Kingdom of Heaven: 'It's basically Osama bin Laden's version of history'

May 02, 2005

Kingdom of Heaven: 'It's basically Osama bin Laden's version of history'

The new blockbuster movie Kingdom of Heaven is looking more and more like a dhimmi whitewash of history. I have written a column about the film that appeared in Human Events last week; a longer version is slated to show up in FrontPage tomorrow or Wednesday. Meanwhile, tomorrow or Wednesday also I hope to finish, and send off to the publisher (Regnery), my new book The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam and the Crusades, which should be out this summer. In it, I plan to discuss the historical errors of the film in detail.

In the meantime, however, ZombieTime (thanks to LGF) has assembled a large amount of evidence showing that this is a propaganda film.

And this article, "Kingdom of Heaven ignites debate," from the South African Press Agency (SAPA) and Deutsche Presse Agentur (DPA) quotes the renowned historian of the Crusades Jonathan Riley-Smith and me to show what the film really is. I am honored to be in Dr. Riley-Smith's company, and I think his remark about the film being "Osama bin Laden's version of history" is the only thing one needs to know about this movie: it is yet another example of the suicidal Western tendency to see the world in terms of oppressed and oppressors, with the "White Man" ever cast as the oppressor and the "Brown Man" as the oppressed.

Khaled Abou el-Fadl, a renowned Islamic jurist at the University of California in Los Angeles, said he believes the film promotes the idea of "a civilisational showdown between Islamic and Christian culture".

"In my view, it is inevitable that there will be hate crimes committed directly because of it," he told Scotland's Herald newspaper.


Remember that statement.

But Scott said he made every effort to give the film the opposite message. He even invented a mythical order in which Jews, Christians and Muslims co-operated.
"The characters portrayed in the film are so important in Muslim culture that I knew we had to do it absolutely properly and correctly," he said. "Saladin fights battles, but he also enters into dialogue. We want to show that dialogue can be much better than war."...

Saladin was not this proto-Nelson Mandela figure at all. Watch for the real Saladin in my book.

"It's basically Osama bin Laden's version of history," said Professor Jonathan Riley-Smith, a British academic and expert on the Crusades. "It depicts the Muslims as sophisticated and civilised, and the Crusaders are all brutes and barbarians. It has nothing to do with reality."

"Kingdom of Heaven is being touted as a fascinating history lesson," said Robert Spencer, the director of Jihad Watch. "Fascinating, maybe - but only as evidence of the lengths to which modern Westerners are willing to go to delude themselves."

Dhimmi Watch: Kingdom of Heaven: "It's basically Osama bin Laden's version of history"