As recently as last week, the film’s star Chris Evans chimed in with more apologies about his intrinsically patriotic character. “He might wear the red, white and blue, but I don’t think this is all about America. It is what America stands for. It could be called ‘Captain Good.’” You read that right. Captain Good.

The Los Angeles Times echoed the hand-wringing that a film with “America” in the title and a protagonist swathed in red, white, and blue might not be groveling enough to suit their leftist self-loathing:

Of course, setting ‘Captain America’ in the storied past [WWII] helps avoid some of the more charged political questions that accompany releasing a patriotically themed production around the world at a time when the U.S. is perceived in certain places as somewhat less than heroic.

As I settled in my seat for a screening of Captain America (next to my esteemed Big Hollywood colleague Alex Marlow, who posted his own review yesterday), my expectations – based on all the preemptive apologies from the filmmakers and critics – was that I was about to witness Hollywood’s ruination of the most iconic of American comic book heroes.

I’m not a fanboy steeped enough in the Marvel mythology to judge whether or not Captain America betrays the comic-book purists in the audience, so I’ll leave that aspect to other reviewers. My only interest was in answering what Big Hollywood readers’ inquiring minds want to know: Is Captain America a stirring action flick or a dud? Can conservatives enjoy it without reservation, or is it spring-loaded with the usual anti-American sucker punches we document so often on this site?

Chris Evans plays Steve Rogers, a 90-lb. asthmatic whose 4F physical status prevents him from fulfilling his driving desire to help combat the Nazi menace. “There are men laying down their lives. I can’t do any less,” says the selfless, determined son of a dead war hero. Then a defected German scientist (Stanley Tucci) selects Rogers for an experimental serum that transforms him into an insanely buff secret weapon – but the powers that be don’t quite know what to do with him. So Rogers ends up instead in tights as “the Star-Spangled Man” on a humiliating USO tour at home and abroad, peddling war bonds.

After he proves his mettle by seizing the opportunity to rescue hundreds of American POWs, he’s suited up in a battle-ready version of his USO outfit with an impenetrable Star-Spangled shield. He sets forth to confront the Red Skull (Hugo Weaving), a Nazi megalomaniac with even bigger ambitions than Hitler, and who has acquired a mysterious power that threatens to lay waste to American cities. Big action ensues.

Enough synopsis, you say – does the film get a thumbs-up or not? I think this dismissive description from The Hollywood Reporter unwittingly says it best:

Sticking to its simplistic, patriotic origins, where a muscular red, white and blue GI slugging Adolf Hitler in the jaw is all that’s required, Captain America trafficks in red-blooded heroes, dastardly villains, classy dames and war-weary military officers.

Indeed it does. And hooray for that. As I alluded to above, perhaps Johnston’s and Evans’ apologetic comments were intended to deflect the scorn of their peers; in any case, the end result is a straightforward tale of heroes, villains, and dames that is action-packed, fun, visually stylish, and about as patriotic as Hollywood is currently capable of.

And I believe that’s what accounts for the tepid response of some critics thus far. Some, for example, are complaining that Evans doesn’t deliver, or is incapable of, a multi-layered performance. But he more than convincingly handles what the material requires – a square-jawed, unconflicted hero, and that is precisely what irks reviewers like the one at The Hollywood Reporter, who complains that “there is no ambiguity here. Nor does any superhero question his powers.”

Though they certainly don’t think of it this way, the Left loves to see the world entirely in shades of gray because it justifies their moral relativism. They use condescending coded language like “simplistic” or “not nuanced” or “no ambiguity” when confronted with the more conservative world view of moral standards. In an article I wish I’d written, Big Hollywood’s John Nolte really gets it right about the Left’s sneering resentment toward “simplistic” values like patriotism and bravery:

What the Left despises about themes that lift the human spirit is that they’re more often than not, conservative themes — themes of self-sacrifice, selflessness, fidelity, manhood, bravery, and nobility.

Exactly. And all those qualities are not only present in Captain America, they’re celebrated. And that rubs left-leaning reviewers the wrong way. THR and their ilk may prefer their protagonists to be more “complex,” by which they mean morally murky, nihilistic anti-heroes, but I think it’s refreshing to see an heroic lead who isn’t riddled with moral self-doubt or reluctant to wield his power for Good against unambiguous Evil.

And yet the point is that Rogers is no superhero. “What makes you so special?” the Red Skull wonders about his unflinching adversary. “Nothing,” Cap replies. “I’m just a kid from Brooklyn.” In other words, I’m just an ordinary American – we’re all like this, or at least all capable of this. And indeed, Cap’s not the only hero here. Every American soldier in the film – and yes, as Marlow notes, they come in all colors – is a rip-roaring, hard-drinking, Nazi-ass-kicking hero in his own right. One of the most stirring moments in the film comes when Captain America comes over the horizon leading 400 escaped American POWs, all of whom fought their way out alongside Cap, every one of them marching back to camp with head held high and ready to go back into action. There may not be any flags visible in that scene, but it speaks volumes about American soldiers and the undeniable, indomitable American spirit.

My Big Hollywood teammate Alex Marlow felt that the filmmakers injected mini-sucker punches that subvert any patriotism or belief in American exceptionalism. For example, he writes that the line that best sums up the movie comes when Tucci’s character asks Steve Rogers, “Do you want to kill Nazis?” And Rogers replies, “I don’t want to kill anyone. I don’t like bullies.” But standing up to bullies, Marlow writes, is not a specifically American characteristic.

I must disagree. What other country in the world has always been counted on to stand up to bullies? China? Paraguay? Denmark? Zimbabwe? What has been the hallmark of American history, internationally speaking, from our very inception if not standing up to bullies? I think there is a different line that best sums up the movie, one that greatly surprised me in light of director Johnston’s previous assurances that Cap’s not a flag-waver. It comes when Cap and his nemesis are facing off, and the Red Skull says, “I have seen the future – there are no flags.” “Not in my future,” Cap retorts.

Why have that exchange of dialogue if not to assert Captain America’s pride in and devotion to the Stars and Stripes? Cap may not run around waving an American flag, but there’s no escaping the red, white and blue of his shield, a symbol crucial to Cap’s very identity, and essentially his sole weapon apart from his fists. Every time he uses that shield to ward off bullets or flame, every time he slams or slices an enemy with it, it’s an unmistakable reminder that he’s wielding American power in the service of Good against Evil.

The supporting cast is almost uniformly strong. Weaving, perhaps best known as the eerie and relentless Agent Smith in The Matrix, is charismatic – and yes, as uncomplicated as Rogers – as the evil visionary with an accent that hisses like a snake. Voluptuous British actress Haley Atwell is ideally cast as Rogers’ romantic interest Peggy Carter for this period piece; a strong ‘40s-style dame, she’s equally comfortable busting a loudmouth soldier’s jaw and busting out of a show-stopping red dress. Tommy Lee Jones hits perfect comic notes as the grizzled warrior who doesn’t want to give the scrawny Steve Rogers a chance or Peggy Carter a break.

The costuming and set design are simultaneously retro and futuristic, which works more often than not, particularly in the military design of Cap’s uniform.

Not that the film doesn’t have problems. Evans’ hair stays impossibly un-mussed. The normally fine actor Stanley Tucci is unconvincing as both a scientist and a German – his accent is embarrassing compared to Weaving’s. The shift from the WWII era into contemporary times broke the spell for me. And tragically, Atwell’s red dress is featured in only one scene.

If you’re looking for nuance and a protagonist with an agonized dark side, there are other choices out there. But if you want to enjoy a rousing, fast-paced movie that features some exciting action, red-blooded American heroes, dastardly villains, classy dames and war-weary military officers, then, to quote Steve Rogers’ best friend Bucky, “Let’s hear it for Captain America!”

“Write what you know” is the first and most basic advice every aspiring creative writer tries to take to heart. Like all writing advice, this is easier said than done, and few novelists make that formula work more successfully and naturally than Bob Hamer, author of last year’s Enemies Among Us and the new Targets Down.

Undercover FBI agent Matt Hogan, the fictional protagonist of both thrillers, bears a striking resemblance to his creator, who spent 26 years as a street agent for the FBI, usually undercover. Hamer, also a Marine Corps vet, relates that remarkable quarter-century backstory in his engrossing, sometimes shocking first book, The Last Undercover: The True Story of an FBI Agent’s Dangerous Dance with Evil.

In his capacity as an undercover agent, he walked convincingly in the flames with drug dealers, pedophiles, gangs, international arms dealers, and killers. Hamer brings this gritty experience to bear on every page of his novels, lending them a degree of detailed authenticity that’s unusual in the thriller genre. No less a thriller authority than Vince Flynn confirms this, having said of Hamer that he “delivers realism only an undercover FBI agent can bring.”

No-nonsense man’s man Matt Hogan is one of the most genuine heroes you’ll find in the genre. He’s no superhuman Bourne or Bond, but a refreshingly real-life hero of the kind that actually fills the ranks of American law enforcement – standup patriots who put their lives on the line to take down the bad guys, but whose work consists more of paperwork drudgery than flashy gunplay or the bedding of bombshells.

Hogan gets his share of action too, but Hamer’s action scenes are also grounded in reality and not cartoonish - as are his plots. In Enemies Among Us, Hogan goes undercover to investigate a charity suspected of funding Islamic terrorists (that’s right, Islamic terrorists, not Homeland Security’s usual suspects: disgruntled veterans and violent, racist Tea Partiers). In Targets Down, Hogan gets down-and-dirty in the real-world swamp of Russian organized crime, neo-Nazis, sex trafficking, and a jihadist with a plan to make 9/11 seem “like a mere footnote in our history books.” Not a rogue CIA program or evil capitalist is to be found between the covers of either book.

Bob Hamer

His page-turners are smoothly and naturally written, and laced with plenty of humor. They’re peopled with characters, not caricatures. Unheard of in contemporary fiction, some of these characters are actually religious and attend church, and are not portrayed mockingly for it. And (surprisingly, for an author who would kick my butt for suggesting that he’s in touch with his feminine side) even Hamer’s female characters are well-drawn, not simply sexy window dressing – like Hogan’s wife Caitlin, a grade-school teacher who keeps him grounded with her quiet strength and Christian faith.

Hamer’s real-life undercover experience was useful preparation for more than just his novels, as he moved on from the FBI to deal with even sleazier and more ruthless, reprehensible characters. That’s right – he went to work in Hollywood. He has consulted on shows including Law & Order: SVU, Sleeper Cell, The Inside, and Angela’s Eyes. He has written episodes for The Inside and Sue Thomas: F.B.Eye.

Most importantly, somewhere along the line, Hamer managed to hook up with one of the minority of standup, decent guys in this cutthroat town – the proudly conservative actor/director/producer Jack Scalia, whom you may remember from a 30-year career in television and film, not to mention stints in pro sports and modeling. Scalia’s chin alone has more commanding masculine presence than today’s wispy leading metrosexuals like Johnny Depp or Orlando Bloom. Scalia, who describes Targets Down as “pedal to the metal, red-lining in every gear,” has optioned the book for a feature film.

Jack Scalia

(Full disclosure: I’m honored to say that Bob Hamer and Jack Scalia are both friends of mine. Does that cast doubts upon my objectivity? Will some dismiss this article as a puff piece? Frankly I don’t care, because I’m much more afraid of either Bob or Jack spearing me with steely, disapproving glares than I am of the slings and arrows of accusations of favoritism.)

Not a day goes by on Big Hollywood that we conservatives don’t lament the leftist dominance of pop culture, and wish that there were more good-quality books and films that reflect our values instead of Hollywood’s usual nihilistic, elitist fare. Well, here’s a chance to get behind a couple of our own and support their work. Check out all of Bob Hamer’s books including the new thriller Targets Down, and hit the theaters when Jack Scalia brings the latter to the big screen. 

But this time he ratcheted things up a few notches. His first column immediately following the most recent Oscars telecast was not just another pooh-poohing of the liberal bias stereotype, but an assertion that the Oscars actually proves the reverse.

Patrick Goldstein

Witness his eyebrow-raising title: “‘The King’s Speech’: The Triumph of Hollywood Conservative Values.” Wow. Not only is conservative griping about Hollywood unjustified, but we have in fact triumphed. Culture war over, people. In your face, Matt Damon! Don’t let the screen door hit you on your way out, Sean Penn!

The article begins, “[I]t’s become an article of faith in Conservative America that Hollywood is a ‘collection of hopeless la-la-land liberals — or worse, an elitist gaggle of heartland-bashing snobs.’” Notice how Goldstein refers to it as an “article of faith,” as if this perception of Hollywood is not based on evidence but is as insubstantial and unprovable as the existence of God. After all, how else could Conservative America possibly have ever gotten such an impression?

He continues: “Conservatives have routinely ridiculed Oscar movies for attacking the military (Avatar), promoting homosexuality (Milk and Brokeback Mountain) and depicting corporate executives as evil villains (The Constant Gardener and Syriana).”

Good start, Mr. Goldstein, but don’t stop there; Conservative disappointment and frustration with Hollywood don’t stem only from a handful of Oscar nominees. They derive also from Hollywood’s general proclivity for rewriting history, burying inconvenient historical truths, attacking the Bush administration’s response to the war on terror, sucker-punching heartland audiences, cravenly appeasing our enemies, tearing down conservative heroes while embracing dictators, and whitewashing Islam while denigrating Christianity.

Oddly affirming what Big Hollywood has been pointing out all along, Goldstein proceeds to admit that this conservative “article of faith” actually is grounded in reality: “Since the arrival of the Easy Rider generation in the late 1960s, Hollywood has been a bastion of liberalism.” Thank you. “It may be a town full of liberals” – thanks again – “but when it comes to its most prestigious awards show, the most exalted statuettes went to films that espouse conservative values.”

Really? The winners were pro-family films that promote limited government, fiscal restraint, adherence to the Constitution, and a strong national defense? I must have nodded off when those elements had walk-on roles in, say, The Social Network. Meanwhile, it certainly could be argued that the one film conservatives were most rooting for was Waiting for Superman, a documentary that was tellingly excluded from consideration.

As evidence that the Oscars was a “triumph of Hollywood conservative values,” Goldstein notes that “all the la-la-liberals” spent the night “honoring their elders and celebrating tradition.” Sorry, but I fail to see how a clip from Gone With the Wind and extended screen time for Kirk Douglas and Bob Hope constituted a conservative coup. True, it could have been worse: a tribute to Howard Zinn, for example.

As further proof, he notes that this year’s Best Adapted Screenplay winner The Social Network “is far from a liberal critique of capitalistic excess. It’s a thoroughly pro-business film.” I’m not buying this simplistic, disingenuous analysis; I’m more inclined to agree with iconoclastic critic Armond White that The Social Network glamorizes “moral confusion, social decline and empire building — although leaving out… the moral consequences of all that glorified disconnection.”

The supposed knockout punch of Goldstein’s argument is that The King’s Speech won Best Film, a movie that was “brought into the world by a host of ardent liberals” and yet “is a profoundly conservative film,” “a fable of egalitarianism,” “resolutely Old School… Could a movie be any more richly conservative in its values than that?”

Besides the fact that “egalitarianism” – at least in the crushingly anti-individualistic sense in which the totalitarian Left reveres it – is not an especially conservative ideal, I’m not certain how “Old School,” whatever that is, represents the apex of “richly conservative” values. Perhaps he thinks that nothing is more satisfying to all us stuffy old white conservatives than a big-budget Masterpiece Theater.

“If you study Oscar history,” Goldstein lectures, “you see liberal Hollywood has often rewarded films promoting conservative values”: Patton beat out MASH, for example, The Deer Hunter won over the openly antiwar Coming Home, etc., all the way up to last year’s The Hurt Locker and now The King’s Speech. Of course, it’s more likely that those films won for a variety of reasons, including because they were better than the competition, not because the Academy appreciated and identified with any conservative values that might have been present.  But even granting Goldstein his point, one could point to liberal Oscar winners as well – American Beauty, anyone? Crash?

How does Goldstein explain his claim of the paradox of liberal Hollywood honoring supposedly conservative films? “[P]eople are making movies, not trying to send a message. Artists, as well as the studio executives who finance their movies, are not ideologues. They are storytellers whose work is propelled by emotion, relationships and the dramatic sweep of a script, not its political content.”

I’ll go make myself a sandwich to give Big Hollywood readers time to recover from hysterical laughter… So, contrary to that conservative “article of faith,” Hollywood is not infested with left-leaning ideologues pushing a political message. Tell that to the makers of (just off the top of my head) The Green Zone, Syriana, Lions for Lambs, Reds, Bulworth, The American President, Dead Man Walking, The Contender, and countless others one could list.

Patrick Goldstein points to conservative disgust with Hollywood and insists that “Hollywood isn’t so easily stereotyped” – and had he stopped there, I might have agreed. After all, most films are mere money-making entertainments without an overtly political theme. Some films do embody conservative values. No one ever said that every single Hollywood product is as ragingly leftist as the recent Fair Game, Sean Penn’s shameless, Bush-bashing snoozefest.

But the stereotype is a fair one, and Goldstein’s insistence otherwise, his claim that Hollywood has no leftist political agenda or ideologues among its artists and execs… Now that’s an Oscar-worthy fiction.

In a coincidental echo of the debate over the Ground Zero Mosque (or as Keith Olbermann might put it, the Nowhere Near Ground Zero Community Center), Turkey has just released New York Ta Bes Minare, or Five Minarets in New York, a big-budget (for Turkey – an estimated $12 million) terrorism drama which features a few familiar Hollywood faces: Showgirls’ Gina Gershon, Terminator’s Robert Patrick, and Hugo Chavez’s BFF Danny Glover.

I’m always curious about how international cinema tries to shape audience perception about the ill-named War on Terror, and how Hollywood undermines us in that conflict. I haven’t yet seen the movie, so my preliminary assessment here is based solely on my impression of the trailer (below), but based on that, it’s not difficult to see that this will be yet another morally inverted tale of bullying American bigotry and noble Muslim victimization (and if my assessment’s off the mark, I will certainly post a follow-up).

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The movie’s website hints at the message we can expect. It announces that the story “underlines America’s paranoia with the Islamic world after 9/11.” Perhaps the word “paranoia” means something different in Turkish; if it means “perfectly rational concern about the clear and present danger of Islamist attacks on American soil and interests abroad,” then that would correctly describe our stance toward the Islamic world (or it would if our administration wasn’t so cozily wrapped in a Snuggie of denial and appeasement). If by “paranoia” they mean, well, paranoia, then to suggest that America has nothing to fear from Muslim extremism but fear itself, that we have blown the threat all out of proportion, is laughable.

It’s also ironic, considering the off-the-charts paranoia pervading the Islamic world, such as their recent suspicion that the Mossad have trained sharks to destabilize the Egyptian tourist industry. Apparently Arab paranoia has now jumped those sharks.

But let’s look at the trailer and decode its messages. It begins with Gina Gershon, who plays the wife of a Turkish scholar wrongfully arrested as a terrorist suspect. After that setup, the overrated Glover, apparently portraying a Muslim, rasps, “Our faith, our way of life is under attack.”

It’s impossible to overstate how intensely this statement would resonate with Muslim audiences, who are incessantly flooded with Islamist propaganda that the West is waging war on Islam, thus making “defensive jihad” incumbent upon all able-bodied Muslims. In the face of that propaganda, Obama’s soothing assurances that we are not and never will be at war with Islam are the equivalent of whistling into a hurricane.

“This is a house of worship,” the film’s imam complains when FBI agent Robert Patrick barges into a mosque, mid-session. “Show a little respect.”

“I have no respect for a religion that gives aid and comfort to our enemies,” Patrick shoots back.

The notion that an FBI agent, in this era of political correctness and hypersensitivity to Muslim hair-trigger offense, would come barreling into a mosque full of worshipers and openly insult their religion is so divorced from reality that it makes the conspiracy theory of Mossad-trained sharks seem like the pinnacle of rationality. This scene bears no relation to the obsequious manner in which our law enforcement have been instructed to tiptoe around the Muslim-American community, fearing that the attempt to root out dangerous extremists will somehow alienate and radicalize moderates.

The word “respect” too will carry weighty significance for many Muslim viewers, for whom respect (many would say dhimmitude) from non-Muslims is paramount. Indeed, according to a new Gallup poll, a large majority of Muslims say the best way for the West to improve relations with them and ease the Clash of Civilizations is to “respect Islam.” (As an aside, my response to that poll is that it’s not enough to expect respect; one has to earn it.)

“And this freedom of yours,” a Turkish character sneers at Patrick in the trailer, “You only seem to take it to countries where there’s oil. Is that just a coincidence?” This is another standard Islamist complaint – that America and the West steal Muslim resources. This is ludicrous, of course; without the Western technology to discover and extract the resource we pay billions for, those oil-rich sheiks would still be riding atop camels instead of in air-conditioned fleets of Bentleys.

The rest of the trailer revs up into what looks like a tense thriller. Along the way we get a glimpse of Gershon in a headscarf, the pious scholar being roughly interrogated (what, no waterboarding scene? Even Stallone’s The Expendables had one), and chanting against “the evils of communism, capitalism, Zionism, and imperialism” – the Axis of Islamist Evils. In all fairness, the film does seem to include an Islamic terror group; it will be interesting to see how that element is treated.

One final thought about this flick. Though it’s not clear from the trailer what the “five minarets” of the title have to do with the story, keep in mind what purpose minarets serve for Muslim fundamentalists: as an aggressive political statement of Islamic supremacism. “The mosques are our barracks,” Turkey’s Prime Minister Recep Erdogan himself recited from a poem once, “the domes are our helmets, the minarets are our bayonets, and the faithful are our army.”

My Name is Khan

The accusation of paranoia reminds me… Two years ago the major Indian star Shahrukh Khan was pulled aside and questioned at Newark Liberty International Airport. Khan suggested he was singled out as a Muslim because Khan “is a Muslim name and I think the name is common on their checklist.” His point so curiously echoes the title of the film he had just wrapped, My Name is Khan, about a Muslim facing bigotry in post-9/11 America, that one could reasonably suspect that the incident was a publicity stunt.

But My Name is Khan director Kabir Khan said that the actor’s delay was “yet another example of American paranoia post-9/11.” Ah, there it is again – paranoia. Muslim extremists aren’t trying to kill us. They aren’t pushing to establish sharia worldwide, or to destroy democracy as they claim. It’s all in our heads. “It saddens me to say this,” director Khan lamented, “but I don’t think the US will ever be cured of Islamophobia.”

What saddens me is that so many fatuous, self-important, America-hating filmmakers – here and abroad – perpetuate this completely wrongheaded notion that the “irrational fear of Islam” springs out of ignorance and hatred instead of Islamic terrorism itself, and that it is a bigger problem than what Obama likes to call “al Qaeda and its affiliates.” The Organization of the Islamic Conference actually calls Islamophobia “the worst form of terrorism.”

You know what they say: It’s not paranoia if someone’s really trying to kill you.

By and large, Hollywood avoids revisiting the 9/11 attacks in film or TV (with the notable exception of the brilliant The Path to 9/11) and avoids confronting the truth and reality of Islamic terrorism. Meanwhile foreign film industries, with the seeming complicity of useful idiots such as Patrick, Gershon, and the despicable dictator-lover Glover, are hard at work whitewashing history, packing their films with anti-infidel tropes, and painting America as an oil-rapacious aggressor and Muslims as victims of paranoia, bigotry, and Western oppression.

Theirs is the message that will ultimately dominate worldwide perception of the Clash of Civilizations – unless Hollywood mans up and begins countering that false perception with the truth.

But writers through the ages have successfully employed satire and farce to empower their audiences to confront ugly realities of power, politics, and war. With drama, the entertainment industry has had mixed success at best coming to grips with the threat of Islamic terrorism; but perhaps comedy, handled correctly, could open up an accessible perspective on this grimmest of contemporary topics.  

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It’s been tried before, though the project never got off the ground. In 2004, screenwriters Mark Legan and Mark Wilding collaborated on a spec sitcom pilot called The Cell, about a band of inept Muslim terrorists sent to America to blend in with the culture and ultimately blow up a power plant. The comic twist is, the jihadists are unable to resist being seduced by American pop culture – Domino’s pizzas, big-screen TVs, talk shows and bowling leagues – and have to conceal their unwillingness to carry out violent jihad from a ruthless superior who shows up to check on their progress. Legan and Wilding wrote it for themselves with absolutely no expectation that any studio would run with it – and they were right, no one would touch it. But the unproduced script (you can download it here) was an “underground” hit with enough executives throughout Hollywood that the writers were offered other work.

Although the concept is funnier than their execution of it, those writers found humor in a subject of the most tragic gravity through sympathetic characters whose totalitarian ideology is defused safely by American freedom and abundance. Toothless? Perhaps, but it would have been a start had not political correctness buried it.

So I was eager to see the new British film Four Lions, directed by Chris Morris and written by Jesse Armstrong, who co-wrote the recent Brit political comedy In the Loop. The trailer showed comic potential, and I hoped it would be a cathartic, hilarious, politically incorrect attack exposing and ridiculing the fanatics that Hollywood normally bends over backward to appease.

In the movie, which opened last weekend, young Londoner Omar is frustrated with the group of fellow jihadists he has assembled to carry out a terrorist attack: the mentally deficient Waj, whose suggestion is that they “bomb the internet”; the fanatical but dense convert Barry, whose idea is to dress up like infidels and blow up a mosque, thus turning moderates into radicals and sparking a full-out holy war; clueless Fessal, who wants to train explosives-laden crows to fly into targets; and wannabe rapper Hassan, who is full of blustery posturing but has reservations about actual martyrdom.

Omar ultimately decides they will target the heavily populated London Marathon with multiple suicide bombings, striking a grand blow for Allah and earning Paradise. Sound hilarious? I didn’t think so either. They head out on their mission as Hassan leads the other terrorists in a carefree singalong of the 70’s hit “Dancing in the Moonlight.” Eventually the film’s already confused tone goes completely off the rails with a stunningly abrupt, dark climax, followed by a farcical denouement as the credits roll.

There are some theoretically funny moments (many of which are already in the trailer). Barry, for example, complains that these are “the end times, with women talking back, and people playing stringed instruments.” Perhaps the best line of the film comes when the group’s rattletrap car breaks down and Barry blames it on Jewish spark plugs, part of “their plot to control global traffic.”

But these lines exemplify precisely why this film’s tone is so mixed and why it fails as a comedy. It’s hard to laugh at Barry’s complaint about uppity women and musical instruments when there are real-world fundamentalists stoning women and bombing CD shops because music is “un-Islamic.” It’s hard to laugh at his loony accusation about Jewish car parts when the Muslim world is rife with just this kind of irrational Jew-hating conspiracy theory, and Jews get killed for it. It’s impossible to find it funny when Fessal talks about targeting Jews and “slags” – British slang for sluts, by which he means uncovered women who go to dance clubs – when one remembers the two car bombs, loaded with nails for extra carnage, parked outside a popular London nightclub in 2007, intended to go off on “Ladies Night” to kill as many slags as possible. As much as I wanted this comedy to succeed, I found it impossible to separate such jokes from their disturbing real-world context. I don’t think I was alone – there was mostly silence and even a couple of walkouts in the theater where I saw it.

The actors are all talented, but how are we to find any of their characters, except perhaps the easily manipulated moron Waj, sympathetic? The main character Omar is the least sympathetic of all. At least the others are bumbling ignoramuses, but Omar has a quick, sharp, clear intellect. His driving purpose is to go to Paradise smiling, having killed many kuffars, or infidels. His seemingly modern, Westernized wife supports this, and he has indoctrinated his nine-year-old son with the same hatred, woven into bedtime tales of The Lion King (upon Omar’s return from a Pakistani terror training camp, the boy asks eagerly, “Did you kill many kuffars?”). When his dull-witted friend Waj begins to be morally troubled by their plan, Omar hurriedly manipulates him back into murderous enthusiasm again (“Satan is confusing you, brother!”).

That’s not funny – it’s disturbing. And the film suffers from too much of this. It’s marginally funny when one character clumsily blows himself up; it’s not funny at all when one character blows up another on purpose to prevent him from surrendering to the cops and exposing the plot. It’s not funny when the British version of a SWAT team bursts into a hostage situation and shoots the wrong man dead. I could go on but I’ve already hinted at too many spoilers.

Director Morris, who apparently immersed himself in years of researching Islamic terrorism, asserts that he is trying to ridicule Islamic fanaticism and its most bumbling adherents:

I was reading about a serious subject, but kept finding things that were very silly. For example, there were some guys in Yemen that wanted to blow up a U.S. warship with an exploding boat; they got to the quayside at 3 in the morning. They put their launch in the water and filled it with explosives and it sank.

“Silly” by itself perhaps – except that the next time those guys in Yemen tried, they blew a gaping hole in the side of the USS Cole and killed seventeen American sailors, wounding thirty-nine. Not so funny. The failed Christmas Underwear Bomber was the stuff of comedy – but had he brought that plane down and killed everyone aboard, which he very nearly did, no one would be laughing.

To its credit, Four Lions is an audacious break from the entertainment world’s taboo against honest, authentic depictions of jihadists, or at least the inept ones. But unfortunately its merry band of terrorists are too grounded in horrific reality to succeed as comedy.

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The real Carlos, born Ilich Ramirez Sanchez in Venezuela, joined the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine in 1970 at the age of 21, after years of Marxist student activism and training in guerrilla warfare. An affluent young Latin playboy who enjoyed living large while plotting to rid the world of capitalist oppression, Carlos was an unrepentant killer who idolized the cowardly murderer Che Guevara. He fumbled his way through an assassination attempt, botched (but deadly nonetheless) grenade and bomb attacks in Paris, and two failed RPG attacks at Paris airports, then shot dead two French detectives and fled to Beirut.

There he planned a bold assault on the OPEC headquarters in Vienna in 1975 (for which he donned a beret in the style of his hero). Leading this hostage-taking operation catapulted him to international fame and earned him upwards of $20 million in ransom payout – although his failure to follow orders and to execute specific hostages cost him his membership in the PFLP.

Thereafter and throughout the ‘80s, Carlos connected with a variety of terrorist partners, including Saddam Hussein, to continue his reign of terror. He even spearheaded a plot to assassinate Egypt’s Anwar Sadat, only to have the Muslim Brotherhood beat him to it. Eventually, Carlos went into hiding, faded into impotence, and was snatched from the Sudan in 1994 by French agents who brought him back for trial. He never became the celebrated pop icon that the totalitarian Che is, but in his time Carlos was almost as much a household name as bin Laden is today.

Prior to viewing the miniseries, I was curious to see how Carlos the Jackal would be portrayed – as the egotistical, murdering ideologue he was or as a folk-hero freedom-fighter in the vein of Steven Soderbergh’s Che (in which actor Ramirez also appears). In a clear marketing attempt to ride the coattails of Che’s mythology and popularity, the posters and promotional stills almost all show “Carlos” sporting the Che-inspired beret. The fact that the miniseries was appearing on the Sundance Channel, the spawn of anti-war activist Robert Redford, also fed my cynical suspicion that Carlos the anti-capitalist would be glorified.

A gushing review by Betsy Sharkey of the L.A. Times gave me further cause to expect the usual moral inversion. After commenting breathlessly on Edgar Ramirez’s “feral sexuality” (apparently succumbing to it herself), Ms. Sharkey was quick to assure readers that the miniseries “neither romanticizes nor demonizes” Carlos. Ordinarily, this is media-speak for, “it romanticizes him but we want to spin it as ’non-judgmental.’” In an interview, Ramirez himself offers no condemnation of Carlos, stressing an actor’s need not to judge his character. I braced myself for 315 minutes of “freedom fighter” mythologizing.

Carlos is “cinematic genius,” Sharkey wrote, that is “already destined to stand alongside the greats” like Lawrence of Arabia and Doctor Zhivago. After sitting through all three nights of the Sundance miniseries, I certainly wouldn’t go that far, but I confess that it is extraordinary. Unlike Soderbergh’s Che, Carlos is riveting from the opening frame and relentlessly paced (although the film’s drive and focus begin to flag in Part 3 as Carlos becomes increasingly dissipated and irrelevant on the international stage, you nevertheless cannot tear yourself away from watching it). It is astonishingly authentic and faithful to the research, and the acting is uniformly excellent by the entire cast.

Does the film romanticize him? To a degree it does, in the sense that Edgar Ramirez is better-looking than the real Carlos and impressively embodies his charisma, egotism, ideological fervor and yes, even his feral sexuality. But it doesn’t rationalize or soften the edges of his misogyny, selfishness, and utter indifference to the victims of his class war.

I would have liked to see less moral neutrality and more moral clarity here, but director Assayas did throw a few crumbs my way. During a hostage-taking by members of the Japanese Red Army, for example, a terrorist tries to bond ideologically with the French ambassador whom he’s holding at gunpoint: “You’re a former Resistance fighter. So you understand our struggle, our methods.” The ambassador shoots back: “You personify everything we fought against: terror, blackmail, the taking of civilian hostages.”

Carlos reveled in his fame, and the miniseries depicts that (although it could have hit that note harder). In Part 2, for example, he proclaims his usefulness to a Palestinian terror group: “I have done a great deal for the Palestinian cause!” The leader of the group, who views Carlos as a loose cannon and a liability, corrects him: “You have done a great deal for your own cause. You are famous now.” There was no room for “stars” in the organization, and from boyhood Carlos desired to be known the world over.

And that brings me to the miniseries’ one unfortunate flaw. Ms. Sharkey claims that it “dismantles the myth to reveal and take some measure of the man underneath.” Actually, we get virtually no measure of the man underneath. The roots of his motivations are never explored. We have no idea what drove him to become, as he was fond of describing himself, an “international revolutionary.” The viewer never knows, for example, about Carlos’ fervently Communist father, who named his son Ilich after Lenin, “the biggest man in all humanity,” and set him on a path of ideological hatred and terrorist violence early on.

The real Carlos turned 61 just this week in a French prison, where he has been since being seized in Khartoum. Convinced that fundamentalist Islam is the new wave of anti-imperialism, he has become a Muslim and written a book about “revolutionary Islam,” which he says “attacks the ruling classes in order to achieve a more equitable redistribution of wealth.” In his book he praises bin Laden and the 9/11 attacks, and claims that only a coalition of Islamic and Marxist revolutionaries can bring down America the imperialist oppressor, a pursuit he describes as “the highest goal of humanity.”

The most recent of a spate of excellent European films about terrorists and gangsters like Mesrine, The Baader-Meinhof Complex, and A Prophet, Carlos spans more than twenty years, more than half a dozen countries, and just as many languages, mostly English, French, Spanish, and Arabic. Despite its frustrating moral distance from its subject, the miniseries is a must-see historical epic of the origins of modern terrorism - and of its first repellant celebrity.

Despite their insistence that Americans “get over” 9/11 even though we’re still at war with Islamic fundamentalists, the Left refuses to get over the Bush administration and the war in Iraq that we’ve already won. The Hollywood Left, with their “Bush lied, people died,” bumper-sticker brain capacity, are especially determined to keep flogging that dead horse long after American audiences have proven that they reject such defeatist, morally inverted propaganda.

And so if you think a new movie about the conspiracy to assassinate President Lincoln might make a gripping historical thriller and be refreshingly free of Hollywood lectures about the ill-named War on Terror, you’d be wrong on both counts.

Robert Redford recently unveiled his period piece The Conspirator at the Toronto International Film Festival. It begins with the assassination of Lincoln and centers on one apparent conspirator, Mary Surratt, on trial for providing gunman John Wilkes Booth and his accomplices (including her son) with a location to plot their conspiracy (her boardinghouse) and with other assistance. Mary, who “kept the nest that hatched the egg,” as Andrew Johnson put it, ended up being the first woman ever executed by the U.S. government.

But strangely – or maybe predictably, if you’re as cynical about Hollywood as I am – one figure looms as a more insistent presence in Redford’s courtroom drama than Surratt, Booth or Lincoln: President George W. Bush.

Time’s Richard Corliss gleefully latched onto “the most troubling and satisfying aspect of The Conspirator”: the comparison it draws between the government’s actions immediately after the Lincoln shooting “and the Bush Administration’s actions in the months and years after the events of Sept. 11, 2001.”

(In case you’re confused by the bland, generic term “events,” Corliss is referring to the act of war against America by Muslim terrorists; he and the Left, however, want you to get over those attacks and think of them as “events”; and while you’re at it, don’t be an insensitive, racist Islamophobe by mentioning the “Muslim terrorists.”)

Corliss helpfully explains the historical parallel:

In this movie, [Secretary of War Edwin] Stanton is the stand-in for Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld; he proposes lurid theories of revolution and, when challenged, replies, “Who’s to say these things couldn’t happen?” In a direct parallel to the Bush administration’s invasion of Iraq as a crowd-pleasing alternative to the fruitless search for Osama bin Laden, one Surratt sympathizer says that Stanton & Co. are trying Mary “because they can’t find John [her son, who temporarily escaped].”

Apart from the fact that our toppling of Saddam Hussein was in no way a mere “crowd-pleasing alternative to the fruitless search” for bin Laden, Corliss is otherwise correct about the post-9/11 parallels. In the immediate aftermath of both the Lincoln assassination and 9/11, the world was changed, no one knew what would happen next, and our leaders had to take swift, decisive – the Left says excessive – actions to seize conspirators, prevent further potentially imminent acts of terrorism, and punish the perpetrators. Redford himself half-hinted, half-confessed that the story “relates very much to the present, but it’s up to the audience to decide for themselves how.”

In the script, novice defense attorney Frederick Aiken (played in the film by James MacAvoy) is assigned to defend Mary (Robin Wright Penn) before a corrupt, closed-door military tribunal bent more on impassioned revenge than dispassionate justice. One soldier, described pointedly as “PATRIOTISM personified,” even commits perjury on the stand to help convict her. Aiken himself initially believes her guilty, but quickly finds the truth to be complicated and the Constitution itself in jeopardy from a military that has taken advantage of the post-assassination panic to exceed the limits of its power. “When the wicked are in authority,” Aiken quotes from the Bible, “transgressions increase.”

And those transgressions include the trampling of our individual rights. The prison cells in The Conspirator are swiftly loaded with hooded innocents swept up in “STANTON’S REIGN OF TERROR” – his roundup of anyone even tangentially connected to the shooting (the caps and underlining are there in the script to make sure you grasp that reestablishing security and order in the hours after Lincoln’s shocking murder constitutes a REIGN OF TERROR; I half-expected the prison to be described as “STANTON’S GUANTANAMO”).

For the Left, the real threat is not avowed American enemies like Islamic fundamentalists, but conservatives playing the “politics of fear” card to seize power and abuse it. As national security expert Woody Harrelson put it: “The war against terrorism is terrorism. The whole thing is just bullshit.” Sadly, this quote can’t be chalked up entirely to his strict marijuana-and-vegan diet. Harrelson’s comment reflects a willful blindness that consumes most of Hollywood: “There is no terrorist threat,” says noted defense analyst Michael Moore.

And so the heavy handed moralizing about our endangered civil liberties begins early in The Conspirator and is hammered home more loudly and steadily than the nails in Mary Surratt’s gallows:

“None of us is safe when a citizen can be dragged from her home, held without charge and denied access to counsel – merely on a suspicion.”

“Had our founding fathers desired tyranny to prevail, I’m sure they’d have intended for the President and his War Secretary to have such indiscriminate powers.”

“Don’t be so eager to throw away Mary’s rights. One day you may need them.”

“By abandoning our laws we become just like [the enemy].”

“If we’re to be destroyed it will be from within. By failing to protect our Constitution and its laws.”

The Left love to circle the wagons ‘round the Constitution when it suits them to paint conservatives as totalitarian oppressors - and yet no President has ever been a greater threat to our Constitution than radical leftist Barack Obama. In any case, presenting the supposed railroading of Mary Surratt as a metaphor for the Bush administration’s supposed post-9/11 shredding of the Constitution makes for both a thin comparison and a poor story.

Redford’s condemnation isn’t reserved only for the Bush administration. Aiken is defending Mary and America not only from a power-mad military junta, but from a citizen rabble lusting for revenge.“What kind of nation are we, one ruled by laws? Or by the fury of our people?” According to this script, it’s dangerously close to being the latter. Mary is at the mercy of a vengeful mob mentality; Aiken is the lone voice of conscience against a vengeful mob mentality; the generals are driven by their vengeful mob mentality, etc. The parallel being, apparently, that Americans were a vengeful mob after 9/11.

But in fact America did not lust blindly for revenge after the 9/11 attacks; Americans rightly wanted justice but were not, and still are not, out to indiscriminately round up Muslims to hang ‘em high, despite insupportable charges of a tidal wave of Islamophobia made by Muslim Brotherhood front groups like CAIR and Obama’s masters at the Organization of the Islamic Conference. And to suggest that we are is further evidence of the Left’s condescension toward, and contempt for, decent Americans.

Though I respect billionaire Joe Ricketts’ patriotic desire – through his new production shingle, the American Film Company – to “make incredible true stories from America’s past,” The Conspirator is an odd and obscure choice for a first film. James Solomon’s screenplay seems notably faithful to the historical facts, as much as a docudrama can be. But it’s a story of very marginal significance in American history, apart from its potential as an emblematic sledgehammer with which to bash the Bush administration. Maybe the AFC was simply overexcited to score Redford as a director, thinking he would deliver another excellent film like Quiz Show; instead, activist Redford couldn’t stop himself from turning out another preachy anti-war bore like his 2007 preachy anti-war bore, Lions for Lambs.

Was the real Mary Surratt guilty of aiding and abetting the conspirators? Almost certainly. That is the historical consensus, and at least one historian, Kate Clifford Larson, was led to that conclusion even though she began her book The Assassin’s Accomplice: Mary Surratt and the Plot to Kill Abraham Lincoln intending to prove Mary innocent. Mary’s guilt is less a question of debate today than is the severity of her sentence – today she surely would not be put to death. And I think it would make a more interesting mystery if Redford had drawn her as guilty or at least made her role in the conspiracy ambiguous, instead of painting her as such an uninteresting, sanctimonious martyr.

But ultimately, this movie is not about Mary Surratt’s guilt or innocence anyway. The one who’s on trial is George W. Bush.

In a recent article entitled “Washington-Set Films May Fudge Facts, But Good Ones Speak To Larger Truths,” the Washington Post’s Ann Hornaday discusses how D.C. audiences composed of political insiders scrutinize Hollywood’s D.C.-based historical dramas for fidelity to the facts. “Myth or reality?” she asks. “That’s the question posed by movies based on true events, and it’s a conundrum that Washington officialdom seems to have a perennial problem in reconciling.” As examples, she references such films as Charlie Wilson’s War, Thirteen Days, All the President’s Men, and of course, Oliver Stone’s controversial oeuvre: JFK, Nixon, and W. (I can’t tell you how long I’ve been wanting to use the word “oeuvre” in one of my blogs).

History buffs and D.C. insiders may nitpick about such films, but as Ms. Hornaday writes, “You don’t have to support Stone’s signature brand of revisionism to agree that overweening literalism can sometimes obscure a larger truth.”

Actually, the problem isn’t that adhering to the facts obscures the truth. The problem is that “overweening literalism” bogs down the storytelling. Bringing a fact-based story to the screen necessitates all sorts of manipulation of messy and inconvenient facts in order to compose a compelling, well-ordered tale: compressing time and events, creating composite characters and/or omitting others, putting imagined dialogue in the mouths of historical figures, etc. The trick, and the goal, is to manage all these creative techniques in a way that might “fudge facts,” as Ms. Hornaday says, but stays faithful to the truth.

She quotes The West Wing screenwriter Aaron Sorkin as calling nonfiction drama “a tricky needle to thread. When an audience sits in a theater having been told that ‘The Following is a True Story,’ they should look at it the way they’d look at a painting and not a photograph.” Exactly so, and I believe most audiences do view nonfiction dramas, or docudramas, that way. I believe most people understand that what they’re seeing is not a documentary or an exact record of facts, but an “artist’s rendition” of historical reality. (Even documentaries are not strictly collections of facts, of course; they too are carefully pieced together and shaped to tell an entertaining story from a particular point of view).

About All the President’s Men, which Hornaday says is considered the masterpiece of political drama, she notes that “it barely matters that the film’s most iconic piece of dialogue – ‘Follow the money’ – was never spoken in real life”:

Contrast this with the Left’s response to the 2006 ABC miniseries The Path to 9/11, which dramatized the chain of events that led to the Islamic attacks of that terrible morning almost exactly nine years ago (a morning the Left would like us to “get over”). As I’ve written about before, and as John Ziegler’s documentary Blocking the Path to 9/11 brilliantly depicts, Democrats hallucinated that the $30+ million miniseries was a hit job on the Clinton administration, concocted by a cabal of conservative filmmakers and somehow financed by a non-profit, Christian (gasp!) relief mission.

Without having seen a frame of The Path to 9/11, Democrat pit bulls like Senators Harry Reid and Louise Slaughter went into pre-emptive attack mode to protect their legacy, claiming that the miniseries was a pack of libelous lies, and threatening to pull ABC’s license if the show aired. Meanwhile an internet-fueled smear campaign spearheaded by the unscrupulous character assassin, blogger Max Blumenthal, ramped up a mob mentality among the lonely and the impotent in the blogosphere. Ultimately, Bill Clinton himself boiled over about it in his infamous interview with Chris Wallace.

They pulled out all the stops not only to censor The Path to 9/11, but to bury it, because the Left knows how critical it is to control the “consensus history,” that “usable past” that Ann Hornaday mentioned. In the end, none of their threatened lawsuits materialized, because the miniseries was faithful to the larger truth and they knew it. But the damage had been done – the show aired only once, and it remains unavailable on DVD.

This is the third time I’ve written about Fair Game for Big Hollywood. Why bother to devote so much space to a movie that’s fated for box-office oblivion anyway? Because it’s important to call out the Left’s persistent efforts to establish their ideologically correct narrative when the historical evidence doesn’t conform to it. Facts may be stubborn things, to paraphrase John Adams, but they don’t stop the Hollywood Left from spinning a “larger truth” out of a lie.

The Council on American-Islamic Relations has muscled its way into being the go-to Muslim-American mouthpiece for the benefit of the lazy and complicit mainstream media – including The O’Reilly Factor, where Awad recently appeared and attempted to smear the opponents of the planned Ground Zero monument to Islamic supremacism. He works tirelessly to advance the stealth jihad agenda of the Muslim Brotherhood, for which CAIR is a front group.

At Kuta, Awad spoke to students, professors, and the dean about “the international image of Islam,” which he claimed had been “subject to insult and distortions since the first Crusade.” He also presented practical steps that Muslims can follow to teach the world about Islam.

(“Teach the world about Islam”? I think the world has already been learning a whole hell of a lot about Islam ever since 9/11, except for the willfully blind, such as New York’s 2010 Dhimmi-of-the-Year frontrunner, Mayor Bloomberg. But I digress.)

Regarding these “insults and distortions,” Awad pointed to the culpability of the Western media, especially in the field of cinema, claiming that “one Hollywood company alone created 800 films about Muslims in the last three decades in which it presented the figure of the Arabs and Muslims from an Israeli point of view.”

This is either a bad translation or the kind of hyperbolic conspiracy theory that passes for fact in the Muslim world, where propaganda outlets like al-Jazeera spread anti-Western disinformation and lies, such as the notion that thousands of Jewish workers at the World Trade Center suspiciously stayed home on 9/11 (Iran’s own Dr. Evil, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, reaffirmed this ludicrous charge as recently as last Saturday). No Hollywood company at all has made 800 films in the last three decades, much less 800 that featured and denigrated Arabs and Muslims.

The numbers he’s referring to may be from the work of Jack Shaheen, an Arab-American (but non-Muslim) academic and pro-Palestinian apologist who has built a career on judging Hollywood’s purported anti-Arab racism and discrimination. In his books such as Reel Bad Arabs: How Hollywood Vilifies a People, he has scoured nearly 1000 movies for possible evidence of the stereotyping of Arabs and Muslims. Of course, striving for a balanced depiction is not the aim; his real goal, like CAIR’s, seems to be to ensure that no depictions of Muslim terrorists are allowed, and that no connection is made between Islam and terrorism.

Since long before 9/11, CAIR has worked hard to steer Hollywood productions toward more and more sanitized depictions of Islam and Muslims, most famously in the 2002 film The Sum of All Fears, in which the filmmakers were convinced to swap out the original novel’s Islamic bad guys for a less politically insensitive choice, neo-Nazis (yawn). And yet CAIR was initially frustrated with Hollywood’s progress; at a White House rally almost exactly a year prior to the 9/11 attacks, Awad asserted that “Hollywood has not been our ally. Hollywood has distorted the facts. Hollywood has shown freedom fighters as terrorists. Hollywood has done the work that Zionists could not done [sic].”

How things have changed since 9/11. Apart from Obama himself, the Islamists almost couldn’t have a better friend than Hollywood now. The whole story of Hollywood’s multiculturalist appeasement and complicity with stealth jihad is a fascinating one which I can’t do justice to here, so keep an eye peeled for my book next year. For now let’s look at one specific example of how Hollywood has absorbed the Islamist influence and become their ally; in fact, since Awad brought up the Crusades in his Kuta speech, let’s choose an appropriate film – 2005’s Kingdom of Heaven.

Kingdom of Heaven is a Ridley Scott-directed epic starring Orlando Bloom and Liam Neeson about the Crusades and the battle for Jerusalem. Unsurprisingly, per Hollywood’s usual morally inverted worldview, the film depicts the Crusaders as uncouth murderers and hypocrites, and Muslims as more dignified and morally superior.

But, you ask, the Crusaders weren’t all saints, right? Didn’t they commit some atrocities? Of course – it was the Middle Ages, for God’s sake (pun intended). Those were brutal, cruel times. The point is that where this Clash of Civilizations is concerned, Hollywood has, since 9/11, almost invariably gone out of its way to assist Islamists like Awad in “clarifying the image of Islam in the West,” as he would put it – in other words, rewriting history, denigrating Christianity and the West, and whitewashing Islam.

In Kingdom, for example, Jerusalem collapses under assault from the Saracen forces led by the legendary general Saladin. Saladin is shown to be a paragon of interfaith tolerance who offers medical assistance to his Christian opponent and spares Jerusalem’s Christian defenders – although the inconvenient historical fact is that the Crusaders were required to buy their freedom, and those who couldn’t afford it were sold into slavery.

Before the battle, Orlando Bloom’s character tells the Christian defenders of Jerusalem that no one – Jew, Christian, or Muslim – has claim to the city: “All have claim.” He urges them not to fight for the city itself, only the people within. This interfaith nonsense would have been unthinkable to the Crusaders, who had devoted their lives to recovering Jerusalem and the Holy Land from Muslim occupation and imperialism in the first place.

After Bloom’s character strikes a deal to spare Jerusalem’s defenders, the Saracens take the city and Saladin enters a church, where he makes a point of uprighting a fallen crucifix, showing an interfaith respect that he didn’t in real life. When the real Saladin entered Jerusalem, his men ravaged many of the churches and all had their crosses removed. But of course, in multicultural Hollywood only Christians can be depicted as religiously intolerant.

One academic dismissed Kingdom of Heaven as “Osama bin Laden’s version of history.” CAIR, however, which was given a private screening by Ridley Scott, declared the film to be “a balanced and positive depiction of Islamic culture during the Crusades.” News flash: anytime CAIR praises your work, you’re on the wrong side of the issue.

The film also made use of an academic consultant, Hamid Dabashi, an Iranian-American intellectual who hurls accusations of racism and Western imperialism as reflexively as a Tourette’s sufferer. Dabashi was also the consultant on the 2005 Oscar-nominated movie Paradise Now, a sympathetic portrayal of two Palestinian suicide bombers. He describes Israel as “a racist apartheid state” and “a military base for the rising predatory empire of the United States.”

With this kind of “balanced and positive” perspective in the mix, no wonder CAIR approved of Kingdom of Heaven, which grossed $208 million while telling the world that: Christians are ruthless hypocrites who refuse to fight for a cause higher than their own lives; Jews and Christians have no special claim to Jerusalem; and Muslims are religiously tolerant and culturally superior. The film is a perfect example of how Nihad Awad would like to “clarify the image of Islam in the West.”

CAIR and pro-Islamist academics aren’t the only ones keeping up the pressure on Hollywood. Another Muslim Brotherhood front group, MPAC, the Muslim Public Affairs Council, even has a busy Hollywood Bureau, which indoctrinates educates filmmakers about Muslim customs and issues, offers script approval consultation, and hands out awards to Hollywood people and projects whose work depicts Muslims and Islam in a favorable light (past winners have included Michael Moore and Alec Baldwin). The Bureau also seeks to “connect aspiring Muslim filmmakers, writers and actors to Hollywood professionals.” Just last week MPAC and Film Independent, the non-profit organization for indie filmmakers, held a Los Angeles networking mixer (if you didn’t see it announced on Film Independent’s website calendar, that’s because it wasn’t there; I was given a heads-up about it – again – by IPT.)

MPAC Award Winner

Why is any of this important? Because while violent jihad is a serious issue, the cultural front is where this Clash of Civilization and Barbarism will be won or lost. Islamists who are patiently but assiduously working to tear down Western civilization are shrewdly crafting Hollywood’s subversive messages to the world. Is Hollywood as diligent in propagating a pro-American, pro-Western, anti-sharia narrative to export to the world?

I think we all know the answer to that.

Correction – his campaign against American victories in Iraq and Afghanistan. If Moore and the anti-war Left were truly anti-war, they would be protesting the real warmongers – Islamic fundamentalists – or at least protesting both sides equally. But they reserve their condemnation for the world’s greatest terrorists. I’m talking about those jack-booted, nuke-happy imperialists America and Israel, of course.

What should we be doing instead of trying to secure lasting victory in those countries? Plucking an estimate out of his sizeable, um, back pocket, Moore says, “$15 billion is what we’ve been spending almost every month on Iraq and Afghanistan. So, one month of the killing machine could give clean water to virtually all the people that don’t have it.”

Yes, if only the American “killing machine” would stop ravaging innocents abroad in order to steal their resources and enslave their peace-loving peoples, we could turn instead to doing some good in the world. For once. Because God knows Americans need to change our greedy, warmongering, rapacious ways and learn us some generosity, compassion and service to others. Then the world will like us again.

Moore pauses in the interview for an aside about the Catholic Church, which he proclaims a “woman-hating institution.” Again, if Moore and the Left are so opposed to “woman-hating institutions,” why do they remain stone silent about sharia law? While Moore is busy chiding the Catholic Church for its shocking oppression of nuns, was there outrage among Hollywood celebrities, Code Pink, NOW and the rest of the Left over the recent sentence of stoning in Iran for a mother accused of adultery? A mother who had already endured 99 lashes in front of her children, years in jail, and who will eventually be buried up to her chest and pulverized with rocks by a raging mob of Catholic fundamentalists? Oops, I meant Muslim fundamentalists?

(Thanks to international condemnation from those who truly care, however, Iran has been forced to relent – not to reconsider the barbaric practice of stoning or the mother’s ultimate fate, but to either hang her instead or simply wait, as they always do, until the eyes of the world are finally averted again. Then they will stone her.)

But Moore really hits his stride in the interview with this stretch of dialogue:

What do you think is going to happen up at the Pearly Gates when they check your citizenship and go, “Oh, you were an American? Ha, well, here’s your list of crimes”?

“Oh, yeah. No, I was against the war! I was against the war!”

“Did you pay your taxes?”

“Well, yeah, you got to pay your taxes.”

“Well, then you helped fund this, didn’t you?”

“Oh, yeah.”

“OK, well, you know, turn around. You’re not coming in the Gates.”

So in the collectivist Heaven of Moore’s imagination (the only kind of Heaven the Left would be willing to inhabit), you won’t be judged based on an individual accounting of your sins and good deeds; instead, St. Peter will turn away all Americans for their war crimes, presumably sending them to Hell instead. I have a question for Michael Moore: if Americans are being kept out of Heaven, who is being let in? Your friend Castro? Chavez? Ahmadinejad? bin Laden?

In the eyes of Moore’s God, it’s not enough simply to be anti-war (again, meaning anti-American). Because you participate in a democracy, because you pay your taxes to a democratically elected government, you are directly responsible for the actions of that government and are equally as guilty as a fellow citizen who supports war.

Revealingly, this is precisely the same position taken by Osama bin Laden and his Islamist brethren: that no American citizen is innocent of crimes against the ummah, the worldwide Muslim community, because they participate in democracy, a man-made system of governance which is in direct conflict with sharia, the law laid down by Allah himself. This is the very rationale used to justify attacks against American civilians everywhere, most notably of course, the 9/11 attacks in New York City.

(You know, New York City – where Dhimmi-of-the-Year-frontrunner Mayor Bloomberg is facilitating the erection of a massive mosque that will serve as a symbol of Islam’s greatest triumph over America to date).

As bin Laden puts it: “Kill[ing] the Americans and their allies – civilians and military – is an individual duty for every Muslim who can do it in any country in which it is possible to do it.” Why? Because “Muslim scholars have issued a fatwa against any American who pays taxes to his government. He is our target, because he is helping the American war machine against the Muslim nation.” “We do not differentiate,” he has asserted elsewhere, “between those dressed in military uniforms and civilians; they are all targets in this fatwa.”

It should come as no surprise that the Left and bin Laden are “not such strange bedfellows,” as Andrew C. McCarthy puts it; check out David Horowitz’s The Unholy Alliance: Radical Islam and the American Left, for example, or more recently, McCarthy’s The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left are Sabotaging America. And yet Michael Moore and his ilk take blustery umbrage at such a suggestion. “I love this country,” he sincerely insists. “My films are acts of patriotism.”

Yes, the Left’s version of patriotism. Well, the next time Michael Moore takes offense at accusations of anti-Americanism, remind him that he and Osama bin Laden are united in their condemnation of Americans as war criminals.