Terrorists Among Us (2001)

Almost everyone agrees that America didn't pay enough attention to the threat of Islamic fundamentalist terrorism during the 1990s. Much of the current political and media heat on the subject focuses on a search for scapegoats.

Terrorists Among Us, an update of a one-hour documentary that originally aired on PBS in 1994, leaves the blame game to others.

Instead narrator-producer Steve Emerson prophetically documents the numerous ways these terrorist groups have organized themselves on American soil. Most compelling are his selections from the videos shot and/or produced by the Muslim associations themselves. They openly preach hatred of the Jews and the United States and recruit followers for training camps located here.

Some FBI and CIA officials were aware of these activities, but before the World Trade Center attacks they were hamstrung by political higher-ups and many of the laws then on the books.

What's even more horrifying is that al Qaeda is only one group among many. It and the others functioned with relative impunity before Sept. 11.

Watch on the Rhine (1943)

The 1990s weren't the only time many Americans were blind to a lethal, barbaric threat to their civilization. In the 1930s, respectable public figures believed that fascism could be somehow contained without sacrifice and the use of force.

Watch on the Rhine, directed by Herman Shumlin and adapted by Dashiell Hammett and Lillian Hellman from Hellman's play, tells the story of German Resistance leader Kurt Muller (Paul Lukas), who moves his family to America in 1940 to live with the wealthy mother (Lucile Watson) of his American-born wife, Sara (Bette Davis).

The war in Europe seems remote until a Romanian count (George Couloris) discovers that Muller is here to raise money for his resistance activities over there. The amoral aristocrat tries to blackmail the freedom fighter, threatening to reveal his activities to the German embassy here.

Muller is forced to take desperate measures to protect himself, his family and his cause. Although the action is at times stagy and the dialogue occasionally preachy, the movie's message is still relevant today.