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Thread ID: 18251 | Posts: 1 | Started: 2005-05-15
2005-05-15 18:40 | User Profile
In "Kingdom of Heaven" Ridley Scott gets the story half-right The neo-cons have it all wrong by Michael A. Hoffman II
[url]http://www.revisionisthistory.org/revisionist16.html[/url]
Copyright (c) 2005 by revisionisthistory.org
"Sir" Ridley Scott's film of the Third Crusade, "Kingdom of Heaven" is said to portray the "Saracen" commander Saladin honorably and the film will not be--as initial reports indicated-- useful as a recruiting tool for Bush and the neocon's contemporary crusade against the enemies of Zionism. It seems that the movie's chief historical inaccuracy will be Scott's disregard for Catholic religious faith among the European troops. The worthies among them are shown as agnostics with a trendy modern disregard for the particulars of faith and dogma that would have been impossible in the medieval period. There were no atheists in the foxholes--or anywhere else in Christendom at that time -- except for certain elite agents of the Cryptocracy and perhaps the occasional madman.
The take on Christian belief in "Kingdom of Heaven" recalls Shekhar Kapur's 1998 anti-Catholic film "Elizabeth," with Cate Blanchett playing a Queen Elizabeth I who was depicted as a sort of hip Unitarian too high on life to quibble over the finer points of Catholic-Protestant enmity, when in fact her reign was obsessed with religious doctrine and the iron-fisted maintenance of Protestant supremacy in her realm.
Unfortunately, Ridley Scott states his lack of concern for some particulars of historical truth without shame, but before we hop on the hypocritical talk-radio blabbermouth bandwagon to denounce him, let us recall that Mel Gibson is equally deserving of denunciation on these grounds, having made similar remarks after historians criticized the depiction of British attacks and relations between colonists and black people in "The Patriot" movie. In the wake of which Gibson lamely mouthed the weasel alibi of every Hollywood fraudster, "It's only a movie." Ridley Scott said something similar to the Washington Post: "We cheated a little bit. I don't think anyone historically, really, except historians, cares."
In other words, "Kingdom of Heaven" is, in some of its parts, a product of Scott's convenient imagination, a mere symbol, in which case we could say with Flannery O'Connor, "If it's just a symbol, then to hell with it."
We could dismiss this movie on those grounds, but we shouldn't, for if preliminary reports are true, it has one saving grace. Before the capture of the West by Judaism and Zionism in the 20th century, Salah al-Din Abu 'l-Muzafer Yusuf ibn Ayyub ibn Shadi (Saladin), was a revered figure among everyone from Dante to Sir Walter Scott to Kaiser Wilhelm II (also admired was Saladin's noble nephew, the Sultan al-Malik al-Kamil, who was a dear friend of Francis of Assisi). If "Kingdom of Heaven" restores Saladin to his rightful place of honor in Western culture, as a paradigm of Muslim chivalry, the movie will be worth seeing for that act of restoration alone. It may also serve to remind modern Muslims that the made-by-Mossad Osama bin Laden type of "Islamic champion" is aeons away from the real thing.
These days putting a human face on an Islamic general who is neither a sellout like Pervez Musharraf, or a child-killer like bin Laden, subverts the neo-con paradigm and is therefore something to relish, whatever the other failings of this film. In the wake of "Kingdom of Heaven" neo-cons are bound to rattle their sabres with demands for a two-fisted "true account" of the Crusades that doesn't "wimp out." But the truth is, medieval crusading entailed battling Judaics as well, and countering rabbinic influence in every sphere.
Any authentic depiction of Christian-Judeo-Islamic relations in the Middle Ages would show that Judaics, such as the theoretician of the extermination of Christians, Rabbi Moses Maimonides, were allies of certain pseudo-Muslim cryptocrats, and that the Crusades were aimed at Judaics as well as Muslims, facts that "Flush" Limbaugh, Sean "Hateity," and the rest of TV and radio's Zionist zombies can neither account for nor countenance. Their zeal is for a Crusades that never existed.
At least Ridley Scott gets the story half-right. The neo-cons have it all wrong.