It’s been a long time since I paid any atttention to top-10 movie lists (once upon a time I was a film fan; then I got preoccupied with my life and at the same time the movies started to get really bad; when the intrigue surrounding the movie business got to be more interesting than the movies themselves, I knew that what I’d lost at the movies was gone forever).

But I read the Times at a leisurely pace over the last couple of weeks (like David Carr, I’m the only one in my family to do the full daily read) and noted that Manohla Dargis called Army of Shadows (which I wrote about here) among her top 10 the best movie of the year.

The movie is having another run at the Film Forum here in New York City. Here is a list of all the critics who’ve listed it among their top 5 movies of the year.

Whatever your politics, you’ll find it stirring to step into the shoes of the men and women who were forced by circumstances to act, and who sacrificed everything in order to shake free of both the Nazi boot (and that of the Nazi collaborators in their midst).

Here’s what Andrew Sarris had to say:

Seen today, Army of Shadows is revealed as a sublime tribute to the mostly doomed precious few who responded to the call of conscience in resisting the Nazi occupiers and the French traitors who collaborated with them. Lino Ventura as Philippe Gerbier is one of seven composite characters drawn from real-life models of martyrdom in the early years of the occupation. The others are the resourceful Mathilde, played by Simone Signoret; Luc Jardie, the chief, played by Paul Meurisse; the extraordinarily self-sacrificing François, played by Jean-Pierre Cassel; Claude La Masque, played by Claude Mann; Felix, played by Paul Crauchet; Le Bison, played by Christian Barbier; the Baron de Ferte-Talloire, played by Jean-Marie Robain; and Sere Reggiani making a cameo appearance as a resistant barber helping Gerbier escape from a Gestapo jail.

There are no spectacular triumphs for these shadow combatants, only the constant, fear-drenched danger of being caught, tortured and executed by the relentless forces arrayed against them. Of necessity, they became ruthless themselves with comrades who betrayed them. Where Melville is most masterly is in his placidly matter-of-fact pacing of these life-and-death existences. For a comparable cinematic achievement, I can think only of Roberto Rossellini’s equally sublime evocation of wartime heroism under existential pressure in General della Rovere (1959). Army of Shadows is a film to be seen and savored for its moral magnitude.

Everybody, it seems, as discovered the power of PR. Now Hamas is worried because the Palestinians are having trouble getting their message out.

The Palestinian Authority is failing to get its message through to the world because of “poorly qualified or unqualified spokespersons with inadequate political and linguistic abilities,” the Hamas English language website claimed in an editorial Tuesday.

 

I would humbly suggest that the Palestinians first stop kidnapping journalists and forcing them to convert to Islam at gunpoint,

Steve & Olaf: “There Were Times When I Thought ‘I’m Dead,’ And I’m Not”

 and that they stop murdering and kidnapping one another, too. They might get a little uptick in their numbers right away. But I digress.

Hamas has a different PR solution in mind:

The editorial said Palestinians “need professional spokespersons with excellent knowledge of the world and mastery of foreign languages, especially English, to tell the world in straightforward manner that Israel is a murderer, liar and land thief and that the problem lies squarely in the Zionist theft of our land and savagery of our people ( sic).”

Hey, I know someone who fits the bill! In the immortal words of ex-peanut farmer and American president James Earl Carter:

For 39 years, Israel has occupied Palestinian land, and has confiscated and colonized hundreds of choice sites.

Often excluded from their former homes, land and places of worship, protesting Palestinians have been severely dominated and oppressed. There is forced segregation between Israeli settlers and Palestine’s citizens, with a complex pass system required for Arabs to traverse Israel’s multiple checkpoints.

Through counterpropaganda, says George Packer in a long, fascinating recent piece in the New Yorker, “Knowing the Enemy.”

Packer spends a long time with social scientist David Kilcullen, who, for the benefit of the United States government, has set out to reframe the unhelpful paradigm “war on terrorism” into something called the “global counterinsurgency,” the better to understand what—and whom—we are fighting.

Kilcullen has plotted out a “ladder of extremism” that shows the progress of a jihadist. At the bottom is the vast population of mainstream Muslims, who are potential allies against radical Islamism as well as potential targets of subversion, and whose grievances can be addressed by political reform. The next tier up is a smaller number of “alienated Muslims,” who have given up on reform.

Some of these join radical groups, like the young Muslims in North London who spend afternoons at the local community center watching jihadist videos. They require “ideological conversion”—that is, counter-subversion, which Kilcullen compares to helping young men leave gangs. (In a lecture that Kilcullen teaches on counterterrorism at Johns Hopkins, his students watch “Fight Club,” the 1999 satire about anti-capitalist terrorists, to see a radical ideology without an Islamic face.)

A smaller number of these individuals, already steeped in the atmosphere of radical mosques and extremist discussions, end up joining local and regional insurgent cells, usually as the result of a “biographical trigger—they will lose a friend in Iraq, or see something that shocks them on television.” With these insurgents, the full range of counterinsurgency tools has to be used, including violence and persuasion.

The very small number of fighters who are recruited to the top tier of Al Qaeda and its affiliated terrorist groups are beyond persuasion or conversion. “They’re so committed you’ve got to destroy them,” Kilcullen said. “But you’ve got to do it in such a way that you don’t create new terrorists.”

So much for the “who.” Now here’s the how.[emphasis mine]

“We’ve got to create resistance to [the radical extremists'] message,” he said. “We’ve got to co-opt or assist people who have a counter-message. And we might need to consider creating or supporting the creation of rival organizations.” Bruce Hoffman told me that jihadists have posted five thousand Web sites that react quickly and imaginatively to events. In 2004, he said, a jihadist rap video called “Dirty Kuffar” became widely popular with young Muslims in Britain: “It’s like Ali G wearing a balaclava and having a pistol in one hand and a Koran in the other.” Hoffman believes that America must help foreign governments and civil-society groups flood the Internet with persuasively youthful Web sites presenting anti-jihadist messages—but not necessarily pro-American ones, and without leaving American fingerprints.

Kilcullen argues that Western governments should establish competing “trusted networks” in Muslim countries: friendly mosques, professional associations, and labor unions. (A favorite Kilcullen example from the Cold War is left-wing anti-Communist trade unions, which gave the working class in Western Europe an outlet for its grievances without driving it into the arms of the Soviet Union.) The U.S. should also support traditional authority figures—community leaders, father figures, moderate imams—in countries where the destabilizing transition to modernity has inspired Islamist violence. “You’ve got to be quiet about it,” he cautioned. “You don’t go in there like a missionary.”

The key is providing a social context for individuals to choose ways other than jihad.

Read the whole thing. It all makes sense.

And, yes, it will be a very long war.