Famed (and infamous) director Roman Polanski has
announced that his next film project will be D, a political thriller based on the real-life tale
of Alfred Dreyfus, the French
Jew wrongly imprisoned for spying at the turn of the century. What drew him to
the topic? Its anti-Semitic theme? Perversely, it is about a persecuted minority – just not the one you might think.
The creative force behind such films as Rosemary’s Baby, Chinatown,
and The Pianist among many others, Polanski
pled guilty to raping an underage girl in 1977, then fled the United States for
the protection of France’s non-extradition law. There his filmmaking career has
thrived and he has lived the high life of a revered artist. The list of awards
and honors bestowed upon him and his films is towering; he is even the
recipient of France’s highest civilian honor, the Legion d’Honneur, alongside
such notables as Gen. George Patton, Victor Hugo, and, coincidentally, Dreyfus
himself.
Polanski and his apologists
consider his fugitive status to be nothing more than petty persecution on the
part of Puritanical Americans who don’t understand that a great artist should be above
the law. So when Polanski was in
Switzerland to attend the Zurich Film Festival in 2009 and was put temporarily
under chateau arrest at the behest of the U.S., French Culture Minister Frédéric
Mitterrand gave vent to melodramatic outrage:
To see him thrown to the lions and
put in prison because of ancient history — and as he was traveling to an event
honoring him — is absolutely horrifying. There's an America we love and an
America that scares us, and it's that latter America that has just shown us its
face.
L’Affaire Dreyfus is one of the most “sensational political scandals
and miscarriages of justice in history,” as D’s
press release describes it. In the late 1890s Capt. Dreyfus was one of the few
Jewish officers in the French Army. Accused of passing secrets to Germany, he was
railroaded into life imprisonment until he was finally cleared of all charges twelve
years later.
When asked how he was able to get inside the head and heart
of his fictional heroine of Madame Bovary
so convincingly, novelist Gustave Flaubert explained, “Madame Bovary, c’est moi.” Similarly, Marc Tracy of Tablet Magazine believes that, in the director’s own mind, Polanski
c’est Dreyfus, a man unfairly
targeted for his Jewishness. Novelist Gore Vidal, who “was in the middle of all that” sexual scandal (and who wrote the screenplay for the 1958 film I
Accuse! starring José Ferrer as Dreyfus), agrees:
“Anti-Semitism got poor Polanski.”
Tracy discredits the comparison:
The Dreyfus Affair (we know in retrospect) involved the deliberately false
accusation, by means of forgery, that an innocent had committed a real crime.
Dreyfus was a total innocent… [To] conjure the Dreyfus Affair… cheapens the
legacy of the episode that most exemplified all the dangers of anti-Semitism,
and therefore cheapens anti-Semitism itself.
But what does
Polanski himself say about his motivation? “I have long wanted to make a film
about the Dreyfus Affair,” he says, “treating it not as a costume drama but as
a spy story”:
In this way one can show its absolute relevance to what is happening in
today’s world – the age-old spectacle of the witch-hunt of a minority group,
security paranoia, secret military tribunals, out-of-control intelligence
agencies, governmental cover-ups and a rabid press.
Seriously? A
metaphor for the “war on terror”? It was weak enough when an increasingly
propagandist filmmaker like Robert Redford turned the trial of the Lincoln
assassination conspirators into a war-on-terror metaphor with his predictably
unsuccessful The
Conspirator. But the Dreyfus
Affair?
What Polanski
means by “the witch-hunt of a minority group,” is, of course, Muslims, whom many
presume are chafing under the lash of counter-jihad security measures and a
tide of “Islamophobic” bigotry. In fact, European Islamists and their
apologists have been actively promoting the meme that they are “the new
Jews,” as even a British Muslim Member of Parliament put it. This shameless claim to the same victimhood status
as the targets of Nazi genocide ignores the obvious reality that not even a
“tiny minority” of Jews in Nazi Germany were carrying out terror attacks, nor
were they striving to destroy European culture and democracy to replace them
with a totalitarian theocracy.
Who is persecuting Muslims? Certainly not the American or
European governments, which turn a blind eye to the rise in the West of honor
killings, sharia, and Saudi-funded
mega-mosques spreading extremism. Unlike Jews in Nazi Germany, Muslims
today are not being deprived of their rights, their businesses, or their homes;
nor are they being herded into concentration camps to make genocide cheaper and
more efficient.
Certainly not the news or entertainment media, who bend over
backward to avoid stereotyping Muslims and to avoid linking acts of terrorism
to Islamic theology, despite the terrorists’ own insistence otherwise.
And certainly not ordinary
citizens either. According
to the most recent (2010) FBI
hate crime statistics, anti-Islamic hate crimes in the U.S. accounted for
only 12.1% of those motivated by religion. Hate crimes targeting Jews however, comprise
67.1% of those – two-thirds of the
total, despite the fact that the Jewish population in America is no more than 2.5 times as
large as the Muslim population. In fifteen years (1996-2010) of online FBI reports, not a single Muslim has been killed for being Muslim.
Perhaps D really
is driven by Polanski’s identification with Dreyfus and not the purported
persecution of Muslims. But to make a movie about an iconic incident of French
Jew-hatred and spin it into a symbol of anti-Muslim victimization at a time
when Islamic
Jew-hatred itself is spiking in
France and throughout Europe is repellent. Remember
that Polanski’s adopted country was the scene of the recent butchery of a rabbi
and his two children (among others) in Toulouse at the hands of jihadist Mohammed
Merah, who has since become an heroic martyr among his fellows and their
sympathizers; a Rouen schoolteacher, for example, called
for a moment of silence in class in memory of the vile Merah, who died attempting
to shoot his way through French police to freedom.
For a Jew to defend an inherently anti-Semitic ideology is
bad enough. One would think that, as the rapist of a 13-year-old, Polanski would
also think twice about publicly defending an inherently misogynistic ideology
that sanctions gender apartheid and the sexual abuse of children throughout the
Islamic world.
Whether D will be
about Roman Polanski as Dreyfus, or Muslims as the new Jews, or perhaps even both,
celebrated auteur Polanski has it wrong. Dreyfus was innocent; Polanski was
not. And the persecuted minority today is not Muslim but, as always, Jewish.
(This article originally appeared here on PJ Lifestyle, 5/31/12 under the title "Rapist Roman Polanski’s New Film to Defend Antisemites and Misogynists")
