-Caveat Lector-
http://www.newsmax.com/archives/articles/2001/11/16/105714.shtml
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Peace at any cost is a Prelude to War!
Support for America: Undermined and Fading Fast
Arnaud de Borchgrave
Friday , Nov. 16, 2001
All of Madison Avenue's admen and all of Tinsel Town's newly minted patriots
cannot put a pro-American Humpty Dumpty back together again.
Hollywood's no-enemies-on-the-left and self-hating outpourings over the years
- from "Heart in Atlantis" and "Three Days of the Condor" to "JFK" and
"American Beauty" - played a large role in shaping anti-American perceptions
around the world.
Movies that depicted the CIA, NSA and FBI as staffed with ruthless maniacs
who were out to "terminate with maximum prejudice (TWMP)", or at the very
least teach local sadists how to slow torture, anyone who dared speak the
truth about America's fascist leaders were widely believed to be an accurate
portrayal of how America came to be the world's only superpower (e.g., "Enemy
of the State").
Average American families, as seen by Tinsel Town, ranged from a psychotic
caricature of the late Dr. Herman Kahn, later replaced in popular mythology,
by Dr. Henry Kissinger, as Dr. Strangelove, to a retired Marine colonel as a
closet gay who collects Nazi memorabilia, and whose drug-peddling son spends
his time peering through a telescope at a neighbor's daughter who likes to be
watched shedding her clothes.
Pro. Jack Shaheen, in his book "Reel Bad Arabs: How Hollywood Vilifies a
People," documents how the stereotype image of bad Arabs ("Rules of
Engagement," "The Siege," and "True Lies") has produced a mirror image of
despicable characters on both sides of the cultural divide.
These productions seemed designed to widen, rather than narrow, the gap
between two civilizations. Attempts to sell America to the Arab world have
been dismal flops - with good reason.
Shaheen demonstrates how Hollywood has shown its greatest contempt for Arab
culture, and how the majority of some 900 films researched, degrades and
dehumanizes the average Arab, robed and turbaned, sinister and dangerous,
engaged mainly in blowing up buildings and hijacking planes.
Two weeks before 9/11, Egypt's Al Akhbar newspaper wrote that the Statue of
Liberty in New York "must be destroyed." The degree of hatred for what is
seen as America's anti-Muslim, pro-Israeli cultural values cannot be
overestimated. And since 9/11, Hollywood's only sensible move was to yank
"Black Hawk Down" on the incident that led to 18 American KIA in Somalia and
to Bill Clinton's decision to fold America's tent in the Horn of Africa and
sneak home.
World War II's pro-war effort movies were a piece of cake compared to what
the White House is now asking Hollywood to project. Hitler and Tojo were the
arch villains. Not so Osama bin Laden, a hero to countless millions of Arabs
and Muslims.
These are the people who see bin Laden as Che Guevara-cum-Robin Hood-cum-The
Avenger-type character who is trying to bring an uncaring superpower to heel,
and correct perceived injustices and inequities between rich and poor
nations.
The America others love to hate or despise was a creation of Hollywood's
liberal screenwriters and superstars. But the mere suggestion that they were
in any way responsible for how foreign Muslims look at the U.S. is dismissed
as unreconstructed McCarthyism.
Hollywood moguls rejected the script of a movie based on a best-selling novel
co-authored in 1980 by Robert Moss and this writer as anti-communist
propaganda.
Directors who wished to take on the assignment of turning a novel that sold
three million copies in 19 languages into a movie received blunt warnings
from the powers that be: you will be blackballed and your career ruined.
Since the end of the Cold War, KGB and Stasi files proved conclusively that
the novel "The Spike" had understated the problem of Soviet disinformation
themes eagerly embraced in the western media.
Whether Motion Picture Association czar Jack Valenti can get the silver
screen's honchos to sample the patriotic crow on the White House chef's menu
remains to be seen.
Karl Rove, senior adviser to President Bush, says he heard some 20 specific
ideas at last week's meeting of about 50 top executives from Hollywood's
movie studios, television networks, cinema operators and labor unions.
No one was willing to accept the blame for grotesquely distorted impressions
of America abroad. Yet Hollywood comes up in almost every conversation with a
Muslim, from intellectuals to small businessmen. In Pakistan, Muslim clerics
and army generals says that the American values conveyed by Hollywood have
contributed mightily to the rise of Islamist extremism.
Both sides in Rove's White House meeting carefully sidestepped content
issues. In fact, Jack Valenti declared, "Content was off the table." Rove
said that the people who compare his efforts at cooperation between Hollywood
and Washington to what occurred during World War II, don't know what they're
talking about.
"Contrary to the expectations that most people have, the government did not
direct the movie industry during World War II," Rove added. "The industry
sort of set its own course, and that is certainly what we would encourage at
this point."
Again, the core issue was avoided. In World War II, the U.S. was allied with
the Soviet Union against the fascist coalition and Hollywood adopted
patriotic themes with enthusiasm and alacrity.
U.S. B-52s carpet bombing a backward Muslim country, albeit ruled by Islamist
crazies and al-Qaeda terrorists, does not tug at the same, seldom used
patriotic strings. It's hard to picture movie stars taking a stand against
anti-bombing demonstrators. That's more their kind of rumble.
It's even harder to see them disagreeing with Bill Clinton who said last week
that 9/11 was, in effect, the sequel to America's history of genocide against
native Americans and black slavery. Clinton sounded like an echo of Islamist
extremists who would have added to his list "America's atomic terrorism
against Hiroshima and Nagasaki."
NPR's Foreign Editor Loren Jenkins, reflecting the anti-military mindset of
liberal media and liberal filmmaking, said he would out a team of reporters
into South Asia with instructions to "smoke out," not Osama bin Laden, but
American troops to reveal their locations.
In Jenkins' judgment, bin Laden deserves to be heard just as much as Pentagon
briefers. Borderless media for this new school of journalism plays a similar
role to "Medecins Sans Frontieres," or borderless doctors. Patriotism has no
place in their ranks.
Rove did feel, however, that Hollywood could help make clear that the war is
against terrorism, not Islam. But how does Hollywood explain that militant
Islam is at war with the U.S.? And why do Muslim radicals have such a
perverted view of the world's freest nation?
Valenti said the meeting produced "a seamless web of unity. It was really
quite affectionate to behold." That's what usually happens when real issues
are swept under the proverbial Oriental rug.
The most effective way to tackle misperceptions about America is to lean on
friendly Arab and Muslim leaders to correct the lies that are published or
broadcast by their media with tedious regularity.
It's high time these leaders speak out loud and clear in America's defense
and remind their people that Washington's last three military interventions
were on behalf of Muslim people.
Instead of apologizing to the Saudis for what U.S. media have been writing
and saying about Saudi funding of Wahhabi Koranic schools that teach kids to
hate America all over the Muslim world, the Bush Administration should take
the House of Saud to the diplomatic woodshed.
The friendly neighborhood gas station has been using a large part of its
income from the western world to appease its anti-American Islamist clergy.
If Pakistan falls to Islamist forces, the well-funded, anti-American Wahhabi
religious machine will be largely to blame.
In its Nov. issue, London's prestigious FOREIGN REPORT documents how Saudi
"religious brainwashing" has led to terrorist attacks against the U.S. "The
House of Saud," it said, "should have understood a long time ago that its
policy of encouraging anti-western religious sentiments in an effort to
preserve the monarchy was bound to turn against the country's own rulers."
The House of Saud should also be told what prominent non-royal Saudis have
been saying privately on recent visits to Washington. One Saudi graduate of
the Harvard Business School, who manages one of the royal prince's
businesses, confided, "Outside of the 30,000-strong royal family, Osama bin
Laden is the most popular figure in the kingdom."
Then he added ominously, "America should get ready for 20 years of Saudi
hostility." For that, too, the royals can thank their extremist Wahhabi
clergy.
A geopolitical train wreck is in the making. American apologies and Saudi
denials can no longer conceal the truth.
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any copyrighted work in this message is distributed under fair use
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in receiving the included information for nonprofit research and educational
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