A Certain Point of View: Writing, Film and Stuff

Today is September 11, 2019. It is the 18th Anniversary of al Qaeda's terrorist attacks on the United States of America in New York City, Washington, DC, and Shanksville, PA (the site where United 93 crashed when its passengers, aware of the other attacks by three hijacked airliners against the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, fought back against the al Qaeda hijackers and forced the plane to crash before it reached its intended target, which was either the White House or the Capitol in Washington, DC.) Over 3,000 Americans, as well as the 19 hijackers, were killed in the worst terrorist incident in U.S. history. September 11 is a date that will, like 12/7/1941, live in infamy. The attacks were masterminded by Osama bin Laden and other radical adherents of Islam. They were carried out by young men who were radicalized into believing the tenets of a religion that some "imams" and "religious thinkers" have twisted into something that most Muslims do n...

On July 3, 2018, Universal Pictures Home Entertainment and Amblin Partners released 7 Days in Entebbe, a taut but somewhat offbeat dramatization of the hijacking of Air France jet by a team of pro-Palestinian terrorists, its journey from Tel Aviv to Entebbe – a city in Uganda – and the events that led to one of history’s most daring rescue missions: Operation Thunderbolt, aka Operation Entebbe. Wilfried Böse: We don't want to hurt anybody. We're humanitarians. Written by Gregory Burke ( ’71 ) and helmed by Brazilian filmmaker José Padilha ( Elite Squad;  the 2014 remake of Robocop ), this Focus Features film – released in the UK as Entebbe – premiered in theaters in March of 2018 and stars German-Spanish actor Daniel Brühl and Rosamunde Pike as Wilfried Böse and Brigitte Kuhlmann, the two German hijackers who helped two Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine – External Operations (PFLP-EO) operatives commandeer Air France Flight 139 and, after a roundabout jo...

(C) 1976 Bantam Books Before Thomas Harris, a respected reporter for the Associated Press and ace novelist, created the creepy-yet-charismatic serial killer Hannibal Lecter in his novels Red Dragon , The Silence of the Lambs, and Hannibal, he had already dabbled in another and even more frightening topic: a massive terrorist attack against a "soft" (undefended, usually civilian) target in his 1975 debut novel, Black Sunday. Like The Sum of All Fears, a Tom Clancy "Jack Ryan Novel" that was clearly inspired by Harris' tautly written thriller, Black Sunday' s plot focuses on a plan by Palestinian terrorists to commit a deadly and spectacular attack on a highly televised event: the Super Bowl. The reason for the attack -- at least from the Palestinian side -- is a common thread that runs through both novels: America's unswerving support for Israel in the apparently never-ending Middle East conflict. And just as Clancy --possibly taking his cues fro...

If you were to ask me if I remember what happened on Monday, September 10, 2001, I would have to be honest and say "Nothing, really." I surely must have walked my six-year-old Labrador retriever, done some ghostwriting work for a (now former) client and chatted online with friends and my (now ex-) girlfriend. It was quite an ordinary day, and September 11, 2001 promised to be just one more ordinary day, not just for me, but for nearly 300 million Americans and the rest of the world. As it turned out, however, a man named Osama Bin Laden and his followers in a terrorist organization named Al Qaeda (The Base) had other ideas, and September 11, 2001 turned out to be our generation's Day of Infamy. On that Tuesday morning 10 years ago, I woke up a bit after 8:30 AM; I made my way downstairs and went through the usual routine of serving myself a bowl of cold cereal and making two cups of coffee in a Mr. Coffee brewer. As the coffee brewed (making those weird gurgling...