U.S.: NYC's Former Mayor Ed Koch reviews Fat Boy's Fahrenheit 9/11

I am a movie critic, so I went to see “Fahrenheit 9/11.” The movie is a well-done propaganda piece and screed as has been reported by most critics.

It is not a documentary which seeks to present the facts truthfully.

The most significant offense that movie commits is to cheapen the political debate by dehumanizing the President and presenting him as a cartoon.

Newsday reported some of Moore’s misstatements as follows: “At the start of ‘Fahrenheit 9/11,’ filmmaker Michael Moore shows a clip of CNN analyst Jeffrey Toobin saying that if ballots had been recounted in Florida after the 2000 presidential vote, ‘under every scenario Gore won the election.’

“What Moore doesn't show is that a six-month study in 2001 by news organizations including The New York Times, the Washington Post and CNN found just the opposite. Even if the Supreme Court had not stopped a statewide recount, or if a more limited recount of four heavily Democratic counties had taken place, Bush still would have won Florida and the election . . . Moore suggests Bush's conflict of interest was manifest shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks when the White House ‘approved planes to pick up the bin Ladens and numerous other Saudis’ who, fearing reprisals, were flown out of the United States. Embellishing the well-known scenario, Moore interviews a retired FBI agent who says authorities should have first questioned the bin Ladens.

“But the bin Ladens were questioned. The commission investigating the attacks reported in April that the FBI interviewed 30 passengers: ‘Nobody was allowed to depart on these six flights who the FBI wanted to interview in connection with the 9/11 attacks or who the FBI later concluded had any involvement in those attacks.’”

It is clear to me from the tenor of the film’s off-screen commentary by Michael Moore that he would have denounced WW II.

Did he support the United States and NATO going into Bosnia to save the Muslims from ethnic cleansing and destruction?

Would he agree that we should have attempted to save the Muslim men from death at the hands of the Serbs in Srebrenica?

Should we now be going into the Sudan and saving perhaps a million black Christian and Animist Sudanese from Arab marauders who are murdering, raping and starving the blacks and even selling some into slavery?

Weren’t we right to go into Iraq on the basis of United Nations Resolution 1441 which stated the Iraqis had weapons of mass destruction and that was a cause for war unless they accounted for them and destroyed them, which they refused to do?

Now that no WMDs have yet been found, was the invasion to end the reign of Saddam Hussein, who had killed and tortured hundreds of thousands of his own citizens, still supportable? Moore thinks not.

I think, yes.

The movie’s diatribes, sometimes amusing and sometimes manifestly unfair, will not change any views. They will simply cheapen the national debate and reinforce the opinions on both sides.