Even in films that aren’t taking thinly veiled jabs at the Bush administration, terrorist baddies turn out to be Eurotrash arms dealers (2006’s Casino Royale), disgruntled hackers (2007’s Live Free or Die Hard), a sinister air marshal (2005’s Flightplan), or the handsome white guy sitting next to you in the airport lounge (2005’s Red Eye). Anyone and anybody, in other words, except the sort of people who actually attacked the United States on 9/11.
In respons, dNa points out the obvious:
Because in an age of detention without evidence or trial, torture, and preemptive war, what we really need is movies that make us feel better about doing all those things to a certain "sort of people."
I think this is exactly right, and gets at something important. Different circumstances call for different discourses. I can certainly imagine a situation where America was beset by ennui, was faced with an existential or otherwise significant crisis and could not motivate itself to face it with heart and determination, or refused to forthrightly identify the enemy at all (in a way, I think this is descriptive of America on racial issues). But, at least in the realm of contemporary America foreign policy, this is not our problem, and (in the words of Tim F.) the possibility that Americans will forget that their are Muslim extremists out there "seems vanishingly unlikely when at any given time a Republican is running for office somewhere." In the past seven years, we've launched two wars in Muslim states, set up extra-legal detention centers for terrorist suspects, held people indefinitely without trial, abducted and tortured innocent people, imprisoned journalists -- and that's just what's been institutionally sanctioned. Our problem is not that we're too disconcerned with this radical Islamic extremism thing. Our problem is that we've a) let this threat explode way out of proportion to its actual menace, b) used it to justify appalling violations of human rights that cut against every moral fiber that America was founded upon, and c) allowed to expand until it represented the totality of America's international security interests, ignoring other important strategic and moral considerations on the international horizon worthy of our concern.
In other words, Americans are plenty convinced that there are scary brown people out to get them, even without Hollywood shoving it down their throat. I'm not saying there is no threat from Islamic extremism, because clearly there is. I'm just saying it's not a bad thing to restore our collective sense of balance and proportion -- something that, in the age of "Black Sites" and Guantanamo Bay, is sorely and conspicuously absent at the moment.
9 comments:
When the State department has put out guidelines stating that no reference to Islam is to be made with regard to Islamists when they themselves use it all the time as their justifications for their actions;
When Syria was about to set up shop to produce nuclear weapons;
When Iran is on the brink of achieving "critical mass";
When this administration and virtually all of Europe is afraid of naming this war as it should be (War against Islamofascism is my personal choice) but names it against a mode of attack:
Therefore I truly think that the elite of Western Civilization is deemphasizing this conflict as an existential threat in which our enemy, the Islamofascists, has declared their intention on either enslaving us,killing us or converting us;
Further much of what the elite is doing undermines the necessary ideological framework to truly win this battle.
So while the people of America and even of Europe are aware of the danger because of the choice of the elite to obscure the danger and to avoid ideological confrontations, despite the wars and actions taken so far, we remain in ever growing danger.
I am getting a scarily improved insight into what folks like cycle cyril think we should be doing in Iraq and Afghanistan: telling the people who live there, whose governments we are reshaping, that there is something wrong with their religion and that Islam, not violence against innocent civilians, is what the West has a problem with.
So much for winning hearts and minds.
One of America's main exports is its culture, especially in the form of music and movies. If Hollywood makes a blockbuster now that depicts negative attitudes toward Islam among Americans as being acceptable (as opposed to "Crash," which portrayed such attitudes as bad), that reinforces everything the Taliban, Al Qaeda, the Iranian government et al. have been telling Muslims.
When the State department has put out guidelines stating that no reference to Islam is to be made with regard to Islamists when they themselves use it all the time as their justifications for their actions;
Reinforcing the message our enemies are putting out is not good strategy.
At least Douthat acknowledges that Red Eye's antagonist was "handsome." Cillian Murphy... total hottie.
I am getting a scarily improved insight into what folks like cycle cyril think we should be doing in Iraq and Afghanistan: telling the people who live there, whose governments we are reshaping, that there is something wrong with their religion and that Islam, not violence against innocent civilians, is what the West has a problem with.
There's a difference between, on the one hand, saying that "there is something wrong with their religion" and, on the other hand, saying that there is something wrong with the political and military movement, variously called Islamism or Islamofascism, that arises out of one interpretation of that religion. It is that political and military movement that poses a serious threat to the United States and the rest of the world.
Not acknowledging that the Jihadists use the Koran and the mainstream interpretations of the Koran as well as the various Hadithas (sayings or stories of the life of Mohamed) as the basis of their actions and having their actions justified and sanctified by a majority of Islamic religious authorities is to ultimately lose the ideological battle in the long run if not in the short run.
Read some items from memri.org, a translation service which translates Arabic news sources and recorded iman speeches for a true flavor of what are the cultural norms in the Islamic world. Also be aware that they tend to translate 'positive' items out of proportion to its actual incidence due to how infrequent it occurs in the Islamic world.
If you look at the polls involving Moslems living in Western countries you routinely see "understanding" of Jihadists' actions in the 40 to 50% range and agreement and willingness to help in the 10 to 15% range. So yes there is a major problem with Islam that affects at least a plurality. Solving will be long and difficult but refusing to acknowledge it will merely result in the collapse of the West or a major conflagration.
There are those who want to reinterpret the Koran but at present they have no traction in the Islamic world for various reasons. These would include the vast wealth of the Saudis who use it to advance Islam and simply the fact that the Jihadists have made progress. Just look at Europe and how cowed they were with regards to the Mohammad cartoons (not that the US press did any better, only one paper reprinted them while many printed photos of Christ in urine or Mary with dung.)
schiller1979,
Nice attempt to reshape cycle cyril's comment, but he doesn't seem willing to go along with it.
PG,
Schiller1979 is right in the sense that there are different fractions within Islam but he doesn't explore the relative size of these fractions and how accepted they are by Moslems or Islamic religious authorities.
1. If you consider all Muslims who describe themselves as being part of a jihad to be America's enemies, that's an awful lot of Muslims and is more illustrative of a limited understanding of the word "jihad" than of those Muslims' inclination to violence.
schiller1979 defined the problematic *faction* as "political and military movement ... that arises out of one interpretation of that religion." What interpretation is that? Do Ahmadinejad and Osama bin Laden share it?
I don't pretend to know what percentage of Muslims support Islamofascism. According to Wikipedia, there are somewhere between 1 billion and 1.8 billion Muslims. Given the nature of, for example, the September 11 attack, it would not have required a huge proportion of all Muslims to carry it out. There were 19 attackers and I don't know how many supporters behind the scenes, but presumably a very small fraction of 1 billion. That doesn't answer the question, but I'm attempting to give some perspective on it.
I assume that, as in any population, there are a significant number of Muslims who are apolitical. Those of us who read and write things like this tend to lose perspective on that. And I suppose there are some (again, no idea how many) Muslims who actively oppose Islamofascism.
If you accept the notion that the politics of Saudi Arabia and Palestine are major catalysts for the movement, then I find it difficult to believe that a very large proportion of the population of, say, Indonesia feels that big a stake in those issues.
The question of Ahmadinejad and Bin Laden is interesting. Of course they have significantly different perspectives, in that the former is Shiite and the latter is a Sunni. Perhaps their main uniting factor is an interest in opposing the U.S. (now that is, obviously not when we were backing Bin Laden against the USSR). People don't choose sides in all of this solely based on religion. Obviously, secular political and economic interests play a part.
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