A Disinformation Co. presentation of a Many Rivers Films production
Produced, directed by David Batty, Kevin Toolis
Written by Robert Baer
<table width="576"><tr><td align="justify">Their devastating and deadly actions punctuate the world news almost nightly, yet they remain faceless figures amidst the violence and turmoil that engulf the Middle East. And, whether it’s the C4-laden martyrs of Hezbollah or the car bombing insurgents of Iraq, what could possibly compel a suicide bomber to voluntarily take their own lives, along with those of hundreds of innocent victims? There is perhaps no one better equipped to investigate this terrifying practice than Robert Baer, a decorated, former Middle East CIA Agent and the man George Clooney’s character was based on in the Academy Award®-winning film, Syriana. Baer returns to his former center of operations to trace the origins of the modern day bomber from the Iran-Iraq war to the Middle Eastern streets of today. He reveals the secret history of the suicide bomber, from the child martyrs of the Iran-Iraq war, the truck bombers in southern Lebanon, to the young men and women who now strap explosives to their bodies and calmly blow themselves up in crowded streets and markets across the Middle East. Baer also reveals the fascinating story of the world’s first suicide bomber, 13-year-old Hossein Fahmideh--who was martyred in the Iran-Iraq war and is now a hero in Iran</td></tr><tr><td align="center">
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The.Cult.Of.The.Suicide.Bomber.2005.DVDRip.XviD-FiCO.avi 
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<table width="576"><tr><td align="justify">Reseña de Film Journal International
If you didn't know who Robert Baer was, you'd take him at first for your standard, slightly over-the-hill BBC stringer. Although he was for years one of the CIA's top field officers in the Middle East, his carelessly nondescript appearance, blithe inquisitiveness and thousand-yard stare all speak to this disarming perception, so that when he launches into his historical account of the rise of the Middle Eastern suicide bomber, he comes off as more plugged-in than your average wonky intelligence expert. Baer also has a personal stake in this topic: He was stationed in Beirut in 1983 when the U.S. embassy was devastated by a suicide car bomber, killing many of his co-workers. The Cult of the Suicide Bomber is structured as Baer's investigation of this phenomenon that, for all its outsized impact on the world stage, has rarely been seriously studied, at least on film.
Baer starts off in Iran, "the birthplace of the suicide bomber," where the Shiite faithful still lovingly reenact the bloody slaughter of the revered Hussein by Sunnis in amateur passion plays, one of which is included here in a particularly fascinating scene. It was during the Iran-Iraq war (1980-88) that Ayatollah Khomeini made the fateful decision to balance out his country's military inferiority by fusing the Shiite martyr ideology with revolutionary zeal, and importuning the populace to sacrifice themselves in defense of Iran. The country is littered with memorials to these dead, especially the war's most beloved martyr, Hossein Famideh, a 13-year-old who strapped on a bomb and threw himself under an Iranian tank. When Baer visits Famideh's family, it's like Ground Zero for the martyr worship that he later tracks to Lebanon and the Palestinian Territories. The family's glazed eyes and reverent tones speak of believers who can't imagine anything more beautiful than this young boy's death, Khomeini's mad but brilliant mixing of authoritarianism and state religion into an implacable and inescapable whole come to life with these happy crypt-keepers.
Having proved so successful in their war with Iraq-Iran would eventually fight their better-equipped invaders to a standstill-they exported the strategy in the early 1980s to Lebanon, riven by civil war and an ill-considered Israeli occupation. Here, in scenes that heavily recall George Clooney's Syriana misadventures, Baer drives through Beirut and the surrounding countryside with his Hezbollah guide, visiting the sites of famous bombings. Fuzzy Hezbollah videos show their attacks on Israeli troops, who took heavy casualties because, as one man says about suicide bombing as a military tactic, "This is the problem...it works." The later stretches of The Cult of the Suicide Bomber are even more disturbing, as Baer travels to Gaza to show how Hamas-and their mastermind Yanyah Ayash, memorably assassinated by the Israelis with a booby-trapped cell-phone-adapted Hezbollah's car-bombing strategy to its current, most terrifying iteration: the targeting of civilians. It's in the Palestinian Territories that the suicide cult has been taken to its creepiest extent, even surpassing martyr-obsessed Iran, in towns carpeted with idealized Elvis-like portraits of the martyrs, children posing with toy assault rifles and Hamas headbands, and a large segment of the population intoning the same cloying platitudes about the joy of death.
Given the breadth and vast scope of the suicide bombing phenomenon, The Cult of the Suicide Bomber is surprisingly adept at staying focused and following Baer's patient A to B to C presentation, which he lays out almost like a security briefing. This approach relies at times too heavily on Baer himself, who is a clumsy narrator and rather flat on camera, not to mention neglecting to discuss related groups outside the Middle East, with the exception of brief nods to the Tamil Tigers and the Black Widows of Chechnya. With the exception of these few missteps, though, Baer's project remains a shocking and highly informative look at the seemingly inexorable spread of these cheerful suicides, Khomeini's ideological spawn memorialized in an endless continuum of kitschy art and grainy videos. This is religion as snuff film.
-Chris Barsanti</td></tr><tr><td align="center">
</td></tr><tr><td align="justify">Reseña de VarietyRobert Baer, the ex-CIA operative upon whom George Clooney's "Syriana" character was fashioned, is the narrator and central figure in "The Cult of the Suicide Bomber," a docu that aims to explain the tactic, as practiced in the Middle East. Benefiting from a remarkable array of interviewees, this thoughtful, incisive, controversial docu, which already aired on Australian TV, bowed June 2 at Gotham's Cinema Village.
One of the few agents based in Lebanon to escape the 1983 attack by a suicide bomber on the American Embassy, Baer took it as his mission to find out who was responsible and why. He traces the origins of such bombings to Iran, to a 13-year-old soldier who sacrificed himself to blow up a tank. Baer subsequently points to the Ayatollah Khomeini as the man who provided the idea for the cult. By reimagining the Iran-Iraq War as a re-enactment of an ancient religious massacre that consecrated its Shiite victims as holy martyrs headed to paradise, Khomeini gave soldiers a reason to go into battle welcoming death.
Baer travels to Lebanon, where suicide bombing was practiced by members of Hezbollah on invading Israeli troops. The case is made that the huge disparity of firepower between the invading Israelis and the Lebanese army, and the large number of casualties among Lebanese civilians made suicide bombing one of the few effective logistical weapons available.
Baer argues that these were not terrorists, but ordinary soldiers, and wonders whether we would judge them differently if they had dropped bombs on the Israelis from the sky rather than blowing them up on the ground.
He observes that the event that launched suicide bombings inside Israel was perpetrated not by a Palestinian but by an Israeli settler who in 1994 opened fire in a Hebron mosque, killing 29 worshippers and injuring more than 100.
He singles out Palestinian Yahya Ayyash, mastermind of suicide bombings of Israeli buses, as the man responsible for changing this weapon of war into a weapon of terror. Present-day footage in the Occupied Territories of parades featuring children festooned with fake sticks of dynamite, and omnipresent posters of youthful martyrs testify to the widespread belief that suicide is the only heroic act of resistance left.
Baer pinpoints the 2005 London bombings, carried out by a homegrown group, as the birth of a new brand of terror dependent on no particular cadre, training or cause.
Baer fearlessly strides through bombing hot spots across the globe, venturing confidently into Iranian anti-American rallies, Hamas-controlled neighborhoods or Hezbollah headquarters, as archival footage of past devastation in each location counterpoints current tensions. As he sips coffee with a member of the Israeli Special Forces or sits down on a couch with a Muslim martyr's mother, he never evades a question or dodges a controversy.
Pic's theorizing is likely to inspire dissent from both left and right. Baer's views on the Occupied Territories are unlikely to please hardline supporters of Israel, and his vision of Iran as a breeding ground for terrorists could be perceived as warmongering at a time when President Bush seems poised for attack.
Production values are those of a superior TV news special.
--Ronnie Scheib
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