No matter how far backward Hollywood bends over to placate
our Islamic overlords, their foot soldiers among the leftist media still
complain it isn’t far enough. Peter Beaumont, foreign affairs editor at
Britain’s left-leaning The Guardian
and The Observer, wrote an editorial this
weekend about Showtime’s terrorism drama Homeland
entitled, “Homeland is brilliant drama. But does it present a
crude image of Muslims?” Guess how he answers his own question.
The show centers on a U.S. Marine, missing and presumed dead
in Iraq since 2003, who is rescued and brought home to Washington D.C. where he
rides his war hero popularity all the way into a Congressional seat and a
possible vice presidential nomination. The twist? This supposed patriot is a Muslim
convert here to carry out a plot spawned by a terrorist mastermind.
As readers of FrontPage know well, political correctness and
moral equivalence reign in Hollywood, and Homeland
is no exception. The show suggests, as Hollywood always does, that the Islamic
terrorism is mere “blowback” – justifiable retribution for America’s
imperialist foreign policy and CIA ruthlessness. Hollywood never acknowledges
that our enemy might be motivated, as it has been for 1400 years, by the
supremacist imperatives of Islam itself.
Thus it’s odd to find myself in the position of defending
the show, but Peter Beaumont’s piece is so typical of the left’s complicity
with Islamic fundamentalists (the unholy
alliance, as David Horowitz calls it) in their agenda to criminalize the defamation
of Islam, that a response was necessary.
Why is the show worth writing about at all? For the same
reason Beaumont himself devoted a lengthy column denouncing it: it’s an
important cultural marker. Homeland just
brought home the Emmy for Outstanding Drama Series, and Best Actor and Best
Actress Emmys for its two leads. It is currently the most highly regarded drama
on television, and perhaps the only show that is even addressing what used to
be called “the war on terror.” Its messages matter.
“I find the
depictions not only crude and childish but offensive,” Beaumont says, and God
knows the left has elevated “offending someone” to the level of violent crime,
so you know he’s serious. He complains that on Homeland, it doesn’t matter whether Arabs/Muslims are “rich, smart,
discreetly enjoying a western lifestyle or attractive” – all are suspect. But the
fact is, not all jihadists are backward, bearded bombers; some are affluent, educated, slick and Westernized
subversives, like CAIR spokesmen or celebrity academics like Reza Aslan and Tariq Ramadan. So yes, those qualities do not exempt one from
suspicion – far from it. This is the reality, not bigotry or the mythical Islamophobia.
Beaumont goes on
to complain that “Arabs and Islamists have been portrayed thus far [in Homeland] as violent fanatics, some of
whom are powerful and influential infiltrators.” Why, that’s outrageous! Where
could that offensive stereotype possibly have come from? The real-world
fanatics and infiltrators themselves, perhaps? Beaumont should be directing his
ire at them for establishing and perpetuating
the stereotype he blames on Hollywood.
Homeland presents “an odd and unbelievable image
of relationships,” Beaumont claims, “between countries and identities in the Middle
East, where Palestinians, Iraqis, Saudis all share an agenda regardless of
background, culture and history.” It’s not odd or unbelievable at all – that
agenda is the annihilation of Western civilization and the establishment of a
worldwide caliphate, and it is shared by Muslim fundamentalists regardless of
national background, culture and history. This is something Hollywood and the
left refuse to acknowledge.
Then Beaumont
lets his own bias slip. Referring to the fact that Homeland originally spun off of an Israeli TV show, he notes that
“what Homeland portrays is a peculiar view of the Islamic world, one
rooted, perhaps, in its genesis as an Israeli drama, where the view of the
surrounding neighbourhood is more paranoid and defensive.” Paranoid and
defensive? Israelis’ wariness about the Islamic world’s open determination to exterminate
them is not “a peculiar view”; as the saying goes, it’s not paranoia if they’re
really trying to kill you.
Beaumont launches
into an explanation that “how we portray the ‘other’ – those whom we fear or
are suspicious of – reinforces cultures of conflict.” This is standard
self-flagellating claptrap from multiculturalists who want us to wallow in
cultural guilt and self-loathing instead of acknowledging the existence of
real-world enemies. In fact, what reinforces “cultures of conflict” is when one
culture – supremacist Islam, the most intolerant ideology on the planet – is literally
hell-bent on erasing another culture – ours – from the face of the earth.
To bolster his
argument that Hollywood is generally bigoted and racist, Beaumont predictably
cites 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 books such as Reel
Bad Arabs: How Hollywood Vilifies a People, he scours nearly 1000 movies for instances in which
Hollywood has failed to portray Arabs and Muslims as doctors, lawyers, and
all-around nice guys. Too bad white Americans don’t have an academic apologist
tallying up all the instances in which they’re portrayed in a bad light in world
cinema, including in Hollywood.
Since 9/11,
favorable depictions of Arabs and Muslims abound in the entertainment biz,
despite their whining to the contrary. In being offended at the depiction of
them as terrorists, Beaumont is conveniently ignoring the fact that Homeland is an action thriller about
Islamic terrorism; hence, there are necessarily characters who are Islamic
terrorists. Remove them and you have no show – which is precisely what Beaumont
would prefer. Pressuring
Hollywood to present a balanced diversity of Muslims and Arabs is not
the true aim of terrorism apologists like Beaumont or Shaheen; their goal, like
that of Islamic fundamentalists themselves, is to ensure that absolutely no
depictions of Muslim terrorists are allowed, and no connection is made
between Islam and terrorism. They're not looking for balance – they want a complete whitewash.
(This article originally appeared here on FrontPage Magazine, 10/16/12)
