Bridget Johnson in Opinion Journal notices that Hollywood has been strangely silent about the brutal murder of Theo van Gogh in Amsterdam.
One would think that in the name of artistic freedom, the creative community would take a stand against filmmakers being sent into hiding � la Salman Rushdie, or left bleeding in the street. Yet we've heard nary a peep from Hollywood about the van Gogh slaying. Indeed Hollywood has long walked on eggshells regarding the topic of Islamic fundamentalism. The film version of Tom Clancy's "The Sum of All Fears" changed Palestinian terrorists to neo-Nazis out of a desire to avoid offending Arabs or Muslims.
The war on terror is a Tinsel Town taboo, even though a Hollywood Reporter poll showed that roughly two-thirds of filmgoers surveyed would pay to see a film on the topic. In a recent conversation with a struggling liberal screenwriter, I brought up the Clancy film as an example of Hollywood shying away from what really affects filmgoers--namely, the al Qaeda threat vs. the neo-Nazi threat. He vehemently defended the script switch. "It's an easy target," he said of Arab terrorism, repeating this like a parrot, then adding, "It's a cheap shot."
How many American moviegoers would think that scripting Arab terrorists as the enemy in a fiction film is a "cheap shot"? In fact, it's realism; it's what touches lives world-wide. It's this disconnect with filmgoers that has left the Hollywood box office bleeding by the side of the road.
Ms Johnson sees a slavish devotion to the dictates of political correctness as the culprit. Maybe she's right. Or maybe van Gogh's murder carried a message that wasn't lost on our courageous Hollywood film makers: It's a lot easier, and safer, to confine your political efforts to telling lies about George Bush than to tell the truth about Islamo-fascism.
