This is the third good column I have posted this week on Hollywood's bias.
LEISURE & ARTS
Hollywood's Last Taboo
Movie studios censor themselves to placate Muslim pressure groups.
WSJ.com OpinionJournal
BY BRIDGET JOHNSON
Wednesday, July 13, 2005 12:01 a.m.
Movies don't just offer us an escape, but reflect our realities and familiar experiences. Thursday's brutal attacks on London reminded us of a reality we've been living with for years now--Islamic terrorism. But don't hold your breath to see it portrayed as such onscreen anytime soon.
Last year, in an OpinionJournal column about the murder of Theo van Gogh at the hands of an Islamic extremist, I mentioned how the 2002 film version of Tom Clancy's "The Sum of All Fears" transformed the Palestinian terrorist characters into Euro neo-Nazis. The day my piece appeared, I received an anonymous e-mail from someone who claimed to be "close to the decision" to alter the adaptation, defending the pre-9/11 changes as trying "to avoid a tired cliché."
And, perhaps, trying to resolve a campaign spearheaded by the Council on American Islamic Relations against Paramount Pictures and the director two years before production began, as claimed in a Jan. 26, 2001, press release from the activist group. "Given the existing prejudice against and stereotyping of Islam and Muslims, we believe this film could have had a negative impact on the lives of ordinary American Muslims, particularly children," Omar Ahmad said in the CAIR statement.
The e-mailer added that if the movie "even had a chance to get made post-9/11," he and other principals in the making of the film have since agreed that they wouldn't have changed the villains in the script--"as incendiary as that decision might be."
It would have been incendiary all right. After all, "True Lies" (1994), "Executive Decision" (1996), "The Siege" (1998) and "Rules of Engagement" (2000) all came under sharp criticism from CAIR well before 9/11. And post-9/11, Arab characters don't even have to be terrorists to draw CAIR's ire; it criticized "Hidalgo" (2004), for example, for "dialogue and imagery" deemed stereotypical.
Yet nowhere, even in those films with Arab terrorist characters, was it stated or even implied that all Arabs are terrorists. According to CAIR and other such groups, not a single Muslim can be portrayed on film as a terrorist--no matter how many good Arabs even out the pack--without putting American Muslims in danger from rabid neighbors who internalize Sunday matinees. But that's just not reality.
Since 1968--when an El Al plane was hijacked by a Palestinian group--we've known Arabs can be terrorists. There were the 1983 Beirut bombings and the 1988 downing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland. In 1993, the World Trade Center was bombed and Hamas started suicide bombings in Israel. In 1998, U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania were bombed; in 2000 the USS Cole was bombed in Yemen. We've seen countless amateur videotapes of hostages weeping, masked men beheading and Osama bin Laden & Co. vowing to continue their jihad.
Are we writing to unfairly stereotype, or writing what we know? We know we have patriotic Muslim neighbors such as those who gathered in Washington on May 14 to protest terrorism; we also know that other Muslims across the world were cheering when our Twin Towers came crashing down.
Fox went out on a limb and presented a plot line in its hit series "24" about a Muslim terror cell within suburban America. After outrage early this year from CAIR and the Muslim Public Affairs Council, the network placated the activists with public service announcements featuring star Kiefer Sutherland: "...It is important to recognize that the American Muslim community stands firmly beside their fellow Americans in denouncing and resisting all forms of terrorism." But it's a stretch to group all American Muslims as supporting the war on terror. Let's face it--not all non-Muslim Americans stand behind the U.S. in the terror war, either.
Ridley Scott, director of the flop "Kingdom of Heaven," was pressed early on by the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee and other Muslim groups to not negatively stereotype his Crusades-era Muslims. Muslim groups got to pre-screen the film. The AP quoted actress Eva Green as saying, "I think Muslims will be extremely proud and happy, because they're seen as noble, chivalrous characters. . . . Especially in this Crusade, the Arab people behaved in a more noble way than the Christian people."
The historical accuracy of the film was blasted by the British historian Jonathan Riley-Smith, a leading Crusades scholar, as "Osama bin Laden's version of history. It will fuel the Islamic fundamentalists."
With production costs exceeding $130 million, "Kingdom of Heaven" took in under $20 million domestically on its opening weekend earlier this year. However, its take in more than 100 markets outside the U.S. on the same weekend was $56 million. Variety reported that the movie opened on 45 screens in the United Arab Emirates, Lebanon, Kuwait, Qatar, Jordan, Bahrain, Oman and Syria. Considering that more than three-quarters of the film's lifetime gross has come from overseas, according to tracking firm Box Office Mojo, principals in the making of the film might have considered appeasement of potential critics necessary for success. Arab critics received the film well.
Does Tinsel Town fear the weight of Muslim organizations' publicity machine? "Hollywood does not want the accusation of being bigoted," says Kamal Nawash, president of Free Muslims Against Terrorism. A Palestinian-American, he also doubted that movies with Arab villains inspire hate crimes. "I don't think Muslims should be oversensitive about it. We should address how we got here, and how we got here is a lot of Muslims are committing terrorism. . . . Muslims should become more hawkish against terrorism."
Since Hollywood has shown it will bow to the pressure of Muslim activists, questions loom about what's next. Should studios even be running their projects by any activist groups for approval? How much license will they take in rewriting history? Will the terror war be ignored onscreen?
This fall will mark the fourth anniversary of the al Qaeda attacks on New York and Washington, and not one European neo-Nazi is to be found on the FBI's Most Wanted Terrorists list. Another convenient movie villain, the Irish Republican Army, has not been deemed responsible for the deadly 7/7 London bombings. Islamo-fascism though is a real, deadly threat. So is censorship by special-interest groups a threat to all that the creative community stands for.
Ms. Johnson is a journalist and screenwriter in Southern California. Her blog is gopvixen.blogs.com.
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