Hollywood and the politically correct terrorist . . .
Long gone are the days when the likes of Chuck Norris and Lee Marvin portrayed red-blooded American men kicking terrorist ass across the silver screen . . .
For those of you who don't remember the film adaption of Tom Clancy's The Sum of All Fears, the film was released back in 2002 shortly after the 9/11 terror attack. In the book the terrorists who sneak a dirty bomb into the US and detonate it were Islamic Jihadists. Now in the film version Hollywood blew the dust off of everyone's favorite bad guys and brought the Nazis out of retirement. So instead of a bunch of military aged men of Middle Eastern descent plotting against us Hollywood cues the evil ultra-radical right-wing white devil.
Recently I watched two films that were just released on Blu-Ray. The first was Liam Neeson's Non-Stop (spoiler alert). In it Liam Neeson's plays a US Air Marshal on a trans-Atlantic flight. At some point "terrorists" hack his secure line and start texting him demands for money to be deposited into a Swiss bank account or a random passenger will be killed in thirty minute intervals. Not bad at this point and it starts out as a pretty good suspense thriller. Well after all the cloak and dagger and Nancy Drew stuff we discover that the "terrorists" are in fact disgruntled US combat veterans home from the Middle East and feel they are owed something. This plays right into the hands of several DHS memos and public statements by individual LEOs that combat veterans returning home are potential domestic terrorists. Pass.
The second was a re-boot of Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan, Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit (spoiler alert). So in this prequel we find a young Jack Ryan as a student at the London School of Economics when the BBC airs footage of the planes going into the WTC on 9/11. Ryan enlists in the USMC and is shot down in an RPG attack on a helicopter in Afghanistan. While recovering from his wounds at Walter Reed he is recruited by the CIA to prevent the "next 9/11". When first approached by the CIA he makes a derogatory comment about waterboarding. Long story short he joins up as a plant on Wall Street to monitor financing of terror groups. After ten years of being a banker on Wall St. Jack discovers a plot by ultra-hard lined Reds in modern day Russia who attempts to crash the world economy by devaluing the US dollar.
I know it should be no surprise to anyone here that Hollywood has gone this route with action thrillers but I am through with any "terrorist" movies . . .
"In a nut shell, if it ever goes to Civil War, I'm afraid I'll be in the middle 70%, shooting at both sides" — 26 Inf
"We have to stop demonizing people and realize the biggest terror threat in this country is white men, most of them radicalized to the right, and we have to start doing something about them." — CNN's Don Lemon 10/30/18
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