To commemorate the Sept. 11 attacks in New York and Washington, a French studio is unveiling an unusual omnibus movie called "11'09"01 September 11," which consists of 11 separate submissions from key directors in as many countries.
     The problem: Several of the segments are stridently anti-American.
     Consider the dialogue from the Egyptian submission directed by Youssef Chahine. "The U.S. and Israel are democracies, their governments are elected by their people -- thus it is legitimate to attack their people," says the character, an unnamed filmmaker.

You know ... that almost makes a kind of bizarre sense. Attack the people, and you may force a change in government policy. After all, if the government derives its ability to govern from the consent of the people, doesn't it logically follow that it derives its policy from its people? (Well, that's not actually how things work, quite, but you can almost understand how he wound up there. Leaving aside, of course, the utter immorality of the odd bit of mass murder.)

The movie's first segment, from Iranian filmmaker Samira Makhmalbaf, begins with Iranian schoolchildren explaining, "The United States want to bomb us, so we must built shelters." Amid references to a possible U.S. atomic bombing of Iran, the teacher encourages the pupils to commemorate the 9/11 victims with a minute of silence, but the kids keep talking about their own local tragedies.

What? Drop an atomic bomb on Iran? Where on earth do they get that one? (From Bush naming Iran as part of his Axis of Terror, I suppose. But still ... an atomic bomb?)

Meanwhile, India's Mira Nair focuses on the true story of a Pakistani-American who died helping New York firefighters at the World Trade Center. His unexplained disappearance on the date of the attack led to police and media suspicions of his possible association with terrorists -- something that wouldn't have happened if he had been named Jesus or David, his mother says in the segment.

Unfortunately, probably quite true.

"11'09"01" has yet to find a U.S. distributor.

Somehow, I'm not even remotely surprised.