Always comfortable with Hollywood’s distortion of history as long as it
suits their propagandistic motives, progressives and their Islamic allies are
the first to try to discredit films that don’t fit their narrative. You can be
sure that any film they attack on grounds of supposed “historical inaccuracy”
must be uncomfortably close to the truth.
Writing in the New
Statesman (and reprinted
in the New
Republic), Turkish
writer Elest Ali asks the burning cinematic question, “Is Dracula Untold an Islamophobic movie?” She’s
referring to the new Universal picture starring Luke Evans and Dominic Cooper, a fanciful
epic about the actual historical source of the outlandish Dracula legend we all
know and love: Vlad Tepes III, 15th century Romanian hero and legend
who dared resist invasion by the feared Ottoman empire.
Elest Ali recently saw the film in Turkey with a friend who declared,
“That film was very anti-Muslim.” “What else is new?” she replies – because we
all know how openly bigoted Hollywood currently is toward Muslims, am I right?
Ali decided to write about her issue with the movie’s “historical accuracy, and
contemporary significance.” Non-spoiler alert: she denounces it as Islamophobic,
the kneejerk, go-to accusation leveled at anything and anyone that doesn’t
shine a flattering light on Islam or Muslims (see Affleck, Ben).
“Hollywood is no genius when it comes to accurate representation,” she
begins, and I couldn’t agree more. From the “Bush lied, people died” message of
Matt Damon’s The Green Zone, to the ahistorical
moral equivalency of the Crusades epic Kingdom
of Heaven, to the lies about Ronald Reagan and race in Lee Daniels’ The Butler, Hollywood rewrites history to ensure that
its dramatic version becomes history
in the popular imagination.
But Dracula Untold doesn’t suit
Ali’s biases, so she casts the suspicion of bigotry over it. “In the current
climate of global political tension and escalating Islamophobia,” she asks, without
considering Islam’s responsibility for the former or providing any evidence of
the latter, “what political statement does Dracula Untold make
in pitting our vampire hero against the armies of Mehmet II?” Probably no
political statement at all was intended by the filmmakers, but in any case it
wasn’t the statement Ali wanted to see.
She suggests that in Vlad’s time (which she oddly labels “the Age of
Enlightenment,” a period that was at least two centuries distant), Islam was an
“appealing,” “fast-spreading faith” that was “glamorized” by “wealthy,
cultivated Muslim travelers” in Europe, seducing large numbers of European
converts. In fact, Islam has always spread not because its appeal is
irresistible (except to barbarous killers like today’s ISIS sympathizers), but
through the coercive power of the sword. She feels that the movie’s use of the
word “Turk” to characterize the glamorous, cultivated, multicultural Ottomans
is a subtle historical slur, “an attempt to tribalize the Islamic faith and
associate it with foreign, potentially threatening powers, which were the
common enemy.” Well, in the time and place in which the movie is set, the
Islamic Ottoman empire was a
threatening foreign power. For that matter, Turkey today is a threatening foreign power.
“I’ll fill you in on some more history,” Ali continues condescendingly
before proceeding to whitewash the imperialist Sultan Mehmet II, while
dismissing Vlad as “progenitor of the vampire myth.” She claims that Vlad’s
father, the Prince of Wallachia (essentially present-day Romania), “willingly
offered” the Sultan his two sons in return for helping him keep the throne
against his enemies. This is laughably false. Vlad the elder was seized and his
sons Vlad III and Radu the Handsome were taken as hostages to ensure the father’s
fealty as a vassal of the Sultan. Young Vlad was a “guest” of the Sultan for
six years; meanwhile, according to biographers Radu Florescu and Raymond
McNally in Dracula: Prince of Many Faces,
the beautiful young Radu initially did his best to resist Mehmet’s sexual
advances before eventually succumbing and becoming his lover and a Janissary
general. Ali doesn’t mention Mehmet’s bisexuality or Vlad’s fierce refusal to
convert to Islam.
Ali continues in her imaginary take on history: When Vlad later “started
wreaking carnage across the Balkans, Mehmet II dispatched Radu to quell his
brother’s blood-thirst.” Wrong. Vlad was well aware that Mehmet fancied himself
a conqueror on the scale of Caesar, Alexander, and Hannibal. Mehmet’s ambition
was to bring all of Europe into his imperialistic fold, and Vlad was determined
to make Wallachia the tip of the spear of Christian European resistance to
Islam. He began by sending a very defiant message to the Sultan: he took Mehmet’s
emissaries, who came demanding an overdue payment of the jizya, and nailed
their turbans to their heads.
“Vlad’s insurrection was not dissimilar to the terror tactics of the
so-called Islamic State,” Ali claims in her ongoing attempt to demonize him (as
an aside, the Islamic State is not “so-called”; it is the name that those
butchers have proudly given themselves). She is not at all incorrect about
Vlad’s terror tactics – details of his widespread cruelty make your hair stand
on end – but what she does not acknowledge is that Vlad learned such merciless tactics
from the Ottomans while he was their hostage
as a boy. He learned them well enough that when Mehmet himself marched upon
Wallachia to seize it, he was so horrified to be greeted by a forest of 20,000
impaled Ottoman soldiers that he had to be talked out of turning tail back home.
Ali complains that Vlad waged a campaign of guerilla attacks against
Mehmet’s larger army, including dressing his men in Ottoman uniforms and using
his fluent Turkish to slip into the enemy’s camps. She says this as if unaware
that the warlord prophet Muhammad himself taught that “war is deception.” Vlad
would have made Muhammad proud.
Ultimately, his hated brother Radu was victorious and Vlad was offered
sanctuary by his ally Matthew Corvinus and his clan. “But frankly,” writes Ali,
“they’d also had enough of his grizzly antics, so they imprisoned him on
charges of treason. True story,” she says, as if we should take her word for it.
In fact, Vlad was falsely charged with
treason for political reasons; Matthew later allied with Vlad to help him
retrieve the Wallachian throne from a Turkish prince. True story.
“Vilification of Islam has reached such heights,” Elest Ali whines,
without acknowledging the many obvious reasons why Islam itself might be to
blame for that, “that even when the Sultan is cast opposite history’s
bloodiest-psycho-tyrant, it’s Dracula who emerges as the tragic hero.” Vlad the
Impaler – not the fictional Dracula – certainly earned his nickname, but he is
by no means history’s “bloodiest-psycho-tyrant.” That honorific could go to any
number of modern monsters such as, say, Ismail Enver Pasha, one of the
principal architects of Turkey’s Armenian Genocide. But don’t hold your breath
waiting for Hollywood to dramatize the truth about that.
(This article originally appeared here on FrontPage Mag, 10/29/14)
