Dhimmitude In 2012

Something is wrong with this poster

Actually, it's dhimmitude right now, from film director Roland Emmerich, the man behind new disaster flick "2012". Here's the story:

He blew up the Empire State Building and the White House in Independence Day, sent a giant monster careering through the heart of Manhattan in Godzilla and destroyed the famous Hollywood sign in The Day After Tomorrow. But it seems there are places even Roland Emmerich will not go - the German film-maker has revealed he abandoned plans to obliterate Islam's holiest site on the big screen for fear of attracting a fatwa...

"I wanted to do that, I have to admit," Emmerich told scifiwire.com. "But my co-writer Harald [Kloser] said I will not have a fatwa on my head because of a movie. And he was right.

"We have to all, in the western world, think about this. You can actually let Christian symbols fall apart, but if you would do this with [an] Arab symbol ["Arab"? ~ Ed], you would have ... a fatwa, and that sounds a little bit like what the state of this world is.

"So it's just something which I kind of didn't [think] was [an] important element, anyway, in the film, so I kind of left it out."...

...in order to highlight his opposition to organised religion, the director decided to use CGI to destroy the Christ the Redeemer statue in Rio de Janeiro instead. For good measure, he also blew up the Sistine chapel and St Peter's Basilica in the Vatican...

This fits in perfectly with the my blog post here yesterday, discussing sitcom "Curb Your Enthusiasm"'s eager willingness to have a man urinate on Christian symbols but not Muslim ones. The first question is: What do Emmerich and the film's producers glean from the fact that they won't face any death threats if they destroy Christian holy symbols, but they will if they destroy Muslim ones? And secondly, why didn't Emmerich simply leave the scene in the movie and declare that anyone who would riot and kill innocent people over a fictional event depicted in a movie is a barbaric medievalist and should not be dignified by such cowardly capitulation?

I suspect that the answer to the first question is that Emmerich knows very well what this fact means, but will never say so in public. And I suspect the answer to the second is that he does not understand the threat to free speech that Islamic political pressure on Western powers actually constitutes.