Are The Arabs Finally Beginning to Ask Giuseppe’s Questions?

by Norman Berdichevsky (June 2007)

Sahara” (1943) with Humphrey Bogart playing Sergeant Joe Gunn, a tank commander in the North African desert, did not win any academy awards. In most respects though, it stands a notch higher than most World War II fighting films glorifying the Allied cause and graphically portraying the absolute evil of the Nazis. No other film I know highlights so effectively the camaraderie of the Allies on the Western Front using the skirmishing just prior to the decisive Battle of El-Alamein to portray the heroic sacrifice of a handful of American, British, Commonwealth, and Free French soldiers. Each of the soldiers with the single exception of Bogart’s character are not portrayed as career army men but come from diverse walks of life and are looking forward to rejoining wives, sweethearts, families and civilian careers.

U.S.). The pilot has been shot down by Sgt. Gunn and taken captive. At first he refuses to be examined by the Black Sudanese on “racial grounds” because Tambul is inferior, a clear reference by the Hollywood producers to the behavior of Hitler in walking out of the Olympic Stadium in 1936 rather than be present at the ceremony awarding a gold medal to American Negro athlete Jesse Owens.

and

2. another Axis soldier, an Italian by the name of Giuseppe, (J. Carrol Naish) taken prisoner by Tambul. The German and Giuseppe are locked in a hut while the outpost comes under attack by a stray contingent of 500 soldiers of the vaunted Afrika Korps commanded by Major Von Falken. They have come 150 kilometers out of their line of march in order to get water from the well, unaware that it has run dry.

German prisoner: Now is the time we must reach the German camp.

Giuseppe: No, I cannot do this.

German Prisoner: We have only to overpower one man now and take his rifle and maybe get a machine gun. Then we have a chance to kill them all!

ührer?

Giuseppe: That would take and artist. I am BUT a mechanic. BUT are my eyes blind that I cannot see, that I must fall to my knees to worship a MANIAC who has made of my country a concentration camp, who has made of my people SLAVES ? Must I KISS the hand that beats me, LICK the Boot that kicks me ? NO !

The German pilot in fury then knocks Giuseppe down and stabs him. Although mortally wounded, he struggles to his feel to warn Sgt. Gunn that the pilot must be stopped before reaching the German lines.

J. Carrol Naish was a bit actor who rarely was given a major role and the dialogue he has in Sahara totals only a few minutes but I have never seen a performance on screen or stage more authentic, and convincing that blends personality factors with ideological and emotional components. Naish joined the Navy at age 16 and as a seaman, he traveled all over the world and became adept at imitating the speech dialects of different nationalities and classes. He appeared in a dozen films as a Chinese (Charlie Chan no less), a Japanese, a Frenchman, Portuguese, Italian, German, and even Chief Sitting Bull! (in a 1954 film of the same title). Although of Irish descent, he never played an Irishman.

Hollywood films (Three Stooges Follies-1973; Frankenstein Meets Dracula -1974). This is truly a sad commentary on the ups and downs of an acting career and Hollywood casting.

Watching the film Sahara today, one feels compelled to ask why through their long history under ruthless leaders able to inflame Arab passions for wars of revenge and conquest motivated by hatred and extreme religious and nationalist fanaticism, the rank and file Arab soldiers who have been so abused and misled, never reached the stage of asking the same questions as Giuseppe.

jihadist suicide attacks in Jerusalem, Madrid, New York, London and increasingly throughout much of the rest of the world – Bali, Beirut, Istanbul, Kenya, Morocco, Algeria and Jordan.

Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, among the Palestinians and Jordanians and in Iraq.

London based Al-Sharq Al-Awsat repeated essentially the same message and had this to say :

Paradise. They are not interested in the life of this world, and they want to take with them to the grave the greatest number of people possible.

I know that this is an issue that is difficult for the Westerner to understand. It is also difficult for many of the Muslims themselves to accept this, and they always try to justify it with issues that they consider legitimate and comprehensible.

Iraq tonight, and the Jews fled Palestine, and extremist religious governments were established in Morocco, Algeria, and Egypt – this would not satisfy them… They want Paradise, and for this they will travel to the ends of the earth, to the North Pole and the South Pole, to fight the infidels”.

ürk abolished the caliphate and sultanate, translated the call to prayer from Arabic to Turkish, instituted a secular state with a Constitution and civil and criminal laws modeled on the Swiss system, abolished the fez and the veil, have essential rights been established for citizens that are not dependent on Islamic law. Nowhere else does a simple soldier or citizen like Giuseppe have any protection against the far reaching non-negotiable demands of a religion that enslaves and enchains him.

Cairo. He identified the Arab individual as pulled apart by the conflicting forces of modern progressive Western influence and the traditional Arab culture regarded as the “perfection of the ancients”. Al-Qasimi did not hesitate to identify the remedy: unreserved adoption of the progressive humanism of the West by ridding Muslim lands of the “crushing heritage of the past“. As David Pryce-Jones so accurately put it….

New York. 2002.)

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