Defending "Homeland"

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.

No Heroes, No Villains: Homeland’s Moral Confusion

Showtime’s terrorism drama Homeland is the television king of the hill. For its inaugural season it recently took the Emmy for Outstanding Drama Series, and Best Actor and Best Actress awards for its two leads. The final episode of season one was the most-watched finale of any rookie Showtime series, and it just kicked off its highly anticipated second season. But underneath its polished production values and top-notch writing is a moral muddle that may undermine its dramatic impact in the long run.

For those who haven’t been following – SPOILER ALERT – the show centers on a U.S. Marine named Brody (actor Damian Lewis), missing and presumed dead in Iraq since 2003, who is rescued and brought home to Washington D.C. to a lot of CIA self-congratulation and media fanfare. He rides his war hero popularity all the way into political office, and by season two he is a Congressman being courted for the presidential running mate.

But that’s not all he is. CIA analyst Carrie (Claire Danes​) rightly suspects that Brody is a sleeper agent here to carry out an attack from terrorist mastermind Abu Nazir (Navid Negahban). That makes Brody a rather unique protagonist – “a whole new breed of lead character,” as the Los Angeles Times put it, “neither antihero nor villain.” Nor hero.

How the Left Keeps Blacks in Line: The Stacey Dash Chapter

Last weekend black actress Stacey Dash ignited a firestorm of racist hate from supporters of President Obama when she dared to step off the Hollywood plantation and endorse a Republican presidential candidate. She posted a picture of herself on Twitter with an American flag and the accompanying tweet, “Vote for Romney. The only choice for your future.” The Twitter response was swift and ugly.

Ms. Dash is best-known for her supporting role in the 1995 movie Clueless and more recently a leading role on VH1’s Single Ladies. In the last election she voted for Obama, but “it’s different this time,” she tweeted. Kudos to her for having her own mind and for being willing to rethink her political stance, rather than falling for Obama’s laughable excuse that he needs another four years to clean up the mess he “inherited” from George W. Bush. Kudos to her also because she works in Hollywood, where anything short of open contempt for conservatives, much less open support for one, can get you disinvited from all the right parties and even hinder you from getting further work.

The totalitarian left demands absolute fealty from their black constituency, and ruthlessly punishes independent thought. So after the former Obama voter’s pro-Romney tweet, some twitterers cut right to the chase and urged Dash to kill herself. The next time progressives demonize the right as “American Taliban,” perhaps we should remind them that it is the intolerant left who wishes death upon those who dare question the orthodoxy.

Others on Twitter railed at her for being a “house Negro,” “Uncle Tom,” “race traitor” and “Oreo” (black on the outside, white on the inside). Remember that these racist epithets are from other blacks. WARNING: The following examples are almost incoherently ungrammatical, which speaks volumes about the left’s self-proclaimed intellectual superiority; but in addition, some of them are shockingly vile – and I didn’t even include the most disgusting ones.

Radicals: Portraits of a Destructive Generation

David Horowitz has established himself as the radical left’s foremost intellectual nemesis, certainly in part because he used to be one of them and understands their mindset and strategies so intimately. He has attacked progressive ideology in book after book, including Radical Son, Destructive Generation, Left Illusions, The Party of Defeat, The Art of Political War, and Unholy Alliance, to name a few. His new book Radicals: Portraits of a Destructive Generation, however, is less of an analysis of their ideology than personal reflections on a handful of people who have embraced that ideology.

The book’s six chapters each profile a different radical figure or figures: enfant terrible Christopher Hitchens, Marxist feminist Bettina Aptheker, black celebrity academic Cornel West, domestic terrorists like Linda Evans and Susan Rosenberg, feminist essayist Susan Lydon, and last but certainly not least, the radical left’s favorite mentor, Saul Alinsky.

The “destructive passion” of the title is the left’s utopian fantasy of human perfection, which “becomes a desire to annihilate whatever stands in the way of [that] beautiful idea.” This “fantasy of a redeemed future has repeatedly led to catastrophic results as progressive radicals pursue their impossible schemes.” And thus Horowitz begins the book reiterating a theme common to all his dissections of the left, and common to the radicals profiled here: “It is an enduring irony of the human condition that the urgency to make the world ‘a better place’ is also the chief source of the suffering that human beings have inflicted on each other from the beginning of time.”

Bond, Music and Gender

My earliest movie theater memory–in fact, one of my earliest memories at all–is of sitting with dropped jaw, thrilled by the brassy, guitar-driven theme song that opened Dr. No, the first in what would become the longest-running film franchise in history. The Bond theme is still my favorite movie music.

Dr. No was released fifty years ago today. In celebration of Bond’s golden anniversary, today is “Global James Bond Day,” the program for which includes an online live auction charity event organized by Christie’s, and a film retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, no less. All of this precedes the upcoming worldwide premiere of the 23rd Bond flick, Skyfall, starring the rugged Daniel Craig as the current Bond.

Also kicking off today is the release of the film’s theme song; for each Bond flick this is something of an event unto itself, and being chosen to perform it is a coveted musical honor. The Bond theme songs set the tone for the movies. They are almost always sung by women (past exceptions include Paul McCartney and Tom Jones) who can deliver a bold, femme fatale sexuality in the vocals–a quality that resonates with both men and women in the audience.

Read a Banned Book

Two years ago when the controversial Florida pastor Terry Jones threatened to burn Korans, I had a passionate argument with a friend who strongly supported the gesture as a protest against the ideology contained within its covers. While I supported Jones’s right to burn the book as a protected act of free speech, I was (and remain) adamantly opposed to book burning as a way to resolve the clash of ideas. Whether it’s the Koran or Mein Kampf or, ironically, Fahrenheit 451, censorship never works and smacks of intellectual Nazism. Controversial books shouldn’t be burned or banned–they should be read and debated.

This is the thirtieth anniversary of Banned Books Week, an annual event that celebrates our freedom to read and that tries to draw national attention to censorship. The site notes that schools, bookstores and libraries have received “challenges” on more than 11,300 books since the event was initiated, 326 last year alone. Among the ten most challenged titles of 2011 were popular works like The Hunger Games trilogy and the Gossip Girl series; surprisingly, old classics like To Kill a Mockingbird and Brave New World are still on the list.

Imagine the loss to our cultural heritage if censors had succeeded in eliminating from our shelves books such as To Kill a Mockingbird, Brave New World, Catcher in the Rye, Native Son, The Grapes of Wrath, Leaves of Grass, Moby Dick, The Scarlet Letter, and Uncle Tom’s Cabin. This is not to say that every “challenged” book is necessarily a classic or that the ideas contained within are not reprehensible; but better to let those earn our condemnation based on their own (lack of) merits than to simply be denied to anyone, which only fuels interest.

The Culture of Cheating

The New York Times recently reported on a culture of cheating at Stuyvesant, one of New York City’s most prestigious public schools and the alma mater of four Nobel laureates. In interviews, dozens of students, alumni and teachers said that an episode this summer, in which  nearly 80 juniors were caught exchanging answers to exams via text messages, might be rare at the school, but cheating on a smaller scale was a daily occurrence.

The school’s paper conducted a survey of 2,045 students in March; 80 percent said they had cheated. Usually it takes the form of homework answers copied or tip-offs from classmates who took an earlier exam. They use sophisticated modern methods, like Googling facts on an iPhone, sharing notes on Facebook, or sharing cell phone pictures of exams. “Writing on your hand, that’s kiddie stuff,” said one senior. The school has anti-cheating measures, like checking for cellphones, but sympathetic teachers dispense light punishment or none at all.

The students say the social currency at Stuyvesant is academic achievement. It’s a demanding environment, but surprisingly, the cheating takes the form more of collaboration than competition. A school newspaper editorial described it as “an act of communal resistance” to a system they feel is designed to grind them down. “I’m sure everybody understood it was wrong to take other people’s work, but they had ways of rationalizing it,” said a 2010 graduate. “Everyone took it as a necessary evil to get through.”

The Celebrity Left’s Obsession with Obscenity

As the election draws near, President Obama’s celebrity supporters are stepping up their political presence in pop culture – and in the process, exposing their bizarre, immature predilection for spewing obscenities.

Foul-mouthed purported comedienne Sarah Silverman, for example, recently fired off a controversial, unsurprisingly unfunny question to Republican candidate Mitt Romney on Twitter, in which she asked him, “Quick Q: Do you eat p**s? Need to know asap. Thx.” Hilarious. And such a useful contribution to the political discussion in the most critical election of our time, if not in all of American history.

You may remember, if you keep up with the juvenile antics of Hollywood’s out-of-work D-list comics, that Silverman recently posted an online video address to Republican billionaire and Romney supporter Sheldon Adelson. In that mercifully short clip, she proposes to Adelson that he give his millions to Obama instead, in return for which, “I will scissor you, wearing a bikini bottom, through to fruition. That means until you c*m”:

Do you know how many Republican billionaires are giving money to Romney? All of them. How many of them are getting scissored by a bikini-bottomed Jewess with big naturals?

Then she attempts to demonstrate said scissoring with a very unwilling and mortified-looking dog on a couch. Classy. And why that doesn’t qualify as animal abuse, I don’t know.

Mark Rothko: The Tragedy and the Ecstasy

In a surprising intersection of pop culture and avant-garde art, a scene from AMC’s hit television series Mad Men centered on a painting by Abstract Expressionist Mark Rothko in a 2008 episode. In the scene, word gets around the Sterling Cooper advertising agency that eccentric co-founder Burt Cooper has bought an outrageously expensive painting for his office. A few employees decide to sneak a look.

A secretary calls the painting’s colored rectangles “interesting.” Accountant Harry Crane, panicked that this might be Cooper’s way of testing his employees’ aesthetic acumen, decides to search the office for “a brochure that explains it.” The agency's art director, Sal Romano, immediately recognizes the artwork as a Rothko and admires it. But only account executive and part-time writer Ken Cosgrove seems to feel it.

KEN: I don't think it's supposed to be explained.

SAL: I'm an artist, okay? It must mean something.

The Egyptian President: Respect the Arab World

As President Obama’s disastrous Middle East policy “comes home to roost” and he retreats to the safety of TV talk show couches, Egypt’s new president presses his advantage. Mohamed Morsi, a former leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, is now demanding a fundamental change (sound familiar, Obama?) in the way the United States relates to Egypt.

In an interview with The New York Times prior to his first trip to the U.S., Morsi said it was up to Washington to repair relations with the Arab world, specifically with Egypt. America must change its approach to the Arab world, show greater respect for its values, and help build a Palestinian state, to atone for decades of pent-up Arab anger caused by our support for autocratic Middle Eastern regimes like that of the deposed Hosni Mubarak in Egypt: “Successive American administrations,” Morsi said, “essentially purchased with American taxpayer money the dislike, if not the hatred, of the peoples of the region.”

So all the recent anti-American violence against U.S. embassies in the region is our fault. It’s no surprise that Morsi, who seems comfortable speaking on behalf of the Arab world, wouldn’t apologize on their behalf as well. Apologizing might be Obama’s go-to diplomatic strategy, but that’s not the Arab way. Blaming others is.