'United 93' director sees one too many hijacks

Jihad Watch are unimpressed by the new film United 93 , or at least unimpressed by the director's view of the hijackers portrayed in the film, to wit:

There were two hijacks on the morning of 9/11 [suggests 'United 93' director Paul Greengrass]. There was the hijack that we know about, the hijack of the airplanes, of the innocent people, that flew into the buildings and all that terrible death and destruction that occurred as a result.
    But there was a second hijack that took place that day. The hijack of a religion by a bunch of young men who twisted and perverted it in order to create a creed and an ideology to justify the slaughter of innocent people, and that's a hijack that is still out there today. It's still going on today, and it's going to be very hard for us to work out what to do to deal with that..."

So says the director of United 93 Paul Greengrass, to which Jihad Watch responds, that this "is still the prevailing mainstream view. But it is founded on a fiction.":

    The twisting and perverting of Islam by terrorists is something that virtually everyone assumes, and no one has ever proven. As I have established again and again and again, the jihadists are the ones who use detailed arguments from the Qur'an and Sunnah to justify their positions, and the putative moderates have never refuted those arguments.
    Why does this matter? Because we cannot win this great war if we fail to see the enemy realistically. If we deceive ourselves into thinking that we can count on tens of millions or even hundreds of millions of Muslim allies, we will be surprised and possibly dangerously compromised.

Why can't we depend on the "hundreds of millions of Muslims [who] are not waging the jihad today" to help ensure the events portrayed in the film never happen again? Because they lack the courage to lift a finger in defence of the religion that appeasers like Greengrass say has been "hijacked" -- as Ali Eteraz says from his home in Philadelphia:

    I always chuckle when I hear the political pundits calling people like me, us placid pools of personality, the “saving force” of Islam simply because we are not firebrands like Bin Laden...
    Many pundits, both inside and outside the community of immigrant American Islam, have rested their hopes upon us muted ones. They expect us to free global Islam from the Tazirs and Bin Ladens of the religion. Somehow we cows, chewing on the cud of our paranoia-stricken life, have been labeled “moderate” as if we offer a counterweight to the extremists. We don't.
    If anything, in the world after 9/11, most of us American Muslims are more concerned with hanging onto our jobs and our passports, and not being caught under the heavy hoofs of Ashcroft's ghost-horses than on challenging the oligarchy of our imams. Immigrant Muslims are not rebels or revolutionaries; no world-changing reformation will miraculously tumble forth from behind the veil of our silence.
    Any one immigrant American Muslim is just another congregant from [their former homes], tolerant of everything, including injustice -- because Allah wills it. We are not even moderately interested in tackling the Tazirs of this world. Our fundamentalism is that of fatalism. Sure, it is not as bad as terrorism; but the silence of fatalism is just as deafening as terrorism’s explosions.

The combination of appeasement and fatalism, combined with the ongoing conservative demonisation of immigrants and immigration, is powerful and seductive. And highly dangerous. .  

LINKS: Dhimmitude from the director of United 93 - Jihad Watch
Because Allah wills it: On the fundamentalism of fatalism and the myth of moderate Islam - Ali Etraz, Killing the Buddah . 

 TAGS: Politics-World, Religion, Immigration, War, Films