Another Prior-Blog Salvage

My second blog, "Anti-Nonsense Alerts," was begun in early January of 2006, because I saw that hardly anyone was taking me up on the gentle-dialogue invitation anyway. The second blog was an extension of a writing ministry that my departed Mary had actually initiated, which we called (and I still call) "Empowered For Freedom." An actual website by that name, which Mary and I had operated since 1997, sank into oblivion with the collapse of the fly-by-night web server Global Aloha.

My first post on the second blog (after explaining there why I was starting another blog) was this article which had originated in e-mail format, after our old website had begun faltering...

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Some years ago, a group of Wicca practicioners raised a great
stink against the film "The Wizard of Oz." They were outraged
that a witch was depicted as evil--even though another, equally
prominent witch was depicted as good. It wasn't good enough
for them for a film to say that some witches were good; ALL
witches must be above criticism. If a movie showed some
Christian clergymen as bad but others as good, any Christian
who complained about this would be dismissed as a thin-
skinned whiner; but for witches, whose very worldview entails
wanting to bend reality to their personal will, it's only
natural to demand favoritism and call it fairness.

Hold that thought...and turn your thoughts much farther
back in the history of cinema, to the silent era.
Douglas Fairbanks Senior, first of the great swashbucklers,
made a movie called "The Thief of Baghdad," one of the first
great fantasy adventures on film. It was set in a Muslim
civilization, and it portrayed Muslim civilization in a favorable
light. It was not the only American silent movie to do so. (How
did Rudolf Valentino become a sex symbol, if not by starring
in "The Sheik"?)

In 1935, Cecil B. DeMille released "The Crusades," which
(not without factual justification) depicted Saladin as a more
civilized and reasonable man than Richard the Lion-Hearted.
This was in an era when racism still was a very serious
problem in America, yet even racism did nothing to prevent
Muslim culture from being given a fairly friendly portrayal.
Not many years later, Asian actor Sabu starred in
Michael Korda's remake of "The Thief of Baghdad," and in
the new screenplay a very explicitly Islamic spirituality was
clearly shown as the supreme height of merit achieved by
Sabu's character. At least two more adaptations of the story
were to follow in subsequent years; and interspersed with
them would be seven or more films about the Arabian Nights
heroes Ali Baba and Sinbad--all putting Muslim culture in
a positive light.

One of Charlton Heston's earliest leading roles was in
"El Cid." This epic had a Muslim villain, but took pains to
indicate to the audience that this villain was NOT part of
the Islamic mainstream. The Christian hero is made at one
point to suggest that his converting to Islam is conceivable,
but none of the Muslim good guys _ever_ hints at becoming
a Christian. (Making Christianity "exactly equal" to other
faiths always leads to considering it LESS equal--not because
any flaws are discovered in Christianity, but because fallen
human nature has a bias against the gospel.)

Live theater in the English-speaking world has also been
generous to Muslims. Sigmund Romberg's operetta "The
Desert Song" romanticized Arabs; though the hero was really
a European, he sympathized strongly with the Arabs. The
later musical "Kismet" had an all-Muslim cast of characters,
including the historical figure Omar Khayyam. Both shows
also became films eventually.

"Lawrence of Arabia," "The Wind and the Lion," and
Brendan Fraser's more recent Mummy movies have all
made Muslims look good. Topping them all, however, was
Kevin Costner's revisionist Robin Hood film. "Robin Hood,
Prince of Thieves" not only practically made its Muslim
character the star instead of Robin Hood, but in addition
it promoted one medium falsehood and two whopping
falsehoods. Medium falsehood: suggesting that Muslims
invented the telescope. (It was a European who invented
it, after the period when Robin Hood would have lived.)
First whopping falsehood: claiming that male-female
relationships in Muslim societies, _more_ than in Christian
societies, are developed by open communication between
the sexes (when Azim says, "We talk to our women").
Second whopper: when Robin says that the land of Israel
is rightfully Muslim territory.

Add up all these productions, and can you seriously
say that Western media and entertainment have always
portrayed Muslims in a derogatory manner? Not if you
have any honesty, you can't.

But now it's time to remember those Wiccans fussing
about "The Wizard of Oz."

Radical Islam, the system that approved putting out a
murder contract on Salmon Rushdie because he wrote a
book Islamists didn't like, doesn't care how many movies
you make that show Muslim culture as good. If you let
even ONE movie be made that says _anything_ critical of
Islam, you're an Islamophobic bigot. Muslims are allowed
to arrest you in _their_ countries just for talking about the
Lordship of Jesus; but if in a Western country you say
that something's wrong with Islam, you're the intolerant
one. If you're Dutch, you may get knifed for it.

Muslim activists in America, taking advantage of the
level of freedom here which NO Muslim country grants to
Christians, have the gall to claim that our entertainment
media are full of unfairly negative images of Muslims. Of
course, they also claim that there have been many anti-
Muslim hate crimes in America since the 9-11 attacks;
but many if not most of those crimes have turned out to
be fictions, made up by Muslims who knew that Americans
are vulnerable to manipulation by false guilt.

In a time when virtually ALL terrorist threats in the
world _are_ in fact of Muslim origin, American TV and
movies have bent over backwards to pretend that it's
really the old standard white-supremacist neo-Nazis who
are behind everything. Yet when the series "24" actually
got around to having Muslim terrorists in the plotline, the
Council on American-Islamic Relations went ballistic. Didn't
we bigoted Judeo-Christian Americans know that Osama
bin-Laden is really a white South African fascist or something?

But in case too many people figure out that the typical
modern terrorist IS a Muslim and is NOT a white South
African, they have a backup plan. If movie reviews are
accurate, the backup plan can be found in the new movie
"Syriana." Okay, the terrorists are Muslims...but it's not really
their fault. It's the fault of the evil American oil corporations!

Yes, now it all makes sense. Muhammad plundered the ancient
Jewish merchant colonies of Arabia because of evil American
oil corporations. The medieval Turkish empire kidnapped the
sons of Christians to make them janissaries because of evil
American oil corporations. Arabs were taking black Africans
as slaves before slavery got underway in America, but it was
the fault of those oil corporations. American oil tycoons gave
Egypt the idea of refusing to hear testimony from Coptic
Christians against Muslims. And Chechen terrorists wantonly
murdered schoolchildren in Beslan, Russia because of evil
American oil corporations.

Maybe I shouldn't be saying this; George Clooney might make
a movie claiming with a straight face that all the sarcastic
statements above are literal truth. But even if he does make
such a movie, it still won't be enough to make the C.A.I.R.
types drop their fraudulent complaints. (In case you think
I'm too hard on Clooney--did he not make an action movie in
which the big threat was a Serbian terrorist? Come on, now,
how many Serbian terrorist attacks have you heard of? It's
the Albanian Muslims who have ties to bin-Ladin, and who in
addition are deeply into forced-prostitution trafficking.)

I myself have Muslim neighbors. Not only do I get along
just fine with them, but I personally cook food for them at
Ramadan time. They could tell me if they were suffering
from hateful harassment just for being Muslims, and they
know that I would side with them against any such injustice;
but they have no such trouble to report, because THERE IS
NOT any widespread persecution of Muslims in America.
The C.A.I.R. types know that American Muslims are not
oppressed; but it suits them to pretend that they believe there
is oppression, so that false guilt over supposed prejudice will
weaken our will to fight real terrorism. We cannot afford to
let them succeed in this cynical deception.

How about this as a cure for the induced false guilt: let
Americans read English translations of the lying propaganda
which Iranian mullahs and Palestinian thugs broadcast against
Israel--even reviving the long-discredited "Protocols of the
Elders of Zion"--and then compare this for hatefulness with
the American media's average treatment of Muslims. Next,
have people see how long it takes to watch all the pro-Muslim
films I described above. If, after doing this research, you still
think that Muslims have a valid complaint about how they are
portrayed in the West, I have a tropical beach condo in Finland
I'd like to sell you.

Yours for Jesus and America,
Joseph Richard Ravitts