The gravitation of liberals to illiberal ideologies is uncanny.
The more illiberal the ideology, the more likely liberals will
endeavor to understand and defend it. Militant Islam enjoys the
benefits of this phenomenon in this century, just as the
totalitarians of the Soviet Union benefited from it in the last.
Militant Islam’s most powerful propagandists are not Muslims but
self-hating Westerners who interpret militant Islam’s history and
doctrines with a sympathy they never extend to Western
religion.
The latest illustration of this self-hatred is Kingdom of
Heaven, an anti-crusader movie that contains Hollywood’s idea
of a happy ending — Christians in retreat and Islam on the march.
Owing to this species of death-wish liberalism, Islamic conquerors
against the West don’t even need to rewrite history. Defeated
Westerners will rewrite it for them, making their imperialism by
the sword look harmless
A few years ago PBS, making a great effort to refurbish Islam in
the wake of 9/11, produced a documentary depicting the early Muslim
warriors as 7th-century Alan Aldas. Kingdom of Heaven
keeps this propaganda rolling, which director Sir Ridley Scott’s
spokesman didn’t even bother to hide prior to the movie’s release.
He told the London press last year that the movie is designed to
please Muslims. “We hope that the Muslim world sees the
rectification of history,” Scott’s spokesman said.
What’s meant by rectification of history here is the rewriting
of history according to politically correct exigencies in the
liberal mind. This need produces a ludicrous movie that looks as if
it was assembled by a committee at the U.N. The movie’s portrayals
break down as: Believing Christians bad, Muslims and
de-Christianized Knights good.
Just as 9/11 inspired liberals to rework the concept of jihad to
mean innocuous self-improvement, so in Kingdom of Heaven
liberalism is trying to rework the concept of Knighthood, defining
its true manifestation as a commitment to secularized social
justice. The true knights, in other words, didn’t risk life and
limb to liberate the Holy Land from four centuries of brutal jihad
but to oversee the building of wells and other public works
projects.
The good Knights, you see, didn’t care a whit that Muslims
armies had been assaulting Eastern Christianity in Libya, Egypt,
Palestine, Syria, and had seized Jerusalem in a power grab that
left the Christian Patriarch Sophronius, according to Edward
Gibbon, mumbling in sorrow, “Behold the abomination of desolation,
spoken of by Daniel the prophet.” No, the good knights sought
political rather than religious salvation in the Holy Land. They
just wanted to form a kingdom of this world in which all peoples
could live in syncretistic harmony.
Ridley Scott’s absurdly anachronistic, U.N.-style vision put
considerable pressure on him to make stuff up in the movie. For
example, he cobbles together a council of properly liberalized
Muslims, Christians, and Jews to try and save Jerusalem from
wild-eyed, primitive fundamentalists. Professor Riley-Smith of
Cambridge University calls this part of the movie “utter nonsense.”
No such “confraternity” existed.
The movie’s so amateurish it wouldn’t even be worth examining
were it not a window on a mindset that will bedevil the West for a
long time to come. The movie contains Big Lies, pervasive in the
culture, that will make the preservation of what is left of Western
civilization very difficult.
Imagine if the attitude that informs the movie were present at
the time of Islam’s advances through the centuries on Spain,
France, Italy, and Austria. Would Europe exist? Nope, and perhaps
the Ridley Scotts would consider that a good thing. The people of
Vienna in the late 1600s should have said to the Muslim armies,
“Thank you for conquering us.” That Europe is now internally
disintegrating as it is Islamized is due to the disappearance of
the Christian consensus that movies like Kingdom of Heaven
applaud.
The Christianity without Christ that liberalism extols is a
Christianity with no interest in Jerusalem. It is no wonder that
CAIR and other Muslim groups are cheering this movie: it vindicates
the Islamic conquest of the Holy Land, which even the very cautious
historian Bernard Lewis has described as a polemical power grab
that was designed to announce to the world that Islam had
supplanted Judaism and Christianity. Jerusalem is not mentioned a
single time in the Koran. But Islam, in order to supersede
Judeo-Christianity, had to occupy Jerusalem and build a Dome of the
Rock to overshadow the dome over Jesus Christ’s tomb. The
inscriptions on the Dome of the Rock, which predict ruin for Jews
and Christians if they do not submit to Islam, make Islam’s use of
Jerusalem clear.
Militant Islam was the new world order, the Dome of the Rock
announced — a message its Western dupes centuries later still
don’t not grasp and won’t until they live under it.
