At  our usual Sunday brunch  with friends we covered a host of topics.  We chatted about the further demise of American exceptionalism evidenced by Putin thumbing his nose at Obama and the West by seizing Crimea.  Then we dawdled over coffee about the advent of meteorological spring, yesterday, March 1^st; although folks up North are bracing for another Super storm, Titan. 

But then our friends talked about a movie they saw last night, Non Stop, an action flick starring Liam Neeson and Julianna Moore in the featured roles together with Michelle Dockery of Downton Abbey‘s  Lady Mary Crawley fame, Scoot McNairy and Anson Mount.  Neeson portrays an US Sky Marshall caught in an airplane terrorist plot.  The film’s action unfolds at 40,000 feet on a transatlantic flight when  a text message threat  is received  by Neesom from a terrorist passenger on board requesting deposit of $150 million in a Swiss account, or else one by one passengers will be killed.  According to the Los Angeles Times, Non Stop topped both Son of God and The Lego Movie  at the box office this weekend.  My brunch partners said that they went home and talked about the plots intricacies for two hours.

According to Debra Burlingame of the 9/11 Families, it had a different agenda. One that disturbed her as the sister of Charles “Chic” Burlingame III, the pilot of the hijacked American Airlines Flight 77 that was flown into the Pentagon.  It may likely disturb David Beamer, father of Flight 93 passenger, his son Todd, who with others on board undertook the first counter-terrorism attack on 9/11 against the jihadi hi-jackers causing the plane to crash into a vacant field in Southwestern Pennsylvania sparing likely targets, the White House or US Capitol Building in Washington. Here’s what Burlingame said aboutNon-Stop.

The “big reveal” of Liam Neeson’s new “thriller,” Non-Stop, is that the terrorist hijacker who is anonymously murdering innocent passengers on a commercial airliner is a 9/11 family member/military combat vet fed up with meaningless war.  See, John Nolte’s review: http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Hollywood/2014/02/28/non-stop-review-neeson-thriller-new-left-wing-low

Worse, the flight’s quiet hero who comes to the aid of the protagonist, thereby saving the day, is a Muslim doctor.   (Oh, the irony, that Al Qaeda’s number one is Ayman Al Zawahiri, a doctor.  And that six of the Glasgow Airport bombing plot were….Muslim doctors.  Hollywood likes to serve up its teachable moments cold.)

An added dash of moral vanity is the side story making news that Liam Neeson wants to convert to Islam , the religion he deemed in an interview to be “the answer.”  Not sure what the question is, but apparently Mr. Neeson is more afraid of his Irish countrymen than his would-be co-religionists.
Normally Hollywood gets a pass, with reviewers issuing “spoiler alerts” when revealing details.  Sorry.   Sitting through this movie for that sucker punch of an ending isn’t worthy of my consideration.

I urge people to pass this on.

Debra

Watch this You Tube video about Liam Neeson’s Da’wah – call to Islam, while doing a film in Istanbul back in 2012. His head was filled with the ringing Muezzins’ calls to prayers from hundreds of Mosques.  All this from a former Catholic altar boy from Belfast.  And to think that I loved Neeson’s portrayal in the 1996 film about Irish revolutionary turned peacemaker, Michael Collins.  Probably because it was the late Israeli Prime Minister Itzhak Shamir’s code name as an underground Irgun leader.

[youtube]http://youtu.be/jEhmXWK4IRs[/youtube]

This film script must have hastened  Neeson’s  intentions to plough throw the Qur’an, Hadith and Sira of Mohammed ,the exemplar, before professing his new found faith with the Shahada.  Burlingame called this one correctly – a Hollywood’s latest sucker punch.

EDITORS NOTE: This column originally appeared on The New English Review.