My latest in PJ Media:
It is a staple of the Muslim victimhood industry to complain that Hollywood frequently features Muslim terrorist villains, and seldom depicts Muslims as anything other than terrorists. Reality is just the opposite: can you think of even one major motion picture that featured Islamic terrorists as the villains? In a typical instance, Tom Clancy’s The Sum of All Fears, jihadis were the villains, but when the book was made into a movie, the villains were changed to neo-Nazis. Moviemakers routinely shy away from depicting the grim reality of jihad violence and Sharia oppression of women and others. But not Cyrus Nowrasteh.
Nowrasteh, who gave us the eye-opening and heart-rending 2009 film The Stoning of Soraya M., which focused on an honor killing, has written, directed, and produced the new movie Infidel, starring Jim Caviezel, Claudia Karvan, and Hal Ozsan. Infidel is as startling, on many levels, as it is gripping. Caviezel plays a Christian blogger who is kidnapped by a Hizballah cell (headed up by a cheerfully villainous and thoroughly engaging Ozsan) and taken to Iran.
That this is the storyline is in itself remarkable. Were Infidel the production of virtually any director besides Nowrasteh, Caviezel’s Christian character Doug Rawlins would turn out to be stupid, evil, or both, while Ozsan’s Ramzi, even while being a Hizballah kidnapper, would be depicted as wise, noble, or even heroic. Muslims are victims of Islamophobic, racist, redneck American yahoos — that’s the general Hollywood narrative, played out in innumerable films.
Infidel instead opts to be more realistic, recalling actual events that seldom gain Hollywood’s notice, such as the 1987 kidnapping of journalist Charles Glass by Hizballah in Lebanon. Infidel unflinchingly portrays the gleeful brutality and inhumanity of Rawlins’ captors, as well as his own struggles to maintain his Christian faith amid torture and isolation. Amid all this, the film’s realism is thoroughgoing: once the movie’s perspective was established, it was refreshing to see Caviezel portray Rawlins as alternately angry, afraid, and confused, rather than as a plaster saint, above the fray and singing hymns even as he is being beaten and verbally abused.
There is much more. Read the rest here.