Posted on 04/06/2007 10:13:41 PM PDT by goldstategop
The movie "300" - based on a "graphic novel" (read comic book), itself loosely based on the battle of Thermopylae (480 BC) - has drawn the usual thoughtful and nuanced response from the turbaned thugs who run Iran.
The last stand of King Leonidas and his 300 Spartans denigrates the glorious Persian antecedents of present day Iran, charges Javad Shangari, art advisor to Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. "Art advisor" to a terrorist state - now there's a non sequitur. Does he critique artists who work in body parts?
"Hollywood declares war on Iranians" blared the headline in a Tehran daily. More than 35,000 Iranians have signed an online petition charging that "300" presents a "fraudulent and distorted" account of the conflict between ancient Greece and the "most magnificent and civilized" Persian empire. That's as opposed to the honest and accurate portrayal of historical events usually found in comic books.
The really good stuff came in a report by IRINN TV. MULLAH-vision noted that Warner Bros., which made "300," is owned by a "famous and rich American Jew." The co-heads of the studio are a Presbyterian and a Jew, but "Presbyterian conspiracy" doesn't have quite the same ring to it.
"The Zionist Warner company is also pursuing cultural and political objectives by producing such a film," IRINN TV discloses. (Warner is the distributor of "300," not the producer.) "The Zionists and the elements affiliated to the U.S. have tried to launch a propaganda front against ancient and historical roots of Iranians."
O those famous and rich Zionist Spartans. One can almost imagine Leonidas' legion marching to glory singing "Hava Nagila"
Have you noticed how almost every pronouncement by the Iranian regime sounds like a Borat routine? ("In Kazakhstan, we have three problems - economic, social and Jew.")
Could "300" be the type of Hollywood decadence Dinesh D'Souza believes is responsible for the terrorist war on America?
D'Souza, an occasional conservative, is the author of The Enemy At Home: The Cultural Left and Its Responsibility for 9/11.
Blame the left for "a decadent American culture that angers and repulses traditional societies, especially those in the Islamic world . ... In addition, the left is waging an aggressive global campaign to undermine the traditional patriarchal family and promote secular values in non-Western cultures," D'Souza writes.
Now I hate the cultural elite as much as the next red-state American, but to blame nose rings, Britney Spears and gay marriage for jihadism is to ignore 1,300-plus years of Islamic history.
D'Souza - who fancies himself quite the thinker - swings between paranoia and megalomania (which presumably keeps him on an even keel).
In a recent offering at the online edition of National Review, D'Souza rhetorically inquires: "So, why the bellicose attacks on me? Consider the difficulty now faced by some American conservatives. The right-wing strategy based on the 'clash of civilizations' ... has proven intellectually short-sighted and politically a failure." This shallow analysis, "falsifies reality and can only be held together by branding dissenters like me wicked and heretical," D'Souza discloses.
After expending a few hundred words inveighing against us intellectually short-sighted, clash-of-civilization conservatives, D'Souza modestly reveals, "Now they are mighty upset that I've come along and shown the bankruptcy of their understanding and have proposed a new way of looking at the problem." (Mighty upset? Nice turn of phrase, Clem.)
It is a hard thing to have one's intellectual bankruptcy exposed by someone as insightful as Dinesh D'Souza.
Getting back to one of several major flaws in D'Souza's thesis, was Hollywood around in 1453, when Muslim Turks put Constantinople to the sword, erasing a millennium of Byzantine civilization and raping, plundering and enslaving the city's inhabitants?
Were thong bikinis to blame for the half-millennium Muslim occupation of Greece and the Balkans - or the Islamic conquest of the Middle East and North Africa, and the destruction of ancient Christian communities there?
Was "Brokeback Mountain" behind the Moghul dynasty in D'Sousa's native India -- a conquest and occupation that included the destruction of ancient temples and libraries and the mass slaughter of Hindus -- some 50,000 in Somnath alone, site of a celebrated temple?
D'Souza bids conservatives to align themselves with traditional Muslims against our common enemy - the cultural polluters of the left. In so doing, he suggests that garden-variety Muslims are just regular folks - like American home-schoolers - sort of Hamid and Harriet.
Within the past week, three traditional Muslims were sentenced for the decapitation of three Christian school girls in Indonesia (a country D'Souza cites as an exemplar of Islamic tolerance). Their heads were dumped in a Christian village. Next to the victims' bodies, the killers left a note that read "Wanted - 100 more heads."
At about the same time, in Northern Nigeria, traditional Muslim students beat to death a Christian teacher for reportedly tearing a portion of the Koran when she seized same from a student during an exam. The high-spirited youth also burned three blocks of classrooms and attacked the school's principal when he tried to save the teacher.
Can D'Souza name one Muslim country where religious minorities are treated decently (forget equally) - Coptic Christians in Egypt, Orthodox in Kosovo, Christians in Pakistan and Indonesia, Hindus in Pakistani Kashmir, or Jews in Iran? Even medical missionaries running clinics in such outposts of Islamic hospitality as Yemen and the Sudan are regularly murdered.
It's true; Bin Laden and company frequently cite American culture as a justification for their bloodshed. "We call you ... to reject the immoral acts of fornication, homosexuality, intoxicants, gambling, and trading with interest," Said Osama, in a 2002 communication to the American people.
And if America returned to the moral climate of the 1950s, would al Qaeda stop killing women and children? Would Hamas unbuckle its dynamite belts?
Traditional Muslims also hate us for democracy, human rights, capitalism, not treating women as chattel, and Israel.
Above all, they despise us for being infidels who rule ourselves - for our shameful refusal to convert to Islam or accept inferior status in a society governed by Islamic law. The Koran instructs the faithful to wage jihad against non-Muslims until they embrace Allah or submit to Muslim rule under Sharia.
When confronted with the Koran's jihad verses, D'Souza (in as nice an example of moral equivalency this side of the Cold War) counters by noting the instructions for warfare against the Canaanites found in the Old Testament - as if Jews and Christians were running around the world engaging in ritual decapitations and suicide bombings, and leaving behind verses from Deuteronomy to justify their deeds.
D'Souza argues:"If we're in a war against Islam, that means America is up against one billion Muslims ... . How does any sane person on the Right expect to win this kind of war?"
The question implies that conservatives can determine whether or not there is a war. But what if millions (hundreds of millions) of Muslims around the world believe they're at war with us?
D'Souza insists that we ignore reality (the left's favored approach on foreign policy questions) by pretending Islam is a "religion of peace," disregarding the brutalities regularly inflicted on Christians in the Muslim world, making believe that al Qaeda, Taliban, Hamas, Hezbollah, Islamic Jihad and the rest of their genocidal ilk don't understand their own religion - aren't fighting us because they hate us for who we are, but over Internet pornography, rap music, drugs (which the Taliban cultivates in Afghanistan) and Seagrams.
And D'Souza wonders why most conservatives don't take him seriously?
"300" has its idiotic elements (including graphic sexuality and violence), but there's something about free men taking a stand against overwhelming odds (choosing death over slavery) that's captured the imagination of the West for 2,500 years.
D'Souza asks how we can oppose a third of humanity. Herodotus informs us that when King Leonidas was told the Persian army was so vast that it blotted out the sun, he replied "Then we will fight in the shade."
Those words of defiance ring down through the centuries. "Go tell the Spartans that here we lie, obedient to their commands."
“I am the enemy of both the Islamofacist and the Left. Hell they have both allied against Christians and other decent folks around the world so we better just accept it and work to take them both apart.”
Most sensible comment on the whole thread. The friend of my enemy is my enemy.
One correction. Leonidas didn’t say, “We will fight in the shade”. Dienekes, his second in command, is credited with the remark by Greek historians.
What the Messrs write about history and barbarism, is fact. But were it not for the Left's war on traditionalism, and their disrespect of all, anywhere, not like themselves, I think Radical Islam would have NEVER gotten it's legs to promote what it is promoting.
Radical Islam would have continued to do its sneaky bombings, as it has, these past decades. (It resembles, in my mind, gang "initiation" murders).
Had the left NOT been so obviously and concertedly at war with America ("imperialism, racism, homophobism"), radical Islam would a) not gotten the funds nor such a large platform upon which to openly murder and hate anyone "not like themselves".
Don Feder is a brilliantly insightful man, IME. His penned thoughts in the early 90s were lightyears ahead of many, and his thoughts, many of which are, now part of the conservative culture.
Islam is damned sure at war with America, no "if's" about that!
You haven’t been following him very closely. He referred to the 911 highjackers as heros.
I've been reading Don Feder for nearly two decades.
First, Dinesh D’Souza is a good and smart man. He is also a very, very nice man.
His position may be incorrect, but it is not entirely unreasonable to assert that what foreigners see of us every day (or decadent culture) is why they hate us. He may be wrong, but it is not worthy of attacking the man’s character over.
When I was in grad school, I knew some Indian guys pretty well. One of them almost couldn’t come because his family was afraid of the violence. They thought that people were shooting each other left and right over here. They also thought that everything was one big orgy. Where did they get that? From Hollywood.
So, of course Islam has been at war with us for 1500 years, or however long it is. But, there is nothing wrong with pointing out that the face of America that is so hated is a face that is constructed almost entirely by liberals, and that may play a big role in things.
save for later
“So, of course Islam has been at war with us for 1500 years, or however long it is. But, there is nothing wrong with pointing out that the face of America that is so hated is a face that is constructed almost entirely by liberals, and that may play a big role in things.”
Sensible comment along with another on how the enemy of my enemy is my friend. Secular liberalism is the first enemy of the West. Take it from there.
While I haven't read his book on Ronald Reagan, at least the title of his book was wrong. Ronald Reagan was no ordinary man. He taught himself to read among other things and was an extraordinarily gifted writer.
One commentator, speculating on Pres. Reagan's excellent writings, does put forth the idea that Reagan may have hid his intelligence when he was young so as not to be unpopular (which is what happens to the smartest child). For that reason Pres. Reagan may have appeared as an ordinary man.
Because like most groups many Muslims are heretics,and hypocrites, and only belong because they were born into it. Fundamentalists know that, and it is why they kill so many other Muslims who are sitting on their hands or cooperating with Infidels, while jihad is being waged.
It is not the kind of religion you just walk away from like Christianity and Judaism. There is a penalty for that in an Islamic country.- tom
I’ve also been reading Dinesh for nearly two decades.
Those hedonists that you speak of did join the fight, and the team eventually succeeded, only to do battle against each other. This Peloponnesian war was soundly won by the Spartans. We see every day that our modern hedonists don’t have the will to stick it out against the horde. Sparta would’ve certainly lost without the Athenian Navy. Lots of good speculation can be had for our future?
Exactly.
Dinesh D’Souza, while I may disagree with him, is at least putting forth options and generating discussion. This will be the biggest question of our time (along with the Cold War, depending on how old you are). I will tolerate (does anyone remember what that word means?) any thoughtful discussion on this issue. I am a little repulsed by how vehemently guys I respect like Feder and VDH have attacked Dinesh. It seems too personal to me.
....and if they didn't then I'd wear sun glasses.
THAT is deep.A Jihadist”intellectual”becoming radicalized because of his experience with collegiate”decadence”at Greeley,Colorado in 1947!
What if he was transported to,say,Evergreen State or Stanford,circa 2007?THEN he would know decadence.
I didn’t say anything about Feder.
"Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached." - Manuel II Palelologus
Ther Persians in 300 arent Muslim though.
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