...I rushed to see French journalist and feminist activist Caroline Fourest’s Sisters in Arms.
And I have to say that not in a very long time have I been so moved by a film.
It is the story of a batallion thrown into war against the Islamic State in a land that is never named but is obviously a composite of Iraqi and Syrian Kurdistan.
The women are Kurds, Yazidis, French, Italian, American.
In fact, they’re an international brigade of volunteers engaged as in Spain in 1936, in a battle against fascism, which today wears the mask of Islamic extremism.
On one day, they liberate a village. On another, they go to the rescue of a column of refugees on the other side of the front line.
On a third, a sniper takes out a jihadist pausing at a checkpoint with his cargo of women destined to be sold like cattle in the slave market of Mosul.
On yet another, we watch a battle in pickup trucks worthy of a Howard Hawks western, in which the fighters face an ISIS unit that is supported by one of those armored suicide trucks that were used to terrorize the Peshmerga, rolling fortresses packed with explosives and careening forward at full speed.
The next day we come into an apparently deserted village in which every house is a booby trap, where each stone, each toy, each abandoned Koran may be rigged to explode. Suddenly the eerily quiet village erupts into a terrifying battle, hand to hand, street by street, a storm of blood and steel that recalls the most powerful scenes of Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker.
I happen to know some of the places where the action is set.
In Iraq I filmed warriors similar to those in Fourest’s film, women who scared the hell out of the jihadists, who were better terrorists than they were fighters: brave when it was time to behead a hostage but much less bold when faced with women of mettle.
And in Mosul I also filmed the neighborhood of Al-Zohur—or was it Gogjali, or Qadisiya—where Fourest’s main character, who saw her father killed before her eyes and the rest of the family taken into captivity, is detained, repeatedly raped, and tortured before finally managing to escape.
I was amazed by the authenticity of those scenes. I felt as if I was back on that hill above Bashiqa, where a young fighter who might have been a sister of Caroline Fourest’s heroines took a bullet to the heart as we filmed the battle.
I trembled for the two hours of the screening as if I were there with those soldiers, so beautiful, so brave, and at times so mordantly funny, soldiers who know that the morons opposing them believe that being killed by a woman blocks their way to paradise and its 72 virgins—but who also know (and here the film reaches a nearly unbearable level of tension) that they must keep one last cartridge in the breech or one last grenade on their belt because even such an enemy as this may sometimes gain the upper hand.
Formally, the film is quite beautiful. It is admirably framed, lit, set, and acted. Meeting all of the requirements of the genre, it is a true war film of the sort that few women have made. A feminist war film.
And two recent events, alas, add to its timeliness and importance.
One is the fact that the ISIS hydra is again raising its head, not only over the lands that made up its former caliphate, but elsewhere as well, including in France, where its fanatics managed to strike deep within the police headquarters in Paris this past week, killing four courageous officers.
The other event, announced at the very moment I was drafting this review, is the latest infuriating betrayal by Trump of northern Syria—the monstrously cynical and spineless “enjoy!” that the United States has tossed out to the henchmen of Erdogan’s Turkish state, inviting them to help themselves to what’s left of Syrian Kurdistan. In short, an Ottoman Anschluss blessed by the very Westerners, or in any case Americans, whose most dependable allies in the war against the barbarity of the Islamic State were and remain the Kurds.
This is Trump’s greatest failure—and that’s saying something. This is what will bring him, if not impeachment, then the certain scorn of history. The world has taken note of this grave moral mistake, as have Americans from both sides of the political divide.
May the rest of the world take notice of Trump’s forfeiture before it’s too late. May Europe, and France in particular, raise before the international community the crime unfolding against our allies.
We owe the Kurds for the blood they shed in Kobane, Raqqa, Qaraqosh, and Kirkuk. We are the guardians of these sisters and brothers in arms who, at the darkest hour, stood up in our stead and for our security.
PUBLIC COMMENT, DPW “PUBLIC WORKS HEARING,” or “DIRECTOR’S HEARING,” OCTOBER 11, 2019 ON “BETTER MARKET STREET” PROJECT
This is public comment on the “Director’s Order” scheduled for hearing on October 11, 2019, the above-numbered Agenda Item proposing to certify the Environmental Impact Report (“EIR”) and other actions on the “Better Market Street Project" (“Project”). Please distribute this Comment to all staff conducting the hearing and place copies in all applicable files on the Project.
1. The Project is preempted under both the California and the U.S. Constitutions. The City may not close public streets or prohibit travel on public streets to travelers, including those using cars. (Rumford v. City of Berkeley (1982) 31 Cal. 3d 545.)
2. The Project also violates CEQA, since it will have significant impacts on transportation on major arterials and neighborhood streets causing increased congestion as noted in numerous public comments (incorporated hereto by reference). The additional traffic congestion will also cause air quality impacts that are neither adequately analyzed nor mitigated.
Among others the Project will also have impacts on historic resources throughout the area by altering existing historic street lamps, other historic resources, and on natural resources by removing all of the existing London plane trees, affecting the character, habitat and environment of Market Street.
The Findings contained in the “Director’s Order” have not been circulated for public review, and falsely claim the Project’s significant impacts that are identified in the EIR cannot be mitigated. The “Order” states that the Project has already been or will be approved, with or without a public hearing.
3. City proposes significant federal funding requiring environmental review under the National Environmental Policy Act (“NEPA”), which has not been done. City may not proceed with this Project or any part of it until it has prepared an Environmental Impact Statement under NEPA.
4. The “Director’s Order” states that the Project will cost $610 million, and yet lists available (but apparently not approved) funding of $143 million. Where does the City propose to get the other hundreds of millions for this bicycle Project?
5. The Project is not a “pilot” Project and not exempt under CEQA Guidelines. City may not piecemeal environmental review by deferring analysis and mitigation of parts of the Project’s impacts or declaring parts of the Project “exempt” while claiming it has conducted environmental review of other parts of the Project.
Therefore, this Project may not be lawfully approved, and the proposed action must be rejected.
