Wednesday, December 05, 2007

"Farewell Israel: Bush, Iran and The Revolt of Islam"

Mideast Outpost: Review, by Rael Jean Isaac

Joel Gilbert has pulled off a remarkable tour de force: in “Farewell Israel” he has produced a technically sophisticated, visually imaginative, scholarly documentary that manages in the space of 145 minutes to investigate the belief system and history of Islam, the development of the Arab-Israel conflict (more accurately the Muslim-Jewish conflict) and the aftermath of 9/11.

The documentary’s enormous achievement is in bringing all this together to show incontrovertibly the total misunderstanding of Islam that shapes the policy follies of the West in general and the U.S. and Israel in particular. The potentially deadly results are summed up in the foreboding title—Farewell Israel. (...)

Gilbert makes no bones that Israel—and the Jews of the world not far behind—will bear the most lethal consequences of Islam’s obsession with destroying Israel on the path to Islamic revival. But he offers scant comfort to the West. The documentary concludes with Gilbert’s warning that the loss of Israel will erode, not enhance, the West’s security, for the goal of the revived Islamist movement that we see enunciated by Ahmadinejad – bringing the whole world to Islam – will now only be pressed the harder.I have one small cavil and that concerns the documentary’s subtitle “Bush, Iran and the Revolt of Islam.” In terms of accurately reflecting what the film is about, a better subtitle would focus on the West’s misunderstanding of Islam. >>>



"Farewell Israel: Bush, Iran and The Revolt of Islam" website

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