Tribeca 2005: Maggie Gyllenhaal Sparks Controversy

Finally a celebrity whose gravitas and intelligence allows herself not to be intimidated by the ill informed masses and the piece of sh*t media, who themselves have surrendered their credibility. We all understand 9-11 was a tragedy but let us not forget what led to that tragedy! Just read some Chomsky or if you're fortunate enough to be at MIT, sit in one of his classes. We cannot whitewash history and pretend the US and the fatcats on capitol hill, trying to establish their hegemonic state, created a worldwide distaste for the US. Ask yourself, why is the US hated by the whole world?!...

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Maggie Gyllenhaal is right. We Americans need to consider how our country, its government, and its corporations are harming people overseas. Look at it this way: if you're an eighth-grader beating up third-graders, and one third-grader decides to beat up your little second-grade sister, your sister didn't deserve the beating, but you did something to bring the beating about.

Now, will Maggie G. be the next Bush-bashing or American-policy-criticizing celebrity to be "Dixie-Chicked", follwing Bill Maher, Martin Sheen, Whoopi Goldberg, et al?

Christians for Kerry/Christians against Bush
http://mnl_1221.tripod.com/kerrybush.html

WTC RIP
http://mnl_1221.tripod.com/wtc.html

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I forgot to mention this:

Please read:

When You Ride Alone, You Ride with Bin Laden
by Bill Maher

a great post 9/11 read

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1893224740/qid=1114531028/sr=8-1/ref=sr_8_xs_ap_i1_xgl14/104-4467663-5587119?v=glance&s=books&n=507846

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Finally a celebrity whose gravitas and intelligence allows herself not to be intimidated by the ill informed masses and the piece of sh*t media, who themselves have surrendered their credibility. We all understand 9-11 was a tragedy but let us not forget what led to that tragedy! Just read some Chomsky or if you're fortunate enough to be at MIT, sit in one of his classes. We cannot whitewash history and pretend the US and the fatcats on capitol hill, trying to establish their hegemonic state, created a worldwide distaste for the US. Ask yourself, why is the US hated by the whole world?!...

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Thing one, 9/11 was because the US had troops on the ground in Saudi Arabia (the holy land) preparing for the war with, and in the aftermath of Iraq annexing Kuwait, nothing more as quoted from Bin Laden himself. Anyone trying to make more of it is chasing rainbows in the dark. Thing two, the attack on 9/11 cannot be justified by anyone, anywhere, anytime. Any one who tries is deep sea fishing with out a boat. Thing three, if the US is so hated in the world then why is every body trying to get in?

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Regarding the question of whether America bears any responsibility over the events of 9/11.

Do you think that Japan bears any responsibility for the nuclear holocausts which occurred at Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August of 1945?

Do you think that the people of Sodom and Gommorrah had any responsibility for the disaster which destroyed those cities during biblical times? According to the bible they did.

How about the tsunami which killed 300,000 in December 2004? Supposedly, the child-sex trade is big business in South Asia. Was this epic catastrophe God's retribution?

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Actually, I do think Japan bear some responsibility for the nuclear holocausts which occurred at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I mean, if they were not in WWII and attacked Pearl Harbor, the US wouldn't have attacked it right? I don't mean to hurt anyone's feelings but its similar to 9/11 as well. If the US wasn't enforcing its Democracy on others, it would not be so hated. It's not exactly a coincidence that America of all countries was attacked. This was a sad tragedy but we do live in a democracy and I don't believe Ms. Gyllenhaal or anyone else should be grilled for expressing their Constitutional right to freedom of speech.

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Actually, John Wirges, Bin Laden said this:
"I say to you, Allah knows that it had never occurred to us to strike the towers. But after it became unbearable and we witnessed the oppression and tyranny of the American/Israeli coalition against our people in Palestine and Lebanon, it came to my mind.
The events that affected my soul in a direct way started in 1982 when America permitted the Israelis to invade Lebanon and the American Sixth Fleet helped them in that. This bombardment began and many were killed and injured and others were terrorised and displaced.
I couldn't forget those moving scenes, blood and severed limbs, women and children sprawled everywhere. Houses destroyed along with their occupants and high rises demolished over their residents, rockets raining down on our home without mercy.
The situation was like a crocodile meeting a helpless child, powerless except for his screams. Does the crocodile understand a conversation that doesn't include a weapon? And the whole world saw and heard but it didn't respond.
In those difficult moments many hard-to-describe ideas bubbled in my soul, but in the end they produced an intense feeling of rejection of tyranny, and gave birth to a strong resolve to punish the oppressors.
And as I looked at those demolished towers in Lebanon, it entered my mind that we should punish the oppressor in kind and that we should destroy towers in America in order that they taste some of what we tasted and so that they be deterred from killing our women and children.
And that day, it was confirmed to me that oppression and the intentional killing of innocent women and children is a deliberate American policy. Destruction is freedom and democracy, while resistance is terrorism and intolerance.
This means the oppressing and embargoing to death of millions as Bush Sr did in Iraq in the greatest mass slaughter of children mankind has ever known, and it means the throwing of millions of pounds of bombs and explosives at millions of children - also in Iraq - as Bush Jr did, in order to remove an old agent and replace him with a new puppet to assist in the pilfering of Iraq's oil and other outrages.
So with these images and their like as their background, the events of September 11th came as a reply to those great wrongs, should a man be blamed for defending his sanctuary?
Is defending oneself and punishing the aggressor in kind, objectionable terrorism? If it is such, then it is unavoidable for us.
This is the message which I sought to communicate to you in word and deed, repeatedly, for years before September 11th.
And you can read this, if you wish, in my interview with Scott in Time Magazine in 1996, or with Peter Arnett on CNN in 1997, or my meeting with John Weiner in 1998. "

(Full Transcript at: http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/79C6AF22-98FB-4A1C-B21F-2BC36E87F61F.htm )

So by that i would concur with Ms. Gyllenhaal, that this was thought of as a retribution of the US's flawed foreign policy, flaws that have only escalated since Bush jr.s terms (we haven't ingratiated ourselves regardless what the media tells us, 100,000 iraqis dead? {please see: http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,1338749,00.html )

and as for "...why is every body trying to get in?"
this from NYT columnist Thomas L. Friedman

"This quiet crisis is a product of three gaps now plaguing American society. The first is an ''ambition gap.'' Compared with the young, energetic Indians and Chinese, too many Americans have gotten too lazy. As David Rothkopf, a former official in the Clinton Commerce Department, puts it, ''The real entitlement we need to get rid of is our sense of entitlement.'' Second, we have a serious numbers gap building. We are not producing enough engineers and scientists. We used to make up for that by importing them from India and China, but in a flat world, where people can now stay home and compete with us, and in a post-9/11 world, where we are insanely keeping out many of the first-round intellectual draft choices in the world for exaggerated security reasons, we can no longer cover the gap. That's a key reason companies are looking abroad. The numbers are not here. And finally we are developing an education gap. Here is the dirty little secret that no C.E.O. wants to tell you: they are not just outsourcing to save on salary. They are doing it because they can often get better-skilled and more productive people than their American workers.
These are some of the reasons that Bill Gates, the Microsoft chairman, warned the governors' conference in a Feb. 26 speech that American high-school education is ''obsolete.'' As Gates put it: ''When I compare our high schools to what I see when I'm traveling abroad, I am terrified for our work force of tomorrow. In math and science, our fourth graders are among the top students in the world. By eighth grade, they're in the middle of the pack. By 12th grade, U.S. students are scoring near the bottom of all industrialized nations. . . . The percentage of a population with a college degree is important, but so are sheer numbers. In 2001, India graduated almost a million more students from college than the United States did. China graduates twice as many students with bachelor's degrees as the U.S., and they have six times as many graduates majoring in engineering. In the international competition to have the biggest and best supply of knowledge workers, America is falling behind.''
Advertisement

We need to get going immediately. It takes 15 years to train a good engineer, because, ladies and gentlemen, this really is rocket science. So parents, throw away the Game Boy, turn off the television and get your kids to work. There is no sugar-coating this: in a flat world, every individual is going to have to run a little faster if he or she wants to advance his or her standard of living. When I was growing up, my parents used to say to me, ''Tom, finish your dinner -- people in China are starving.'' But after sailing to the edges of the flat world for a year, I am now telling my own daughters, ''Girls, finish your homework -- people in China and India are starving for your jobs.''

I repeat, this is not a test. This is the beginning of a crisis that won't remain quiet for long. And as the Stanford economist Paul Romer so rightly says, ''A crisis is a terrible thing to waste.'"
( full text at: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/03/magazine/03DOMINANCE.html?pagewanted=1&ei=5070&en=6a602493e4b5a3ac&ex=1114660800&incamp=article_popular_4 )

there are people trying to get in, but these are more likley "unskilled laborers" who DO get in because they are cheep laborers, illegal, and contribute 1,000,000 of dollars to our social security and don't collect because they are illegals.
see:
"Starting in the late 1980's, the Social Security Administration received a flood of W-2 earnings reports with incorrect - sometimes simply fictitious - Social Security numbers. It stashed them in what it calls the "earnings suspense file" in the hope that someday it would figure out whom they belonged to.

The file has been mushrooming ever since: $189 billion worth of wages ended up recorded in the suspense file over the 1990's, two and a half times the amount of the 1980's.

In the current decade, the file is growing, on average, by more than $50 billion a year, generating $6 billion to $7 billion in Social Security tax revenue and about $1.5 billion in Medicare taxes.

In 2002 alone, the last year with figures released by the Social Security Administration, nine million W-2's with incorrect Social Security numbers landed in the suspense file, accounting for $56 billion in earnings, or about 1.5 percent of total reported wages.

Social Security officials do not know what fraction of the suspense file corresponds to the earnings of illegal immigrants. But they suspect that the portion is significant.

"Our assumption is that about three-quarters of other-than-legal immigrants pay payroll taxes," said Stephen C. Goss, Social Security's chief actuary, using the agency's term for illegal immigration."

( full text at: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/05/business/05immigration.html?ex=1114660800&en=5f0c84fc94c926a5&ei=5070 )

so now we are becoming a nation of ignorant menial workers, anti intellectual, and perfect future solders.

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This young woman deserves the strongest, sharpest rebuke possible, not just by filmgoers - i.e., don't go to see the wretched piece of work -- but especially by those of us who were most directly affected by the terror attacks.

I lived 4 blocks from WTC and lost my home that day, and was fortunate that I did not lose my life. Remarks such as hers are an insult to the memory of the American martyrs of that day, and as one who lives daily with the aftermath, I am disgusted, not only with her remarks, but with the lack of response to those vile sentiments by the organizers of the Festival.

Those of us who survived that day and who live with its consequences especially have the duty to express our revulsion and disgust with this woman's unlettered, ill-informed, and grossly insensitive statements to the Festival, and to demand an apology from Ms. Gyllenhaal, from the producers and creators of the movie at issue, and from the Festival for not immediately distancing itself from this individual.

Ms. Gyllenhaal has issued a statement that compounds her error and adds insult to injury. As a survivor of 9/11, I am incredulous at the studied intransigence of this immature young girl, and I urge those of you who share my outrage to visit nytimes.com/movies and post to that forum, as well as your favorite Weblogs - and in addition, call the New York City Council and urge them to continue the pressure they have applied to Ms. Gyllenhaal's orginization for her to issue a true apology, rather than the mealy-mouthed, insincere nonsense she has already inflicted upon us.

It is important to remember that freedom of speech does _not_ mean freedom from the _consequences_ of one's free speech. If a public figure makes public (and inflammatory) comments in a public forum, it is not undemocratic to expect that those comments will engender a wide range of freely expressed responses.

Her intemperate remarks have served only to increase the suffering of those of us directly affected by the terror attacks, and her arrogant refusal to apologize for the damage her remarks have caused reflects poorly on her, her colleagues, and the TriBeCa Film Festival - an event born from a desire to bring life and hope back to my devastated neighborhood of Lower Manhattan.

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Actually, John Wirges, Bin Laden said this:
"I say to you, Allah knows that it had never occurred to us to strike the towers. But after it became unbearable and we witnessed the oppression and tyranny of the American/Israeli coalition against our people in Palestine and Lebanon, it came to my mind.
The events that affected my soul in a direct way started in 1982 when America permitted the Israelis to invade Lebanon and the American Sixth Fleet helped them in that. This bombardment began and many were killed and injured and others were terrorised and displaced.
I couldn't forget those moving scenes, blood and severed limbs, women and children sprawled everywhere. Houses destroyed along with their occupants and high rises demolished over their residents, rockets raining down on our home without mercy.
The situation was like a crocodile meeting a helpless child, powerless except for his screams. Does the crocodile understand a conversation that doesn't include a weapon? And the whole world saw and heard but it didn't respond.
In those difficult moments many hard-to-describe ideas bubbled in my soul, but in the end they produced an intense feeling of rejection of tyranny, and gave birth to a strong resolve to punish the oppressors.
And as I looked at those demolished towers in Lebanon, it entered my mind that we should punish the oppressor in kind and that we should destroy towers in America in order that they taste some of what we tasted and so that they be deterred from killing our women and children.
And that day, it was confirmed to me that oppression and the intentional killing of innocent women and children is a deliberate American policy. Destruction is freedom and democracy, while resistance is terrorism and intolerance.
This means the oppressing and embargoing to death of millions as Bush Sr did in Iraq in the greatest mass slaughter of children mankind has ever known, and it means the throwing of millions of pounds of bombs and explosives at millions of children - also in Iraq - as Bush Jr did, in order to remove an old agent and replace him with a new puppet to assist in the pilfering of Iraq's oil and other outrages.
So with these images and their like as their background, the events of September 11th came as a reply to those great wrongs, should a man be blamed for defending his sanctuary?
Is defending oneself and punishing the aggressor in kind, objectionable terrorism? If it is such, then it is unavoidable for us.
This is the message which I sought to communicate to you in word and deed, repeatedly, for years before September 11th.
And you can read this, if you wish, in my interview with Scott in Time Magazine in 1996, or with Peter Arnett on CNN in 1997, or my meeting with John Weiner in 1998. "

(Full Transcript at: http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/79C6AF22-98FB-4A1C-B21F-2BC36E87F61F.htm )

So by that i would concur with Ms. Gyllenhaal, that this was thought of as a retribution of the US's flawed foreign policy, flaws that have only escalated since Bush jr.s terms (we haven't ingratiated ourselves regardless what the media tells us, 100,000 iraqis dead? {please see: http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,1338749,00.html )

and as for "...why is every body trying to get in?"
this from NYT columnist Thomas L. Friedman

"This quiet crisis is a product of three gaps now plaguing American society. The first is an ''ambition gap.'' Compared with the young, energetic Indians and Chinese, too many Americans have gotten too lazy. As David Rothkopf, a former official in the Clinton Commerce Department, puts it, ''The real entitlement we need to get rid of is our sense of entitlement.'' Second, we have a serious numbers gap building. We are not producing enough engineers and scientists. We used to make up for that by importing them from India and China, but in a flat world, where people can now stay home and compete with us, and in a post-9/11 world, where we are insanely keeping out many of the first-round intellectual draft choices in the world for exaggerated security reasons, we can no longer cover the gap. That's a key reason companies are looking abroad. The numbers are not here. And finally we are developing an education gap. Here is the dirty little secret that no C.E.O. wants to tell you: they are not just outsourcing to save on salary. They are doing it because they can often get better-skilled and more productive people than their American workers.
These are some of the reasons that Bill Gates, the Microsoft chairman, warned the governors' conference in a Feb. 26 speech that American high-school education is ''obsolete.'' As Gates put it: ''When I compare our high schools to what I see when I'm traveling abroad, I am terrified for our work force of tomorrow. In math and science, our fourth graders are among the top students in the world. By eighth grade, they're in the middle of the pack. By 12th grade, U.S. students are scoring near the bottom of all industrialized nations. . . . The percentage of a population with a college degree is important, but so are sheer numbers. In 2001, India graduated almost a million more students from college than the United States did. China graduates twice as many students with bachelor's degrees as the U.S., and they have six times as many graduates majoring in engineering. In the international competition to have the biggest and best supply of knowledge workers, America is falling behind.''
Advertisement

We need to get going immediately. It takes 15 years to train a good engineer, because, ladies and gentlemen, this really is rocket science. So parents, throw away the Game Boy, turn off the television and get your kids to work. There is no sugar-coating this: in a flat world, every individual is going to have to run a little faster if he or she wants to advance his or her standard of living. When I was growing up, my parents used to say to me, ''Tom, finish your dinner -- people in China are starving.'' But after sailing to the edges of the flat world for a year, I am now telling my own daughters, ''Girls, finish your homework -- people in China and India are starving for your jobs.''

I repeat, this is not a test. This is the beginning of a crisis that won't remain quiet for long. And as the Stanford economist Paul Romer so rightly says, ''A crisis is a terrible thing to waste.'"
( full text at: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/03/magazine/03DOMINANCE.html?pagewanted=1&ei=5070&en=6a602493e4b5a3ac&ex=1114660800&incamp=article_popular_4 )

there are people trying to get in, but these are more likley "unskilled laborers" who DO get in because they are cheep laborers, illegal, and contribute 1,000,000 of dollars to our social security and don't collect because they are illegals.
see:
"Starting in the late 1980's, the Social Security Administration received a flood of W-2 earnings reports with incorrect - sometimes simply fictitious - Social Security numbers. It stashed them in what it calls the "earnings suspense file" in the hope that someday it would figure out whom they belonged to.

The file has been mushrooming ever since: $189 billion worth of wages ended up recorded in the suspense file over the 1990's, two and a half times the amount of the 1980's.

In the current decade, the file is growing, on average, by more than $50 billion a year, generating $6 billion to $7 billion in Social Security tax revenue and about $1.5 billion in Medicare taxes.

In 2002 alone, the last year with figures released by the Social Security Administration, nine million W-2's with incorrect Social Security numbers landed in the suspense file, accounting for $56 billion in earnings, or about 1.5 percent of total reported wages.

Social Security officials do not know what fraction of the suspense file corresponds to the earnings of illegal immigrants. But they suspect that the portion is significant.

"Our assumption is that about three-quarters of other-than-legal immigrants pay payroll taxes," said Stephen C. Goss, Social Security's chief actuary, using the agency's term for illegal immigration."

( full text at: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/05/business/05immigration.html?ex=1114660800&en=5f0c84fc94c926a5&ei=5070 )

so now we are becoming a nation of ignorant menial workers, anti intellectual, and perfect future solders.

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I applaud this woman's courage. And mostly for not backing down. Funny how all of the media spin is portraying her comments as being overwhelmingly condemned, yet all of the polls I've seen show that 40% agree with her. This is the majority ( 25% disagree with her comments). This is how the mass media tries to control public opinion, as they did with Arnold Shwarzennegar's comments on securing our borders. The majority of working Americans fully agree but media pressure as usual forced "a clarification" on his part. She has displayed more courage than "The Terminator" in not backing down.

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In response to John Smith:

I work a couple blocks from World Trade Center and my commute involves me actually using the Path Hub, so I am privy the destruction and void that has been left there. John, we all agree that this was a tragedy, but put everything in perspective. This was not a random act of violence. This was a response for what the US has been doing, clandestine and other. John, please read and understand the history of the US. Maggie Gyllenhaal, voiced her opinion and should not be battered over it. The US is a great country and a land of opportunity, but at whose expense? We must not forget what the US has done... from deposing standing presidents in Chile to sanctioning murders in other developing countries. We were pretty quick to jump into Iraq, so why aren’t we helping out in Dafur, Sudan? We can't be lead by this blind patriotism and nationalism. You say Maggie Gyllenhaal is ill informed... I say to you, you are the ill informed one. If you want to complain about this, I think the blame should be put squarely on Capitol Hill and the decision makers and those responsible with the safety of the nation. People are afraid of the truth.

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Joseph Smith - While I empathize with your plight, and understand you discouragement with this young ladies' comments, don't you think it would behoove you to educate yourself as to WHY you were victimized? Instead of wasting your time posting in movie message boards urging people to boycott this production company/film festival/actress, why don't you do some homework and boycott the things that all of this nonsense was based on ... OIL.

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Ben T. you use a lot of words, but don’t say much. That’s the mark of a pseudo-intellectual, using so many words that you hope no one will see the man behind the curtain.

Thing one; 1998, Osama’s Fatwa, “For over seven years the United States has been occupying the lands of Islam in the holiest of places, the Arabian Peninsula, plundering its riches, dictating to its rulers, humiliating its people, and terrorizing its neighbors. The ruling to kill the Americans and their allies -- civilians and military -- is an individual duty for every Muslim who can do it in any country in which it is possible to do it”

Thing two; my grandparents came to the US from Europe to escape Hitler. My grandfather shined shoes and washed dishes to get a head but he entered legally. There are about 20 million illegal aliens in the US, many doing the menial labor you refer too. But there is also my doctor who has been here 3 years, after waiting on a list for 7 years for a chance to enter. This is a great country, if you did any travel outside the US you would realize that. You would also meet many people that believe it too, so long as you stayed out of Socialist Europe.

Thing three; Freedom of Speech comes at a price. I am tired of ignorant, uneducated, under-educated celebrities using the fame we give them to tell us how to think, however, Miss Gyllenhaal is not one of those having a degree in English. To her I say this, While I disagree with her opinion that we are some how to blame for 9/11, I will die for her right to say it.

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Would you be saying these "intellectual" thoughts if your family were in the Twin Towers on 9/11? Or are you trying to "drum up" business for a flounderinf career? If we had people like you and you ilk in WWII, the Japannese and Nazis would have won. You are not an asset to the United States in its war on terrorism. You give aid and comfort to the enemy just as Hanoi Jane did in Vietnam.

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Maggie,I think you are an absolutely wonderful human being!!!

Thanks
B.

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