Andrew Bolt suggests that Hollywood would never make a film “that trashes Islam the way The Da Vinci Code trashes Christianity”. His article can be seen here: http://heraldsun.news.com.au/sectionindex1/0,5442,dhs_andrewbolt%5ETEXT%5Eheraldsun,00.html

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Movie madness Andrew Bolt 24may06

AT last, Hollywood makes a movie about a barbaric religion that oppresses women and sends fanatics to kill unbelievers.

Yes, they’ve had it coming, those, er, Catholics. They’ve terrorised us too long.

So clap the makers of The Da Vinci Code. Imagine what guts it took for them just to go to last week’s premiere in Cannes when — as The Independent reported — outside the theatre there was “a contingent of persistent nuns hovering forbiddingly”.

Those damn hovering nuns. No wonder we’re so scared of flying.

But a word of advice to the Catholic Church, and particularly its Opus Dei order, accused in this film of being a bunch of self-flagellating perverts and assassins.

Friends, why waste breath insisting the film tells lies when it says Christ had a child with his “wife” Mary Magdalene, and the church has murdered their descendents to protect its power?

Stop claiming that you’re actually nice guys who’d have to be insane to kill the children of your own God.

You’re accused of being killers? Then live up to the hype. It’s your only hope. Just ask our Muslim friends.

Ask them why no Hollywood director dares make a movie that trashes Islam the way The Da Vinci Code trashes Christianity.

Here are a few clues. In 1988, novelist Salman Rushdie wrote The Satanic Verses, which — as The Da Vinci Code does with the Bible — questions how the Koran came to be written, and suggests it, too, crushed the worship of female divinities.

But some Muslim hate-preachers, unlike the average bishop, don’t wring hands, but necks.

And so Iran’s ayatollahs issued a fatwa on Rushdie, who within five years saw his Japanese translator murdered, his Italian translator stabbed, and his Norwegian publisher shot three times.

I don’t know if Dutch director Theo van Gogh forgot that lesson, or learned it too well, but he later made a 10-minute film which showed half-naked actresses on whose skin was written the Koranic verses, which most insulted women.

Two years ago, a Muslim viewer gave him the ultimate bad review, cutting his throat and pinning a note of complaint to his chest with a hunting knife.

Other “bad” art has had similarly robust critiques from militant Islamists. The huge Bamiyan statues of Buddha were blown up by Afghanistan’s Taliban. A fresco in a Bologna church, showing Mohammed in hell, was the target of a planned bombing by al-Qaida.

And in case our artists still hadn’t got the fatwa, Muslim crowds this year rioted so violently against Danish cartoons of their prophet that 140 people died and two Danish embassies were burned down.

Now that’s the kind of protest Hollywood heeds and had newspapers around the world censoring themselves out of sheer fear.

Of course, Hollywood hardly needs an excuse to savage us rather than the latest tyranny. But never has it seemed so determined to do this as it has since September 11.

IT was around that very day that the makers of The Sum of All Fears became the first in Hollywood to declare that showing Muslim extremists as the kind of people who might kill you was haram, a sin against safe business.

Their film was based on the Tom Clancy novel, in which Muslim extremists, helped by East German communists, smuggle a nuclear bomb into the United States and blow up a crowded stadium, illustrating a threat only too real.

But when the Council on American-Islamic Relations demanded he be nice to Muslims, the director turned his baddies into German Nazis and a white South African, pleading: “I have no intention of promoting negative images of Muslims”.

Since then Hollywood has looked in every direction except the East for its villains — every direction except the one most terrorists actually come from.

Run through the latest movies. The Constant Gardener paints our drug companies as racist killers. Kingdom of Heaven makes the Crusaders the real baddies. Munich criticises Israel for hitting back. Syriana blames wicked American oil men for corrupting a harmless Arab tyrant. Fahrenheit 9/11 makes Saddam’s Iraq seem like paradise and George Bush an agent of hell.

Even past enemies of us wicked capitalists are redeemed. Good Night and Good Luck savages those who once hunted Communist spies in the US. The 2004 remake of The Manchurian Candidate replaces the old villain — an agent of communist China — with one from a US company just like Halliburton.

So many villains, and all Americans, Christians and Jews. Not a Muslim among them. Still, it keeps the actors safe, I guess. When did some Jew or Christian last hammer out a film review with a machine gun?

But there is more than cowardice behind this. This year’s V for Vendetta chokes with real loathing of the very institutions that make us free, as if only the totalitarian is pure.

It invents a police-state Britain in 2020 that — backed by a pedophile Anglican archbishop — has declared war on all gays and Muslims, and is so evil that its leaders could poison 80,000 of their own people and pin the blame on Muslims, just to pass harsh new laws.

Get the hint? Some on the Left now claim the CIA staged the September 11 attacks as well, to justify a war against Iraq. The film’s climax is the bombing of Parliament by a noble freedom fighter — a scene filmed with the help of the British Government, which agreed to have streets around Westminster closed.

Have we no sense of self-preservation? Perhaps not. See only how many now cheer The Da Vinci Code’s attack on Christianity.

Is Christianity really a plot to oppress women, as the film claims? Did pagans really celebrate women only to be destroyed by the sex-hating church fathers?

Again Hollywood attacks what has helped make us free. As sociologist Rodney Stark wrote in his celebrated The Rise of Christianity, “Christianity was unusually appealing to pagan women” because “within the Christian subculture women enjoyed far higher status than did women in the Greco-Roman world at large”.

CHRISTIANS rejected polygamy, divorce, infidelity, incest, infanticide, giving women more power and dignity than pagan Rome ever did.

It’s true we now have one movie about September 11, United 93, that tells of the hijacked plane brought down by its heroic passengers. But as Khalid Abdalla, who played one of the hijackers said, the director tried not to make the hijackers seem too bad because “it wasn’t to be a film about stereotypes”.

Of course not. Islamist terrorists killing innocent people for a mad ideology? That’s a stereotype we’ve seen so often in real life that why see it in the movies too?

Let’s instead see a film with a fresh take on how, say, the Catholic Church hates women and protects perverts. Or how our politicians are crooks, Germans are Nazis and businessmen scum.

And at the end of it you can declare: I have seen the movie and the enemy is us.