Obsession — I caught the airing of this documentary on Fox Network, on a plane, after an episode of The Dog Whisperer. This film, like mauled dogs, is not for the weak-of-stomach, which I unfortunately found out while in seat-back-upright position, face-to-face with graphic footage of terrorist acts set to a hip-hop soundtrack. The film, which sets out to relate radical Islam to Nazism, draws on extensive Arab and Iranian television footage — comparing Americans to pigs, etc. — and commentary from counterterrorism figures such as Nonie Darwish, the daughter of a Fedayeen terrorist. I won’t comment on the parallel, except to say that I could not stop watching it, with its scenes of things such as little girls fervently chanting Jihadi kill-Americans-in-the-name-of-Allah. The film is available for pre-release order on DVD.

The web sites
Riverbendblog.blogspot.com — Leave it to me to pick a “Girl Blog from Iraq.” Iraqi girly-girl-turned-blog-award winner Riverbend (her pseudonym) blogs about Iraqi culture — check out her link to iraqimusic.com — and politics in a time of war, where “A day in the life of the average Iraqi has been reduced to identifying corpses, avoiding car bombs, and attempting to keep track of which family members have been detained, which ones have been exiled, and which ones have been abducted.” Her New Year’s post: the top 10 reasons you know your country is in trouble.

Comw.org/warreport — The War Report Web site is like an international search engine for articles covering Iraqi and Afghan issues and is updated daily. A recent week’s sampling included stories from the Asia Times, the Guardian, and the Independent. Unlike your daily-go-to news sites, the War Report also posts periodic Iraq and Afghanistan status reports from the US Department of Defense and the UN Assistance Mission for Iraq. Editors’ picks include pdfs of federal legislative documents such as the recently released Select Committee on Intelligence report.

Electroniciraq.net — Electronic Iraq, probably the most eclectic war Web site, posts articles, analyses, op-eds, Iraq Diaries, War Every Day: The eIraq Blog, and more. The Iraq Diaries read like the stories written by soldiers for Operation Homecoming. Except the diaries are in the voices of Iraqi contributors. In his December diary entry, titled “I Never Made So Many Coffins a Day,” 36 year-old Muhammad Abdel Kader compares his pre-war two-coffin-a-day life to his wartime at-least-20-a-day demand. The going rate? $10 USD per burial.

Milblogging.com — Uh, there’s a little bit of everything on milblogging.com. It features blogs like 365 and Wakeup; a sample: “Mortal things cannot brush shoulders with eternity without bearing the psychic scars of their meeting.” Whatever that means. And there are blogs like Mudville Gazette; another sample: “it is hard for me to tell you all this but i was hurt by an ied here. my right arm has been amputated below the elbow, my left has four working fingers.” And, of course, there are photos of kitties with guns. Whatever that means.

Memritv.org — Memri TV is the Middle Eastern media’s YouTube. The site shows clips from the Arab and Iranian media, on subjects ranging from the war in Iraq to the partisan war stateside. Watch Middle Eastern journalists and editors, academics and researchers, public-opinion and policy makers, politicians, military experts, intellectuals, and authors spin the news — and other stuff. Examples of other stuff being a recent lecture by Iranian film critic Majid Shah-Hosseini on Western Islamophobia in American films such as Godzilla, Alien, and Star Wars. Really?