Excerpt:
In my 2009 book Surrender I wrote at some length about the contrast between the Hollywood of the 1940s, which released movies like Mrs. Miniver –considered by Churchill "more powerful to the war effort than the combined work of six military divisions" – and the post-9/11 filmmakers who, in pictures like Redacted, Syriana, Lions for Lambs, In the Valley of Elah, and Stop-Loss, have waxed cynical about America and systematically whitewashed Islam, painting Muslims as the innocent victims of Western bigotry, capitalism, and imperialistic bullying. A recent item at Breitbart provided two new titles to add to this hall of shame – though, as America's involvement in Afghanistan and Iraq winds down, they're not about the war over there but about the war at home – namely, America's supposed war on Muslims. The Citizen is about a Middle Eastern man who proudly obtains his U.S. citizenship on September 10, 2001, only to find his new countrymen turning on him in the wake of 9/11; a similar story is told in The Reluctant Fundamentalist, directed by Mira Nair (an Indian filmmaker based in New York) and starring Kiefer Sutherland, Kate Hudson, and Liev Schreiber. Nair's film opened this year's Venice Film Festival, where, according to Breitbart's Christian Toto, it "drew gasps from the audience for its portrayal of anti-Muslim behavior aimed [by Americans] at the film's protagonist (British actor Riz Ahmed)."
Never mind that the only remarkable thing about "anti-Muslim behavior" in the U.S. since 9/11 is how little of it there has been; never mind that year after year, the number of anti-Muslim acts in both the U.S. and Europe is dwarfed by the number of anti-Semitic incidents (many of them, needless to say, committed by Muslims): one of the Big Lies at the heart of the ideology informing movies like these is that non-Muslim Americans have treated their Muslim neighbors so monstrously since 9/11 that it's thoroughly understandable if some of the latter turn to terrorism.