Somewhere between a young Joan Rivers and \”Desperate Housewives\” actress Eva Longoria, you\’ll find Adrianna Costa. On March 5, the Agoura-raised entertainment correspondent will be covering the Academy Awards live for the first time. However, she won\’t be in a gown hobnobbing with celebrities on the red carpet.
In Sidney Lumet\’s searing short film, \”The Rachel Aria,\” a fanatical Jew tears a Torah scroll while making a horrific vow: He\’s decided to let himself and his adopted child be boiled alive rather than convert to Christianity; he won\’t save her by revealing she\’s actually the daughter of the cardinal, his arch-nemesis.
When I write a screenplay, I start out with an agenda. I decide who my hero is first and who is the villain. Then I fashion scenes to build my dramatic case and make it believable. That is, I believe, exactly what occurred with regard to at least two reporters, Sheila MacVicar of CNN and Tom Miller of the Los Angeles Times, on Tuesday, April 16 in the Jenin refugee camp.
I was there. I saw everything they saw, I heard everything they heard, I smelled everything they did not smell. And the truth is there was no smell of death on that day, despite what Miller wrote in his feature article of April 21.
It began by happenstance. CNN reporter Steve Emerson was stuck in Oklahoma City on Christmas 1992 with nothing to do and wandered by the city\’s convention center, where a gathering of the Muslim Arab Youth Association was taking place.
Suddenly, we find that an alternate universe shadows our world. Its inhabitants see our culture as their poison, our politics as their oppression, our freedom as their threat — The question is how we could have been so blind. Only now is most of America learning about fundamentalist Islam. Just one year ago, when then-candidate George W. Bush didn\’t know the name of President George W. Bush\’s best friend, the president of Pakistan, the public\’s response was, \”So what?\” So, this: Our blissful ignorance turned out to be deadly.
September 11, 2001.
This morning, America woke up to the same nightmare that my parents did on February 6, 1985. On that morning, my parents in Los Angeles heard the news that a suicide bomber had attacked an Israel Defense Forces convoy in Southern Lebanon. Reports of casualties varied from 50 injured to 100 killed. My parent\’s ultimate nightmare was that their son, who had enlisted in the IDF seven months earlier, was a part of the convoy that had been attacked.
Over the next few months, Jewish life is going to get a lot more interesting than most of us would like. It\’s summer, and we\’re in for a hot one.
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