The wretched fiction of Iraq's 'success' is Blair's attempt to make us wear the veil
By Robert Fisk -- The Independent
Oct., 21, 2006 -- Yes, the film O Jerusalem -- loosely based on the epic history of the birth of Israel by Dominique Lapierre and Larry Collins -- has reached Europe (mercifully, not yet Britain) and it is everything we have come to expect of the Hollywoodisation of Europe. It is dramatic; it stars the French singer Patrick Bruel as an Israeli commander; there is a flamboyant David Ben-Gurion -- all white hair defying gravity -- and Saïd Taghmaoui and JJ Feild as that essential duo of all such movies, the honourable, moderate, kind-hearted Arab (Saïd Chahine) and Jew (Bobby Goldman) whose friendship outlives the war between them.
We are used to this pair, of course. Exodus, based on Leon Uris's novel of the same 1948 events, contained a "good" Arab who befriends Paul Newman's Jewish hero, just as Ben Hur introduced us to a "good" Arab who lends Charlton Heston's Jehuda Ben Hur his horses to compete in the chariot race against the nastiest centurion in the history of the Roman Empire. Once we have established that there are "good" Arabs with hearts of gold, we are, of course, free to concentrate on the rotten kind. They murder a young woman in Exodus and they also kill a brave young woman during the battle for Latroun in O Jerusalem. (She is seen being partially stripped by her aggressor before being killed by a shell.)
It is also a sign of the times that for "security" reasons, O Jerusalem had to be made in Rhodes, just as the Beirut scenes in the infinitely better movie Munich had to be staged in Malta and the crusader epic Kingdom of Heaven made in Morocco, complete with Maghrebian-accented Arabs. Exodus was filmed on location in an earlier, much safer Israel.
But it's not this routine bestialisation of Arabs and Muslims that concerns me. You only have to watch the Arab slave-trader film Ashanti, again filmed in Israel and starring Roger Moore and (of all people) Omar Sharif, to see Arabs portrayed, Nazi-style, as murderers, thieves and child molesters. Anti-Semitism against Arabs -- who are, of course, also Semites -- is par for the course in movies. And I have to admit that in O Jerusalem, the confusion and plotting of the Arab leadership -- only King Abdullah of Jordan is an honourable man -- is all too realistic, not least the arrogance of the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini (he who shook hands with Hitler).
more
READ MORE: Information Clearing House
{mos_sb_discuss:2}
