Diana West tackles Hollywood dhimmitude in the Washington Times:
It's amazing what's possible if you close your eyes. An American television news organization - such as ABC, NBC, CBS, Fox, CNN or MSNBC - can close its eyes and accept videotape procured by Al-Jazeera in concert with terrorists who kill and maim American soldiers. A Hollywood director, such as Sydney Pollack, can close his eyes and pretend that terrorism is a plot device and the United Nations is an honest broker. Leaps of morality and boundaries of logic may be hurdled simply by turning a blind eye to facts.To what end? Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Dorrance C. Smith connects the bloody dots between terrorists who assist Al-Jazeera in obtaining film footage that appears on the evening news in America. Among other pointed questions, he asks: "Do the U.S. networks know the terms of the relationship that Al-Jazeera has with the terrorists? Do they want to know?"
To date, the answer is a morally reprehensible no. But see-no-evil, hear-no-evil, speak-no-evil monkeys aren't the best role models for journalists. Then again, maybe this very numbness to facts is in fact a culture-wide phenomenon that our news media merely reflect.
Take Mr. Pollack's new movie on international terrorism, "The Interpreter." Stepping back from even the outermost brink of reality, it switched the source of terrorism from a fictional Middle Eastern country to a fictional African country. "We didn't want to encumber the film in politics in any way," Kevin Misher, the movie's producer, told the Wall Street Journal. Politics? How about encumbering the film with a little history or maybe a few current events?
But fantasy-land is where Hollywood lives these days. The world burns and Steven Spielberg remakes the sci-fi chestnut "The War of the Worlds." The producers of last summer's "The Manchurian Candidate" drop an Osama bin Laden-like character for being too "Tom Clancy." Meanwhile, Mr. Clancy's "Sum of All Fears" was also too "Tom Clancy," so the 2002 movie replaced the Islamic terror cell of the 1991 book with some generic old Nazis.
Then there's "The Great New Wonderful," the first movie set in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks. But, as newyorkmetro.com reports, "The completed script never mentions Bush, terrorists, Michael Moore, Fox News, or even September 11." Don't look for Afghanistan, the hunt for Osama bin Laden or the fall of the Taliban, either. Why not? As director Danny Leiner put it, "I just wasn't interested in anything didactic." Didactic? What is "didactic" about our cataclysmic national experience? A potentially significant industry revels in its own irrelevance...
Read it all.
We need to make our own movies.
If you're looking for a realistic and non politically correct portrayal of Islamic terrorists at work, check out my new novel Royal Canadian Jihad.
Hopeless! These guys have to learn how to walk upright.
Big sleep: I guess you need 'quick time pro'-
or ask infidel from
http://www.terrorists-suck.org/fight/winds_of_jihad.html
to play my song.
Anybody else having trouble with that link?
" Still, what were the producers afraid of? When networks, movies and television deny the facts of jihad terror, they whitewash killers. Why? "
How easy to substitute black africans or neo nazi ideologues, who represent no threats to the filmakers.
Even 24, the bravest of the lot, refrains from associating islam with Middle eastern terrorists.
terrorism must be transformed from religious to secular roots to remain PC and not to attract lawsuits from a plethora of islamic groups.
And this is just the "light side of things".
Check out the personal hell of Salman Rushdie after his fatwah from the "BIG BOY" himself -the Ayatollah khomeini. And the brave young female nigerian Journalist who had to flee and hide in an obscure Norwegian town after the Miss world fiasco.
Should she not have been invited to the US to work as a Journalist of "the Free Press"?
She now works in a Norwegian public library.
Does this not illustrate the cowardice of the MSM and the Hollywood filmakers?
And who do the MSM blame?
Not the perpetrators of attrocities, those who placed burning tyres around the necks of black nigerian christians , not the machete wielding muslims who maimed and murdered or the issuers of religious fatwahs.
No they blamed the "decadent" Miss world organisers of the contest themselves.
Chevalier:
It could be worse. So far, Hollywood hasn't gone quite as far as British playwrights who find it noble to die accidentally protecting tunnels used to smuggle weapons as a means of attaining peace. (But who knows that they won't go for it as well.)
They are afraid of lawsuits by Muslim clerics, rulers, and individuals. They are afraid of loss of box office revenue and boycotts. They are afraid of hate-crimes and speech-crime laws that are or could possibly be initiated at any moment, and they are afraid of death...beheading, like Theo VanGogh, car bombings, violence against their families and so on.
Muslim extremists operate in the way of Mafia dons, but they do it much better. They send a message: criticize or thwart Islam in anyway and you and your families will pay with your lives in the most horrible of ways...
Patrick,
My compliments! Let's pray that courageous novelists like you are clearing a wide path.
This same problem exists within the human rights community. If you go to the Global Issues page at Human Rights Warch or the Topics page at Amnesty International USA, you won't find Terrorism anywhere. However, HRW does consider "Opportunism Watch: Repression in the Name of Anti-Terrorism" a Global Issue and AIUSA includes "The "War on Terror"" in its list of priority Topics.
Terminator-
Got the tune! (COOKIN', SMOKIN' & ROCKIN'!)
(My mistake... I was clicking on "Open File" instead of "Save"... which solved the glitch... in case anyone is just trying to "open" it... be more 'religious' and "save" it.)
EXCELLENT SONG!!!! (Allahu Clark Bar!)
Reminds me of the classic band FOCUS (their "Hamburger Concerto" album) in overall instrumentation sound with a lead guitar flavor of maestro Joe Satriani.
Mightily impressed bro!
As for Hollywood's cowardice in the face of reality, remember that it always easiest to kick the dog that won't bite back at the box office (not a big neo-Nazi or 'non-specific African' audience out there to worry about losing).
As Patrick would understand, should they turn his novel into a mainstream film, the villians would have to be morphed into baby seal-hunting Eskimos (Sorry! Inuit Tribal Peoples!). Who are actually just misunderstood and only really want to start of modern hi-tech fish cannery but can't figure out a way to stop the harp seal cubs from eating into (sic) their profits. The Canadian government, with the help of a lantern-jawed Montreal intelligence agent, and eco-savvy son of a former whaler, will aid them in their quest. Happy ending for all, with Inuit giving baby seal a big kiss at the final titles.
"Jihad." Sorry that word would have to go. Big box office loser in the Middle East. Change the hummus to blubber and we'll get a green light.
"Terrorism"? Let's make it, eco-terrorism. Everybody hates that.
FADE IN:
EXT. A COASTAL TOWN IN NOVA SCOTIA- DAY.
Three elderly Inuit tribesmen are shooting skeet over the icebound harbor from their fishing trawler.
INUIT 1
(yells)
Pull!
Skeet flinging device, pulled by Inuit 2, hurls the clay 'pigeon' toward the sky. The spinning disc disintegrates as someone else FIRES at it with an automatic weapon from across the bay.
SOUND: RAT-A-TAT-TAT!
Inuit 1
(annoyed that his 'pigeon' is shattered)
Damn kids! No respect for their elders.
See how easy it is to remove all traces of the real problem?!
No jihadis. Good profits. Hollywood heap big happy!
(Sorry Patrick! Keep up your good work!!)
We need to make our own movies.
Posted by: Voltaire at May 1, 2005 08:52 AM
YES! WE DO! :-)
There's SO MUCH TO SAY! There's so much TRUTH to be told! And there's no shortage of really exciting stories to be told; the conflict between good and evil is the basis for the most engaging works.
Congratulations, Patrick! Maybe you're at the cutting edge of a wave of non-PC polluted works! The description of your novel looks very interesting--good luck with it!
Hey, parents, get your high school and college students to read Patrick's book, eh? There's no reason why your End-Run program (around the whitewash the kids are getting as a result of da'wa in the government schools) can't be fun as well as educational.