 global warming movie, An Inconvenient Truth, and Edward R. Murrow’s Harvest of Shame, a 1960 TV documentary on the plight of farmworkers. He observes that only film images can adequately reveal the meaning of Rodney King’s police beating, of tanks rolling into Tiananmen Square, and the extent of “Joseph McCarthy’s deficit of decency”-a characterization of the late senator hotly disputed by scholar M. Stanton Evans in his book, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Blacklisted-History-Senator-McCarthy-Americas/dp/140008105X" style="box-sizing: border-box; background-color: transparent;">Blacklisted by History: The Untold Story of Senator Joe McCarthy and His Fight Against America’s Enemies</a> (Crown Forum, 2007).</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">What’s great about Sundance documentaries, LaMarche writes, is that they can contradict the false image of Iran that George W. Bush projects when he places it in “the so-called Axis of Evil.” And they can overcome the fear created by “nativist vigilante groups like the Minutemen patrolling the U.S.-Mexico border and demanding Draconian treatment of undocumented workers.”</font></p></blockquote><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em; background-color: rgb(253, 250, 243);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Adamson observes that “most of the documentaries that receive Sundance funding are highly critical of some aspect of American life, capitalism or Western culture. The projects generally share George Soros’s worldview that America is a troubling if not sinister influence in the world, that the War on Terror is a fraud and terrorists are misunderstood freedom fighters, and that markets are fundamentally unjust.”</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em; background-color: rgb(253, 250, 243);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Adamson continues:</font></p><blockquote style="box-sizing: border-box; padding: 14px 28px; margin: 0px 0px 28px; border-left: 5px solid rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.1); font-style: italic; border-top-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.1); border-right-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.1); border-bottom-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.1); background-color: rgb(253, 250, 243);"><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Films such as An American Soldier and Persons of Interest (a film about Justice Department detention of Arab and Muslim immigrants after 9/11) and Why We Fight, the much-publicized 2005 Sundance Festival winner (“an anatomy of the American war machine”) underline Soros’s views on the U.S.-led War on Terror. Soros derides the War as “a false metaphor that has led to counterproductive and self-defeating policies.”</font></p></blockquote><blockquote style="box-sizing: border-box; padding: 14px 28px; margin: 0px 0px 28px; border-left: 5px solid rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.1); font-style: italic; border-top-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.1); border-right-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.1); border-bottom-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.1); background-color: rgb(253, 250, 243);"><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In his view, the phrase War on Terror is a conversation-ender that strikes terror in the hearts of those hearing it. The expression “has inhibited the critical process that is at the heart of an open society,” he says. The application of this “misleading figure of speech” has “unleashed a real war fought on several fronts -Iraq, Gaza, Lebanon, Afghanistan, Somalia- a war that has killed thousands of innocent civilians and enraged millions around the world,” he wrote at the Huffington Post blog (September 29, 2006). It is true that some who support the War on Terror may question the semantic limitations of the “War on Terror” phrase (after all, how does one fight “terror,” a tactic?). But when Soros blames the strife in Gaza, Lebanon, and Somalia -violence-prone regions long before September 11, 2001- on the U.S.-led War on Terror, he betrays his ‘blame America first’ mentality.</font></p></blockquote><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em; background-color: rgb(253, 250, 243);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">From Adamson’s article, here are some examples of films that have been funded by Soros directly or indirectly or that have been screened by the Sundance Institute or shown on the Sundance Channel:</font></p><blockquote style="box-sizing: border-box; padding: 14px 28px; margin: 0px 0px 28px; border-left: 5px solid rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.1); font-style: italic; border-top-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.1); border-right-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.1); border-bottom-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.1); background-color: rgb(253, 250, 243);"><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Soldiers of Conscience (2007): “Their country asked them to kill. Their hearts asked them to stop. From West Point grads to drill sergeants, from Abu Ghraib interrogators to low-ranking reservist mechanics; soldiers in the U.S. Army today reveal their deepest moral concerns about what they are asked to do in war.” (film website)</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">An American Soldier (2008): “A disproportionate number of people serving and dying in Iraq come from small-town southern America. How they get there, rather than why, is the point of ‘An American Soldier.’ It’s a film about process: the seduction process.” (Washington Post film critic John Anderson)</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Semper Fi: Always Faithful (in production): “Two retired marines lead the fight for justice for U.S. soldiers exposed to dangerous toxic chemicals while stationed at Camp Lejeune Marine Corps Base in North Carolina.” (film critic Agnes Varnum)</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Our Oil (in production): a documentary about Nigerians and Americans “amid the poverty, corruption and violence of oil production in Nigeria, one of America’s top oil suppliers.” (Sundance Institute press release)</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">My Baghdad Family (in production), in which a “family in Baghdad grapples with massive changes in their lives after the end of Saddam’s rule. Will their dreams of a new life gradually turn into a nightmare?” (Sundance press release)</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Control Room (2004), a documentary about Arabic-language network Al Jazeera’s coverage of the Iraq war, which critics have said amounts to pro-Islamist propaganda.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch’s War on Journalism (2004), which argues that Fox TV news is a hotbed of conservative misinformation.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The Corporation (2003), a Canadian film that puts modern corporations on the couch and depicts them as sociopathic institutions.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">My Terrorist (2002)…about Yulie Gerstel, an Israeli flight attendant who begins to suffer a delayed onset of Stockholm Syndrome after her airplane is hijacked on a flight to London. According to the film’s promotional blurb, “In a remarkable twist of faith, twenty-three years later Gerstel began questioning the causes of violence between Israelis and Palestinians and started to consider helping release the man who almost killed her.”</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The Women of Hezbollah…focuses on what its promotional blurb calls two Hezbollah “activists,” Zeinab and Khadjie, examining their “commitment” to the cause. According to one review, the film offers a “complex picture of Islamism, gender relations, feminism and nationalism.”</font></p></blockquote><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em; background-color: rgb(253, 250, 243);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Meanwhile, Hollywood seems more than content to keep throwing money at box office bombs. Four non-documentary movies that put America in a bad light sank like stones last year:</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em; background-color: rgb(253, 250, 243);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">-The Valley of Elah, starring Tommy Lee Jones, was about Iraq war combat trauma and its tragic consequences</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em; background-color: rgb(253, 250, 243);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">-Rendition, starring Jake Gyllenhaal, Reese Witherspoon and Meryl Streep was about an Egyptian being removed from the U.S. and shipped to Egypt by the CIA</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em; background-color: rgb(253, 250, 243);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">-Redacted, directed by Brian De Palma, was about U.S. soldiers tormenting an Iraqi family</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em; background-color: rgb(253, 250, 243);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">-Lions for Lambs, was about U.S. involvement in Afghanistan. It starred Redford, Tom Cruise and Glenn Close. In an interview with ABC’s Diane Sawyer about the film, Redford scolded the U.S. media for not being hard enough on the Bush administration: “At the point we found out that the cause behind the war was a lie, that’s when I think everybody should have stood up, wakened up, and moved forward.”</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em; background-color: rgb(253, 250, 243);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">People who want to make inspirational movies about good things Americans have done routinely get the cold shoulder from Hollywood financiers. Action star Bruce Willis is reportedly having trouble getting movie studios interested in his proposed movie about the 1st Battalion, 24th Infantry, (known as the “Deuce Four”) that heroically battled Islamist fighters in Mosul, Iraq. Willis wants to spotlight “these guys who do what they are asked for very little money to defend and fight for what they consider to be freedom.”</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em; background-color: rgb(253, 250, 243);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“Sounds like blockbuster material -but where are the Hollywood heavies who will help him make it and make a buck?” asks Adamson.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em; background-color: rgb(253, 250, 243);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">And don’t hold your breath waiting for Soros or Sundance to help out conservative movie makers any time soon, because when you love America and American values you’re just not considered hip in Hollywood: Conservatives have to blaze their own path. Three conservative film organizations are doing just that. They are Jim and Ellen Hubbard’s <a href="http://www.afrfilm.com/" style="box-sizing: border-box; background-color: transparent;">American Film Renaissance</a> (AFR), Govindini Murty and Jason Apuzzo’s <a href="http://www.libertyfilmfestival.com/" style="box-sizing: border-box; background-color: transparent;">Liberty Film Festival</a>, and Thor Halvorssen’s <a href="http://movingpictureinstitute.org/" style="box-sizing: border-box; background-color: transparent;">Moving Picture Institute</a> (MPI).</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style=""><span style="background-color: rgb(253, 250, 243);">American Film Renaissance has screened films such as Submission (2004), about Islam and the abuse of women (its maker, Theo van Gogh, was murdered by a Muslim fanatic to send a message), Indoctrinate U (2007), an expose of political correctness on college campuses, and The Call of the Entrepreneur (2007), a paean to economic dynamism.</span><b style="background-color: rgb(253, 250, 243);"> The Liberty Film Festival</b><span style="background-color: rgb(253, 250, 243);"> has screened Border (2007), about the public response to illegal immigration; Suicide Killers (2006), about Islamists’ terror tactics; and The Road to Jenin (2003), about Israel’s military reply to the Palestinian “Passover bombing.”</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"> MPI boosts movies such as Mine Your Own Business (2006), a critical look at environmental elitists fighting gold mining operations in desperately poor Romania – against the wishes of local residents who want the mine and the jobs and economic development that would come with it.</span></font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em; background-color: rgb(253, 250, 243);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">(This post is an expanded version of a <a href="http://newsbusters.org/blogs/matthew-vadum/2008/04/12/soros-social-justice-cinema-coming-theater-near-you" style="box-sizing: border-box; background-color: transparent;">NewsBusters post</a> from April 12.)</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em; background-color: rgb(253, 250, 243);"><font size="4" style="" face="Times New Roman"></font></p></div>