I note it's been over a month since I posted anything last. It's part of my plan to become famous, you see -- stop posting, and don't tell anyone what (or where) your blog is...
All seriousness aside (as Steve Allen used to say), a recent Jihad Watch story reminded me of an old annoyance of mine -- namely, the prevalence of softballing / whitewashing the problem of Islam on cable series, television shows, Netflix shows, and various movies over the years. On my erstwhile blog, The Hesperado, I penned many an essay on this phenomenon, including this one (same title as my essay here) which offers an overview of the discussion, a few reviews of movies/shows and links to other essays of mine on it. As the reader will note should they peruse those, I became annoyed, exasperated, and finally weary of this prevalence in our popular culture with regard to the problem of Islamic terrorism.
Although I haven't written about this in at least a couple of years, it continued to be an issue for me -- usually in the form of turning me off from a show or movie I wanted to watch (example, the 5th season of House of Cards -- before Kevin Spacey's fall from grace), whose first episode made me roll my eyes -- "Oh for Crissakes, here we go again!" Basically, the first episode was about a crisis in President Underwood's power -- he, played by Kevin Spacey, being deep down a cynical sociopath who only cares about his power and not about right and wrong. In the first episode, an Islamic terror group has taken an American family hostage and threatens to broadcast their beheading on TV, and President Underwood cynically uses this as a way to leverage his power, using language that sounds like the same language we Islamo-realists use.
So anyway, along comes a new show called The Bodyguard. I didn't know what it was about other than being a taut, tense thriller about intelligence agents, and as I started into the first episode, I noted how well it was acted, directed and written. I thought, great, another good show to watch. The lead character, an undercover agent, is on a train with his young child, when he suspects a terrorist is aboard. At a dramatic juncture, he's convinced a suicide-bomber is holed up in the train restroom. When he breaks in the door, the viewer is presented vividly with a Middle Eastern woman in a hijab and a suicide vest on. Sounds pretty good, for an Islamophobe like me, right? Finally, a realistic show about the problem, eh? Not so fast. The woman was acting (and written and directed) to be clearly out of her wits in fear herself. I.e., either she had been extorted and pressured to do this horrible thing ("We have your children and we'll kill them if you don't do this") or she had terrible second doubts about doing it at all (i.e., a conscience). Both of these are not plausible in terms of realism. Much more correct -- but, of course, politically incorrect -- would be to show the degree & depth of fanaticism which we know by now is common among not only suicide bombers but mujahideen in general.
Anywho, the Jihad Watch article I referred to above was about how a Muslim stand-up comedian, Hasan Minhaj, cracked jokes in his routine about how "Islamophobic" this new series is. I.e., even a show which telegraphs its politically correct anxiety about the issue isn't good enough for Jihadists-of-the-Mic like Minhaj.
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