By: Jay

As our friend, the talented writer Peter Parker pointed out back in May of 2013, the intelligence scripting for the news events surrounding radical Islamic terrorists seem to find their curious parallel in certain Hollywood blockbusters.  Parker explained with precision how the plot of Iron Man 3 in particular demonstrated this obvious correlation with Ben Kingsley’s character, The Mandarin, playing the laughable role of the British actor cum terrorist.  In the plot, the terrorists were fake, kidnapping Iron Man and holding him ransom.  Sound familiar?
As is usual around Jay’s Analysis, this Hollywood meme is again relevant, with a new ISIS “beaheading” today calling to mind the same scene from Iron Man 3, following last week’s theater showing.  In May 2013, Parker wrote:
“Sometime ago this writer made a discovery that was featured here on Jay’s Analysis concerning an episode of the 1990’s Iron Man animated series.  As is the case with numerous films and television shows, this episode contained scenes that seemed to eerily prefigure certain aspects of the 9-11 tragedy.  Interestingly, this particular episode featured not one, but two major parallels to the events of that fateful day, yet surprisingly, at the time, I had never seen this episode featured in any of the internet’s exhaustive lists of ‘9-11 predictive programming.’  I am not suggesting that its absence was due to any conspiracy within a conspiracy, presumably this was merely indicative of the extreme unpopularity of the 90s Iron Man cartoon.  However, its absence from most lists is still in some ways surprising, given how closely it resembled the September 11^th terror attacks. Arguably, of all the examples of ‘9-11 semiotic programming,’ perhaps only the infamous Lone Gunmen pilot came as close to mirroring the real life event.
The episode, which originally aired in 1994, was entitled “The Grim Reaper Wears a Teflon Coat.”  It opens with a control room of NORAD operatives panicking as the new experimental plane, the Grim Reaper, slips by their defenses and begins raining a volley of missiles on New York City.  Amongst the buildings hit in the attack are the Twin Towers.  Moments later it is revealed that this attack was nothing more than a video simulation being shown to high-ranking military officials, illustrating what might happen should the Grim Reaper, the military’s newest super weapon, fall into the wrong hands.  Unfortunately, fall into the wrong hands it does when the Mandarin, a shadowy super-villain who operates out of a secret base in the mountains of Tibet, has his agents steal the plane.  Viewers are treated to yet another simulated attack when the Mandarin shows his followers exactly how he plans to use the Grim Reaper; he will fly it into the Pentagon, destroying the heart of American military power!  Needless to say, the bad guy’s plans are foiled by Iron Man by the episode’s end.”
And,
“By the time of the second Iron-Man movie in 2010, the Mandarin had yet to appear.  For my own part, I thought the studio might be holding back since the character might be considered an offensive ‘Orientalist’ stereotype by today’s standards.  He had, after all, originally been created during the time of Vietnam War.  Admittedly, I felt a little cheated, that is until several months ago when I started seeing trailers for Iron Man 3, featuring Ben Kingsley as the Mandarin, making grandiose bad guy speeches and dramatic super villain poses.  However, upon seeing the movie mere days ago I was both marginally disappointed and yet, at the same time, pleasantly surprised.

Spoiler Alert
As predicted, Iron Man 3 follows through with the groundwork that was laid in the first film, transforming the Mandarin from a Chinese master criminal into a bin Laden-style terrorist leader of indeterminate (presumably Middle Easter or Central Asian) descent.  Like bin Laden, The Mandarin claims responsibility for numerous bombings throughout the world through the release of anti-American diatribes presented in low quality video recordings.  In this sense Iron Man 3 has made the 911 meme in the 90s animated series come full circle.  Now the over-all ‘bin Ladeniness’ of the Mandarin has been fully accentuated, retroactively reinforcing the semiotic resemblance of “The Grim Reaper Wears a Teflon Coat,” to the actual events of September 11^th.
However, the conspiracy content of Iron Man 3 does not end there.  When, Iron Man’s friend is injured in one of the Mandarin’s attacks, the hero enters into an all-out war with the terror leader, back-tracing his televised threats to a mansion, which is surprising located, not in the Middle East but in Miami, Florida.  Busting into the recording room, Iron Man discovers that the Mandarin is not a master terror leader but merely a bumbling, washed up, British stage actor with a drug problem who has been hired to serve as the fake head of a boogeyman terror organization.  He is simply, dressed up in robes and given scripts to read to the camera.  In exchange he is paid with booze, money and loose women and since he is kept confined to the mansion he isn’t even aware that real people are being hurt in his name.  The real mastermind behind all of this is a weapons manufacturing industrialist working with the corrupt Vice President of the U.S.  This is all part of a plan the Industrialist set in motion back in 2000, suggesting perhaps that the entire war on terror itself, at least in the fictional world of Iron Man, is all part of his grand design.
What is interesting about this is how it bares strong resemblance to many of the so-called ‘conspiracy theories’ about Osama bin Laden.  That, bin Laden was either dead or retired, and that look-alike actors working for Western intelligence were performing his various video releases, was and still is a popular opinion among many.  Similar, of course, is the notion that Osama bin Laden had, in fact, been a Western asset from the beginning of his career.”

A year and a half later, the narrative has again emerged, with the rebranded and expired Al Qaeda becoming “ISIS,” the new radical Jihad threatening the western world, and in particular a long line of “journalist aid workers” that seem to be in large supply and quite easily captured.  Perceptive readers will be aware, of course, that these are not “journalist aid workers,” but known intelligence operatives: “aid” worker is one of the most obvious known covers, and their supposed captors, as well.  In our new staged “beheading,” the clip is even more absurd, as once again the film cuts away before any blood, this time without even a head or a body!  The only evidence of the so-called “aid worker’s” corpse are two pasty legs.  Those could be anyone’s legs, but the WWF nature of ISIS and their ridiculous videos will unfortunately continue unabated.  When ISIS shows us their next retarded video and stages the “beheading” of Robert Downey, Jr or Katy Perry, maybe the media whores will begin to lose credibility.  Then again, probably not, since Hollywood and ye ole theatre of staged intelligence operations are now the same.  All these videos are intended to do is rile moronic western evangelicals and faux conservatives who don’t know their theological ass form a hole in the ground for Huntington’s clash of civilizations philosophy.