Posted: 27 Jan 2014 10:07 PM PST
In real life,
terrorists are almost always Muslim. In the movie theater, they are anything
but. America's fictional secret agents, covert operatives and rogue cops who
play by their own rules have spent more time battling Serbian terrorists than
Muslim terrorists.
Before
September 11 broke up the party, 24's Jack Bauer was fighting the international
menace of Serbian terrorism. Serbian terrorists also showed up in 1999's
Diplomatic Siege when their "Serbian Liberation Front" took over a
US embassy and in 1997's The Peacemaker with George Clooney rushing to stop a
Serb from detonating a nuke in New York City.
The United States has remained unscathed by Serbian terrorism, though the
same can't be said for Peter Weller, the star of Diplomatic Siege, and Mimi
Leder, the director of The Peacemaker, but not by Muslim terrorist attacks.
Despite September 11, the Fort Hood Massacre and the Boston Marathon
bombings, Hollywood has however resolutely kept its eye on the real threat.
Serbian terrorism.
This weekend, Ride Along, which features Ice "F___ the Police" Cube
playing a cop, knocked Lone Survivor out of the top spot at the box office,
and once again takes on the terrible threat of… Serbian terrorism.
When the Serbs aren't available, the North Koreans have to step in. Red Dawn
had to switch its army of invaders who conquer America from the Chinese to
the North Koreans. North Korea, unlike China, doesn't pay Hollywood studios
money for the movies it imports. But to be on the safe side, when North
Koreans attacked the White House in Olympus Has Fallen, the movie specified
that they were extremists. Hollywood wouldn't want to imply that North
Korea's moderate government might be attacking America.
Only the Serbs do that.
North Korea however responded by warning that if it did attack the United
States, the outcome would be even worse than anything in a movie.
When the Serbs are too busy shoveling snow and the North Koreans are too busy
watching Dennis Rodman act like an idiot, there are always the Russians. The
Russians are more likely to show up as villains after the fall of the Soviet
Union than during the Communist era. It's as if the end of Soviet Communism
finally set Hollywood free to join in the fun of Boris and Natasha villains
without any of the guilt about red-baiting.
When Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit featured a terrorist cell in Dearborn, even
though Muslim settlers dominate the area, the villains were shown operating
out of a Russian Orthodox church and getting their cues from a priest reading
the bible while the terrorists cried out, “Slava Bogu" or "Praise
God."
It would have been so very unrealistic to show them praising Allah instead.
Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit is the latest attempt at making a Tom Clancy movie
without the Tom Clancy part. Sum of All Fears, one of the first movies about
terrorism to come out after September 11, jettisoned Clancy's Muslim villains
and replaced them with neo-fascists out to turn Europe into a "united
fascist superstate".
While this wasn't true to the Clancy novel, it was the first time that a
major motion picture unintentionally portrayed the European Union as a
villain even though it had already been around for a decade. Around the time
Sum of All Fears came out, Europeans were already on a single currency. But
that obviously wasn't what anyone in the production had in mind.
Phil Alden Robinson, the director whose career also appears to have fallen
victim to Serbian terrorism, responded to CAIR's demands that the movie be
more true to life by not featuring Muslim terrorists, with compliant
acquiescence.
Its writer Dan Pyne dismissed Islamic terrorism as a
"cliche"; even though a plot can’t be a cliche when it never
appears in movies, only in real life. Pyne however found a more realistic
villain. "I think, there was some neo-nationalist activity in Holland, and
there was stuff going on in Spain and in Italy. So it seemed like a logical
and lasting idea that would be universal."
Nothing is more universal than the threat of neo-nationalists in Holland.
Dutch neo-nationalism is an enduring world menace that everyone can relate to.
The neo-nationalists of the Netherlands that Pyne had discovered in a used
copy of the LA Times were probably Pim Fortuyn's party. Fortuyn was a gay
Sociology professor and former Marxist who favored drug legalization, gay
marriage and less Muslim immigration. The neo-nationalist threat of the
Netherlands did not prove lasting when around the time that Sum of All Fears
was playing in theaters; Fortuyn was murdered by a leftist who, like Pyne,
worried about the plight of the Muslims.
In an even bigger cliche, Theo van Gogh, who had just finished directing May
6th, a movie about the assassination of Pim Fortuyn, was murdered by Mohammed
Bouyeri, a Muslim immigrant from Morocco who told the victim's mother that he
could have no empathy for her because she was a non-Muslim.
It was the sort of ridiculous cliche that Dan Pyne would never have put into
a script.
Instead Dan Pyne went on to write a remake of the Manchurian Candidate in
which Communist China was replaced by the "Manchurian Corporation".
He's currently working on a movie featuring a Syrian rescue worker who gets
mistaken for a terrorist while trying to save lives during Hurricane Katrina.
It's a cliche, but it's the kind of cliche that Hollywood likes.
If a movie is made about September 11 a decade from, now, the villains will
probably be Serbian nationalists. Or perhaps a villainous "September 11
Corporation". It would be a cliche to have 19 Muslim hijackers murder
3,000 people. And then the camera will linger meaningfully on a Muslim
rescuer wrongly taken into custody by a bigoted NYPD cop who is overlooking
the real Serbian/Dutch neo-nationalist corporate villains.
But the Serbians, Russians, North Koreans and the Neo-Nationalists of the
Netherlands are only the understudies who get called in when the usual
villains, right-wing extremists who want to false flag America into a war
with the Muslims are on vacation.
After 24 got done with the Serbian terror threat, it defaulted to the real
threat of government warmongers trying to fake a Muslim terror threat. After
9/11, 24's second season’s story was about an evil government conspiracy to
fake a Muslim terrorist attack. Anything else would have been a cliche. And
to avoid cliches, the series used variations of the same plot in three
seasons.
When the Serbs went on strike last year, White House Down brought in a
villainous Speaker of the House with a Jewish last name to assassinate a
black president in order to sabotage his treaty with Iran. The movie lost so
much money that Sony blamed its quarterly $197 million loss on it.
Serbian terrorism had struck again.
When a straightforward presentation flops, Hollywood finds ways of embedding
the same old message into more fantastic fare. Last summer, Iron Man 3, Star
Trek Into Darkness and the Lone Ranger all had minor variations of the same
story about false flag attacks that were orchestrated by governments or
powerful interests connected to them. This Trutherism explosion was just
another case of Hollywood carefully avoiding cliches.
Nowhere in all these tales of evil corporations and governments is there a
movie about an entertainment industry so intertwined with government that it
not only helped pick the country’s current leader, but it constantly releases
propaganda films attempting to revise reality according to his worldview.
That would be a cliché; much like the idea of that industry filming false
flag movies depicting the favorite villains of the Clinton Administration
carrying out ridiculously implausible acts of terror to retroactively justify
its focus on the Serbs instead of Al Qaeda.
Hollywood stands as firmly against depicting Muslim terrorism as Hollywood
Communists after the Hitler-Stalin pact did against anti-Nazi films. If they
had been positioned further up the ladder back then, instead of mainly being
relegated to writing scripts, we would no doubt have a catalog of movies
featuring Yankee warmongers plotting to stage fake Nazi attacks on America.
Hollywood's ideological hostility to reality however has not proven to be
very profitable.
The
Peacemaker, a movie written and co-produced by the Cockburns, whose politics
are slightly to the left of Stalin and who wrote a book blaming Israel for
everything wrong with the world beginning with the death of the dinosaurs,
was the inaugural feature from the failed Spielberg-Geffen-Katzenberg
Dreamworks studio and disappointed critics and audiences. The Cockburns would
never try their hand at film fiction again unless you count American Casino,
their "documentary" about the financial collapse, which had a
financial collapse of its own with an opening weekend of $1,397.
Sum of All Fears, the movie inspired by the Netherlands neo-nationalist
threat, was the weakest performer of the Tom Clancy movies when accounting
for ticket price inflation and full budget. And it still had a much better
opening weekend than Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit.
But failure hasn't stopped Hollywood from churning out anti-war movies and it
won't stop it from alerting the nation to the terrorist threat lurking in
Orthodox Churches or the Dutch neo-nationalists trying to nuke our cities.
Hollywood’s handpicked leaders were the ones who made the country
vulnerable to Islamic terrorism and their industry has gone on covering up
for them with movies in which the villains can be anyone and everyone except
the real killers.
Daniel Greenfield is a New York City based writer and blogger
and a Shillman Journalism Fellow of the David Horowitz Freedom Center.
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