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[ by Charles Cameron — with an assist from Wm Benzon, under-appreciated and brilliant film and literary critic, musician, author of Beethoven’s Anvil ]
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Screen-time is valuable: movie directors don’t just throw it away.

Here are screen-grabs of two moments in Greg Barker‘s HBO bin Laden documentary, Manhunt, offered for your consideration:

and:

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As you know from my review of Battle of Algiers (Pontecorvo) and Black Friday (Kashyap), I’m a film buff.

Screen time is the life-time of story: every second counts. And thus it is that if a director uses the same shot with variations at two or more points in a movie, they don’t just follow along, the way the elements in the narrative through-line follow along, one after another — they stack up. They “mean” cumulatively, synchronically…

Putting that in musical terms, they take on the function of rhythm rather than melody — and it is rhythm that can make the body dance, just as it is melody that can make the heart soar.

So, this repetition, this striking parallelism — why?

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Here’s my friend Bill Benzon, writing about the use of parallelism in Apocalypse Now:

The Assassin and the Surfer

Now for the less obvious parallel: Willard and Lance, the only member of the boat crew to survive. One can’t miss the parallel killings nor Willard’s statement of kinship with Kurtz. This parallelism, on the other hand, is easy to miss. That is to say, it may well elude conscious notice. Unconscious notice, on the other hand … Well, what is that?

Here’s three frame-grabs that point up the parallel. The first is from the opening montage of Willard in Saigon just before he gets his orders:

The second shot comes much later in the film. Clean has been killed (bullet), then the Chief (spear). Lance is the one who floated the Chief’s body down the river. Now they’re heading upriver toward Kurtz again, with Lance in the bow of the boat:

He’s doing a martial arts dance. Not the same one as Willard did in the opening montage, but a martial arts dance. No one else in the film does such a thing. Clean does some dance moves while listening to the Rolling Stones, but they’re in an entirely different style; faster, jerkier, more angular.

Finally, we have this scene in Kurtz’s compound. Willard’s in the foreground, and Lance is in the background:

One might suggest that this parallel is a mere accident, one might. And perhaps it is. In cases like this, however, my default assumption is that it is not an accident. It may not be there by conscious intent and deliberate plan; but it is not there by accident. The people who made this movie are too skilled to do such things inadvertently.

That final remark of Benzon’s makes exactly the point I was hoping to make here, before commenting on those two screen-grabs from Manhunt:

The people who made this movie are too skilled to do such things inadvertently.

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There’s actually a third shot in Manhunt with a view of a dangling rear-view-mirror ornament — let’s take a look:

This one’s from the van Peter Bergen and his cameraman, Peter Jouvenal, took in the docu’s re-enactment / flashback to their CNN interview with bin Laden, back in 1997. I don’t think this one is a rosary-like thing though it might be — I think it’s just the sort of tassel decoration you’ll find on saddle-bags, or decorating a camel or a car in Afghanistan.

The other two, however, seem clearly religious, both of them are shots of the cars in which American counter-terrorist folks would have gone to work during their efforts to track down bin Laden — and I find it significant that one features a (Christian) cross while the other very likely shows (Muslim) prayer-beads.

I say “very likely” because the beads could be (secular, Greek) worry-beads — but they look more like a tasbih to me. And why would that be interesting — why would a film-maker be interested in such a parallelism?

Besides the fact that these shots allow voice over and show us the various folk involved going to work, they specifically point up the fact that those working to defeat bin Laden were not all kuffar but included Ali Soufan of the FBI and “Roger” — the fellow described by Greg Miller in this March 2012 piece in WaPo, At CIA, a convert to Islam leads the terrorism hunt.

Am In right? I don’t know. But the subliminal message, if I am, is that the manhunt for bin Laden was indeed not a “Crusaders against Islam” affair.

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May I recommend Wm. Benzon’s Beethoven’s Anvil to all who read here who have an interest in cognition and / or music?

For more on parallelism in cinema, see David Bordwell, Julie, Julia, & the house that talked, to which Benson also pointed me.

[ by Charles Cameron — how do you intercept messages that come via dreams? I’m thinking of al-Balawi ]
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My little graphic (below) may be kidding — but what of reality?

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In the bin Laden documentary, Manhunt, which I mentioned before seeing it here, and discussed briefly here, another passage (at 1.22.31) that is missing from the CNN transcript concerns the dream which radicalized Humam al-Balawi, the Khost bomber. Balawi speaks, the subtitles translate for us:

God blessed me to have this dream. I dreamed I saw Zarqawi. He was in my house. His face was like a full moon. He was busy. Preparing an attack. I wishes I could fight with him. Be killed with him. I am your humble brother from Jordan. I am 32 years old and a medical doctor.

I’m not suggesting there was no prior fertilization of Balawi’s mind and heart, nor that he was influenced by no other drivers: I just wonder what the impact of such a dream would be, given that intense smuggling goes on between our waking and dream lives, of a kind that no intercepts can capture for analysis.

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How powerful can influence can a dream exert?

Consider this example, taken from Marie-Lousie von Franz, On Dreams & Death: A Jungian Interpretation, p. 64:

She sees a candle lit on the window sill of the hospital room and finds that the candle suddenly goes out. Fear and anxiety ensue as the darkness envelops her. Fear and anxiety ensue as the darkness envelops her. Then, the candle re-lights on the other side of the window and she awakens. She died the same day.

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If I may borrow a bit from some unpublished writings of mine…

Dreams as early indicators:

The western secular paradigm considers dreams to be of little or no significance, and it is therefore entirely possible that intelligence gleaned from the recounting of dreams will seem of little interest to western analysts. In the Islamic view, however, certain dreams are of considered to be of real significance, their importance being indicated by the hadith reported by Bukhari:

Narrated Ibn ‘Umar: Allah’s Apostle said, “The worst lie is that a person claims to have seen a dream which he has not seen.”

— Sahih Bukhari, book 87: Interpretation of Dreams, #167.

One early indicator of a Mahdist tendency in a given population, therefore, would be the presence of dreams about the Mahdi in a given discourse — in jihadist chat rooms, for instance — while the frequency of such mentions would be a useful heuristic measure of the development of such a movement. Thus Yaroslav Trofimov reports [Siege of Mecca, hb. p.50.] that in the run-up to the 1979 siege of the Grand Mosque and Ka’aba in Mecca, many followers of Juhayman al-Otaibi, the leader of the raid, dreamed dreams:

Then, one after another, hundreds of Juhayman’s supporters experienced detailed, vivid dreams. Mohammed Abdullah’s sister appears to have been the first, quickly followed by others. In their sleep, they all had the same vision: Mohammed Abdullah standing by the sacred Kaaba in Mecca’s Grand Mosque, accepting allegiance as the blessed Mahdi amid multitudes of believers. Militants from as far away as Lebanon who never encountered Mohammed Abdullah in person claimed to have had the same dream.

It is worth noting here that while, as Trofimov suggests, much of the dreaming “must have been caused by self-suggestion” this in no way invalidates their significance as indicators. Indeed, Reuven Paz writes of the mediaeval scholar Ibn Sirrin‘s still-popular Interpretation of Dreams that “high selling rates of this book can provide us an indicator for rising apocalyptic notions”. Paz also notes a “sizable number” of jihadis publishing their dreams and visions on Jihadist forums on the web [p.4..

Dream narration of this sort certainly corresponds to hikayat as discussed by Michael Vlahos in his essay Terror’s Mask: Insurgency Within Islam — still one of the most necessary pieces I have read on al-Qaeda..

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Closer to home, in one sense, than the siege of the Grand Mosque, is the 9/11 attack on the Twin Towers and Pentagon. This too had its dream precursors, as we can tell from the video transcript of bin Laden‘s taped meeting of mid-November 2001:

UBL: He [Abu-Al-Hasan Al-Masri] told me a year ago: “I saw in a dream, we were playing a soccer game against the Americans. When our team showed up in the field, they were all pilots!” He said: “So I wondered if that was a soccer game or a pilot game? Our players were pilots.” He didn’t know anything about the operation until he heard it on the radio. He said the game went on and we defeated them. That was a good omen for us.

Shaykh: May Allah be blessed.

Unidentified Man: Abd Al Rahman Al-Ghamri said he saw a vision, before the operation, a plane crashed into a tall building. He knew nothing about it.

Shaykh: May Allah be blessed!

and notably:

UBL: We were at a camp of one of the brother’s guards in Qandahar. This brother belonged to the majority of the group. He came close and told me that he saw, in a dream, a tall building in America, and in the same dream he saw Mukhtar teaching them how to play karate. At that point, I was worried that maybe the secret would be revealed if everyone starts seeing it in their dream. So I closed the subject. I told him if he sees another dream, not to tell anybody, because people will be upset with him.

(Another person’s voice can be heard recounting his dream about two planes hitting a big building).

For your in-depth reading pleasure, see Iain R. Edgar, The Inspirational Night Dream in the Motivation and Justification of Jihad if you can get past the paywall…

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Vlahos quotes Albert Hourani, A History of the Arab Peoples, on this point — I’ll present my own version of that quote here, because it describes a mindset that, mutatis mutandis, many of our opponents share to this day:

It was commonly held, in all cultures before the modern age, that dreams and visions could open a door into a world other than that of senses. They might bring messages from God; they might disclose a hidden dimension of a person’s own soul; they might come from jinns or devils. The desire to unravel the meaning of dreams must have been widespread, and was generally regarded as legitimate; dreams told us something which it was important to know.

Dreams are “outside the box” of waking reality — and we need to learn to appreciate the force of dream logic, if we want to think outside our own western prejudices, and inside our adversaries’ heads…

[ by Charles Cameron — bemused again, “jihad” (the word) in the news, “big data” too, plus Google expecting Mahdi ]
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I suppose I should be glad — or should I? — that the word jihad is now in the news.

It’s about time. Jihad (the word, the concept, the interpretations) should have been in the news at least since 9/11, don’t you think? or since the World Trade Center bombing in February 26, 1993, perhaps? or at least since Osama bin Laden’s Declaration of Jihad Against the Americans Occupying the Land of the Two Holy Mosques of September 2, 1996?

In any case, the word finally seems to have arrived, if the entry from the National Geographic site last month (upper panel, above) can be trusted:

And Big Data (lower panel)?

President Obama launched his Big Data Initiative on March 29, 2012, but I’m not sure how long the term has been in active use. I’m told there’s no “big data” listing in the 2009 Oxford English Dictionary on CD-ROM, I have the sense that three days ago’s Foreign Policy is far more up to date than last month’s National Geographic in any case — and just a month or two ago the CTO of CIA, Ira “Gus” Hunt, situated Big Data somewhere between “the cloud” and right now, telling his audience at GigaOM:

Big Data was so last year, right, all those breathless articles and all the front page covers — I was expecting BD to be Time’s Man of the Year, right. This year what we’re really talking about is how do we get value out of the stuff?

That quote, of course, is so “two months ago”…

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So what does National Geographic tell us about jihad?

The Boston marathon bombing has focused attention on the word “jihad.”

Vice President Biden characterized the alleged bombers as knockoff jihadis.” The Associated Press reported that the elder brother had “vaguely discussed jihad” with his mother over the phone in 2011.

Origins

“Jihad” is derived from the Arabic word juhd (meaning effort, exertion, or power) and literally translates to “struggle” or “resistance” for the sake of a goal. Used 30 times and in multiple contexts in the Koran, jihad most often denotes a struggle against external enemies, the devil, or one’s self. One example from the Koran (49.15) is: “The believers are those who believe in Allah and His Messenger … and jahadu (do jihad) with their properties and selves in the way of Allah.”

Mark Wilks, an early 19th-century British author, introduced jihad into the English lexicon, defining it as a Muslim “holy war,” in his Historical Sketches of the South of India. It’s retained that meaning in English; the Oxford English Dictionary defines jihad as “a religious war of Muslims against unbelievers.”

History

Because of its roots and context in the Koran, jihad has a positive meaning to Muslims. Whatever form jihad may take, the struggle is always noble. When the term is evoked against external enemies, it can be used only during just or defensive wars.

I’m sorry, but that last para beginning “Because of its roots and context in the Koran, jihad has a positive meaning to Muslims” isn’t terribly clear. When al-Zawahiri talks about jihad, for instance, does the writer imagine all Muslim readers imagine he’s talking about something noble? I fear there are some subtleties being missed her that not everyone who reads National Geographic may understand.

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And what does Foreign Policy want to tell us about Big Data?

The promoters of big data would like us to believe that behind the lines of code and vast databases lie objective and universal insights into patterns of human behavior, be it consumer spending, criminal or terrorist acts, healthy habits, or employee productivity. But many big-data evangelists avoid taking a hard look at the weaknesses. Numbers can’t speak for themselves, and data sets — no matter their scale — are still objects of human design. The tools of big-data science, such as the Apache Hadoop software framework, do not immunize us from skews, gaps, and faulty assumptions. Those factors are particularly significant when big data tries to reflect the social world we live in, yet we can often be fooled into thinking that the results are somehow more objective than human opinions. Biases and blind spots exist in big data as much as they do in individual perceptions and experiences. Yet there is a problematic belief that bigger data is always better data and that correlation is as good as causation.

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Mr Orange had something to say about the word “jihad” in his War Tracker blog the other day, under the title What’s in the names of terrorist groups (1): Jabhah al-Nusrah li-Ahl al-Shâm min Mujâhidî al-Shâm fi Sahât al Jihâd:

… they still use a religious term in their name: One that is quite negatively understood in the West but not so in the Arab and Muslim world namely Jihâd.

They are Mujâhidîn – those who do Jihâd (religious struggle – in this case fighting) – on the fields of Jihâd. Mujâhidîn has a positive, religiously legitimizing ring to it – see here is someone who struggles for the religion – and is furthermore including. Whether you are with the FSA (even one of the rather secular parts of that group mind you) or with an independent Islamist group or with Jabhah al-Nusrah all do use the term Mujâhîd and all may be identified by that term (Granted there was a time when Thuwâr (revolutionaries) was en vogue but no longer so).

That, IMO, gets us a lot closer to understanding a term that has a range of meanings, a range of users, and a range of audiences — from something along the lines of divinely obligated warfare to something akin to conscience (or what Rilke calls “being defeated, decisively, by constantly greater beings”) , and from those who use it for glorious self-identification to those for whom it is a euphemism for terrorist (irhabi), and from those itching for a fight to those longing, praying and working devotedly for peace…

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So — since we’re talking big data and jihad, here’s a tiny snippet of jihad-related skew from Google, one of the giants of big data…

I came across it via SelfScholar, who posted a very interesting response re the Iranian nuclear fatwa issue here a few days ago, in a post titled Google Translate’s Khomeini Problem.

It appears that Google Translate has a distinctly unsecular view when it comes to major figures in Shi’ite theology — specifically, it adds religious honorifics to their names when translating from English into Farsi. As you might imagine, I wanted to know how they dealt with the Mahdi — and behold, my prayer was answered:

So Google awaits his blessed return?

It seems pretty clear that SelfScholar would be skeptical about that. He ends his blog post, in fact, with an indication that he neither awaits nor expects it — choosing for his final example “to highlight the inanity of it all, just one for the road…”:

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Prof. Dr. Muhammad-Reza Fakhr-Rohani has an interesting piece titled Rendering Islamic Politeness Markers into English, which he concludes thus:

There remain some Desiderata to be dealt with. First, the Arabic pre-nominal honorifics as well as post-nominal honorific-cum-optative sentences must be re-translated with a view to remove the items which make the language sound odd, and perhaps ungrammatical. Secondly, appropriate abbreviations must be devised for them. Finally, they must find their ways into English dictionaries, hence registered as part of the language.

[ by Charles Cameron — a testament to bewilderment ]
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It is pretty clear, I think, that Craig Little (upper panel) is not a mujahid from Daphne, Alabama, now living or dead in Somalia. He first tweeted on 22 March, 2009, however, and hasn’t tweeted since 29 July, 2010. Which gives him the name AbuAmerican on twitter.

Abu M, however, came later, first tweeting on May 15, 2012, and most recently on May 3, 2013. He has the Twitter handle AbuMAmerican, and is generally regarded as being the mujahid from Daphne, Alabama, Omar Hammami — of whom one might ask, is he in heaven, is he in hell, that demmed, elusive Pimpernel? Or still in Somalia, perhaps, dead or alive? Depending on what one believes about life, death, and beyond.

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But that leaves us with two other contenders to consider:

Both these gents — the one with an “a” where an “e” would otherwise be, and the one with an _ at the end of his handle, as though you might need to crank a car with it — purport to be picking up where AbuMAmerican left off.

AbuAmerican_ with the crank handle is followed by Jarret Brachman, J. Dana Stuster, Khanserai, Peter Neumann, and Raff Pantucci among knowledgeable others — Raff also follows AbuAmarican with the improper “a”. And how’s this for complicated? AbuAmarican with the “a'” is followed, too, by the frankly cranky AbuAmerican_, by Chris Anzalone, IntelGirl, DC Gomez and Christof Putzel.

Putzel, in case this is any help, interviewed Hammami in 2012 for CurrentTV, long before Spencer Ackerman talked with him for Wired this April.

Neither Abu with an A nor Abu Crank have shown the kind of easy humor the Original Abu M showed in tweets like this:

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But then — is Abu M any more real than his knockoffs? At least he’s the most interesting of the lot. And as JM Berger said to Attackerman, speaking of the “original” AbuMAmerican:

If it’s a hoax … it’s an incredibly elaborate one, and would be done for an extremely small audience.

Who’s Who? How should I know?

[ by Charles Cameron — taking a break from my pressing writerly duties ]
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I wouldn’t have noticed these two offerings quite so clearly if I hadn’t been pointed to each of them in the last couple of days. Both look to be of considerable interest:

Artur Beifuss & Francesco Trivini Bellini, Branding Terror: The Logotypes and Iconography of Insurgent Groups and Terrorist Organizations
Asiem El Difraoui, The Jihad of Images

Hat-tip Nico Prucha at Jihadica, and who or whatever pointed me to HuffPo — idenitfy yourselves and be saluted!

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The first image in the HuffPo slideshow for Branding Terror (lower image, below, AQIM) really hit me square between the eyes, because when I was in Mashhad, Iran, in the early seventies, I snarfed up a postcard with a very similar design — Shi’ite rather than Sunni, and not so distinctly violent (upper image):

Some things just don’t seem to change.