Posted on 07/02/2002 5:20:56 AM PDT by SJackson
Why does the popular culture - including the movie industry - place such a powerful premium on downplaying the obvious connection between international terrorism and fanatical Islam?
Just 10 days before the government announced the detention of Jose Padilla (also known as Abdullah Al Muhajir) on charges of plotting a "dirty bomb" explosion on American soil, Hollywood unleashed Bad Company, its second thriller in two weeks about nuclear terrorism in the United States.
But in that Anthony Hopkins-Chris Rock box-office dud - as in its high-profile predecessor, The Sum of All Fears - Islamic extremists bear no responsibility for the deadly designs against our country.
The Bad Company bad guys hail from Yugoslavia and wear colored scarves and nasty scowls to make them identifiable as they plan to explode a nuclear device under New York's Grand Central Station.
In a feeble attempt to describe the terrorist mastermind he plays, actor Matthew Marsh declares: "Dragan is a deeply troubled and very disaffected man. There were problems in his homeland during the breakup of the former Yugoslavia" - there's a classic understatement - "and some of his family was destroyed, and this fueled his psychopathic nature. He has become a freelance troublemaker and has allied himself with misfits from other countries, all crusading to cause some trouble for Uncle Sam."
NOTHING TRIVIAL ABOUT REAL THREATS
Writing off terrorist threats as the work of ill-assorted "misfits" and "freelance troublemakers" trivializes the real dangers we face. The ruthless, dedicated and well-organized killers who slaughtered 3,000 Americans on Sept. 11 deserve more respect and should inspire more fear - especially when they boldly announce their intentions to kill millions more.
It makes no sense for Hollywood to create cartoonish images of terrorist villains when real-life villains are an ever-present concern.
The Sum of All Fears is an even more ridiculous distortion of reality. Its producers changed the identity of the nuclear terrorists specifically to avoid any imagery that might show Muslims in an unflattering light. In Tom Clancy's best-selling novel, on which this film is based, Palestinian fanatics lead an elaborate conspiracy; but the movie version's laughably caricatured Nazis, complete with accents and overacting reminiscent of Hogan's Heroes, take over the plot and make it look ridiculous.
This same pattern applies to earlier movies about terrorist schemes against the USA. In 1997's The Peacemaker, George Clooney and Nicole Kidman battled a chilling attempt to blow up New York with a nuclear weapon. Again, the plotter came from the former Yugoslavia. The Siege (1998), one of the few movies to show Islamic terror attacks against America, suggests that the U.S. military represents a greater danger to the republic than any foreign enemy. The armed services impose martial law, suspend the Constitution, herd law-abiding Arab-Americans into concentration camps and display precisely the sort of racist, xenophobic overreaction so strikingly absent since Sept. 11.
All of these films, including the most recent two, were shot before the Sept. 11 attacks, so entertainment-industry apologists claim that the de-emphasis on the Islamic nature of the terrorist threat remains more excusable.
Yet a long series of attacks before 9/11 - Beirut, Lockerbie, Khobar Towers, Somalia, the East African embassies, the USS Cole, the 1993 World Trade Center bombing - showed the single-minded determination of Muslim fanatics to murder Americans.
YOUNG BUT OBSERVANT
Even some schoolchildren understand the danger, but in today's climate must be careful describing it. A friend of my eighth-grade daughter got into trouble at their public school when a teacher asked why al-Qaeda hates us so ferociously. The 14-year-old girl accurately observed that some Muslims have always interpreted passages in the Islamic holy book, the Koran, to demand that believers conquer or kill infidels who refuse to follow the prophet. Her observation produced gasps of horror from fellow students and a stern reprimand from the teacher for her indulgence in "hate speech."
Why is it hateful for a bright teenager to speak the truth about a religious faith that was first revealed by a brilliant and successful warrior and has always thrived on violence? As Piers Paul Read, historian of the Crusades, recently observed in The Women's Quarterly: "Islam, from its inception, had espoused the use of force. Where Jesus had died for his beliefs, the Prophet Mohammed had wielded a sword."
Among all major faiths, Islam stands alone in the 21st century for its frequent imposition of rigid theocratic rule - as in Saudi Arabia, Iran, Pakistan, parts of Nigeria and other nations. All religions occasionally produce monstrous killers, but in Islam those monsters receive encouragement and inspiration from some prominent mainstream leaders, and thousands of the faithful openly celebrate the random slaughter of innocent civilians. It is impossible to find Christian, Jewish or Buddhist equivalents to the recent Saudi telethon that raised millions for the families of homicide bombers.
Such statements make many uncomfortable. They worry that these observations will encourage the persecution of Muslim Americans, the overwhelming majority of whom obey the law and honor our flag. But another even more powerful factor inhibits the honest discussion of Islamic ideas and helps explain Hollywood's reluctance to identify movie terrorists as Muslims.
ALL GOOD, OR ALL BAD
The secular worldview that dominates American elites, including leaders of the entertainment industry, insists that all religions deserve identical respect - or similar dismissal. Conventional wisdom holds that all faiths are comparably valid, beautiful paths to the same G-d. Or, if the commentator feels ill-disposed toward religion, then all faiths manifest similar violent, anti-intellectual, intolerant tendencies.
But as they progress through their education, they come - with the help of their teachers, no doubt - to understand that there really isn't a danger. In a recent survey of American college students, 16% think Western culture is superior to Arab culture, but 79% do not.
They can make the villain catholic altar girls. Who cares?
Anyone who would take any part of a movie seriously has a terminal case of ignorance, is beyond reach, beyond help, and real life has enough challenges without fretting about the 30-70 year old kids among us.
For instance. I saw my last episode of Enterprise, the Star Trek knockoff.
In it, a freighter first mate was humiliated and ridiculed for armed resistance against intergalactic pirates.
We must play nice with loser cultures, try to understand them, because resisting immediately will make them act more brutal and mindless with their next victim.
The real life parallel was just a bit much for me.
The usual whine was too close to reality for me:
But there are a billion of them!
Now I got to go finish sorting my socks.
Even as late as the 1980's, with movies like "Red Dawn", when it came to the cold war, the enemy was the Soviet Union. Hollywood knew it, accepted it and reflected it in the movies it released.
Why is it so hard now? (Rhetorical question)
I think it is more important to as why Hollywood is afraid to take on liberalism while always ready to attack conservatism? The answer is Hollywood fears activists of any type and while the liberals are full of activists ready to pounce full force on the politically incorrect, the conservatives will only show their indignation and merely refute Hollywood. So until conservatives become activists Hollywood will show them no fear or respect.
Me too. Islam means "submission."
They ripped the heart out of it with the changes in turning it into a movie. And for what purpose?
In white font (highlight it if you want to read it) I will tell you a few more things that they changed in the movie.
- They made it a soccer game instead of the Super Bowl that is the target of the nuke attack.
- The nuke attack takes place in Baltimore instead of Minnesota.
- Instead of the President not being at the game due to a helicopter malfunction, the President is actually injured in the shockwave from the explosion.
Yes, and anyone who believes that vouchers and private school educations are going to change all that are woefully wrong. Private schools are just as corrupted by P.C. culture as our public schools. In fact, in many Catholic schools, the emphasis is no longer on academics and religious education; students are force fed a diet of multiculturalism, social justice teaching, and revisionist history with a passion that NEA teachers would envy.
Ah yes, the evil Serbs. The one group that the PC globalist allow us to hate!
..yeah, maybe the problem of Western powers helping KLA terrorists.
Really. Perhaps in our War on Terror we might allow people like the Serbs to deal with the terrorists on their soil, instead of bombing them.
Hollywood and everything in it lost touch with reality a long time ago.
My dog has a better sense of good vs evil, right vs wrong than most people in Hollywood.
My dog bites the bad, licks the good.
I don't have a problem with this swap, Hollywood just owes us one. The next "Mississippi Burning" type movie will have Islamic extremists instead of Klansmen as the bad guys and we'll call it even.
By the same token, films that showed any sort of favorable aspect of Jews (such as INDEPENDENCE DAY, with a scene where Arab and Israeli soldiers are cooperating) were censored or even boycotted in the Moslem world.
And some people can remember about 25 years ago when MOHAMMED THE MESSENGER OF GOD came out and, even though that movie was subsidized by Libya and some other Moslem govts, the Hanafi Muslims, in Washington DC, took hostages, shot Marion Barry (at the time we were horrified that they'd shoot a district counselman, later we were annoyed that they only wounded him), and it took days to settle that ugliness -- and across the country a lot of theatres cancelled showing that movie altogether.
I'm actually hoping that competition from private schools might tighten them up. Considering that they're usually the only alternative to the government detention centers they haven't had to compete very hard.
Also how much do you want to bet in the same class if the same 14-year-old girl stated that Fundamentals Christian always interpreted passages in the Bible to demand that believers conquer or kill the observation would produced praise from her fellow students and an "A+" from the teacher
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