Film Review: Kingdom of Heaven
Doncha just love it? When Ridley Scott was filming his Crusades epic Kingdom of Heaven in the Moroccan Sahara, death threats from Islamic militants flooded in, prompting King Mohammed VI to offer 1,000 soldiers to guard the set. Those without quite the chuztpah to make death threats attacked Scott in the local press for making a piece of war propaganda for George Bush's "new Crusade" against the Arabs in Iraq. Now that the film is out, right-wingers on our side of the Atlantic are bashing it as "anti-Christian" propaganda that loans comfort to the Muslim enemy. Go figure! Film Review: Kingdom of HeavenOY VEY, JERUSALEM!
Why Both Christian and Muslim Fundamentalists Hate Ridley Scott
by Shlomo Svesnik
World War 4 Report: Deconstructing the War on Terrorism
http://www.ww4report.com
Doncha just love it? When Ridley Scott was filming his Crusades epic
Kingdom of Heaven in the Moroccan Sahara, death threats from Islamic
militants flooded in, prompting King Mohammed VI to offer 1,000 soldiers to
guard the set. Those without quite the chuztpah to make death threats
attacked Scott in the local press for making a piece of war propaganda for
George Bush's "new Crusade" against the Arabs in Iraq. Now that the film is
out, right-wingers on our side of the Atlantic are bashing it as
"anti-Christian" propaganda that loans comfort to the Muslim enemy. Go
figure!
If it was Scott's intention (and this much seems clear) to make a movie
that warns of the dangers of religious fanaticism, these nimrods are sure
helping to make his point. Yes, the film deviates sharply from the details
of history. But it seems to do this more in the interests of box-office
success than any political agendas. If Scott is trying to make any points
here, they are not anti-Christian or anti-Muslim, but
anti-fundamentalist--and the fact that he is coming under attack from both
Christian and Muslim fundis can only be seen as vindication.
Kingdom of Heaven tells the story of the 1187 taking of Jerusalem from the
Crusaders by Saladin, the Kurdish warrior who became sultan of Egypt and
united the dissolute and humiliated Islamic world in a new jihad for the
Holy Land. The story is told through the eyes of Balian of Ibelin, the
Frankish noble who organized the defense of Jerusalem against Saladin's
besieging army.
By the standards of their day, both Saladin and Balian were moderates, and
they avoided a lengthy siege and general massacre of Jerusalem's population
by working out a deal. Both did so in defiance of hard-liners within their
own ranks. Both are favorably portrayed by Scott. The siege of Jerusalem is
the film's climax, but after battle sequences arguably more realistic and
extravagant than those of Scott's last historical epic, Gladiator, the end
comes not with glorious victory, but with a peace deal. Balian--the hero
and protagonist, portrayed by Hollywood's current golden boy, Orlando
Bloom--surrenders the city to the Muslims in exchange for a pledge of no
reprisals against the Christian inhabitants. Instead, they are granted safe
escort to the sea.
Those are the salient points of the movie, and they are historically
accurate. So is the contest which is portrayed between the "doves" around
Balian and the Leper King of Christian Jerusalem, Baldwin IV, and the
"hawks" led by Guy of Lusignan, Reynauld of Chatillon and the fanatical
Knights Templars. Baldwin's death in 1185, and the succession of his
son-in-law Guy to the throne, practically guaranteed renewed war with the
Muslims. Jerusalem had been closed to Muslim pilgrims for generations after
the Crusaders first took the city in 1099, and Baldwin had re-opened it in
a bid for peace. The Templars, in turn, were scheming to break the peace
with (illegal) attacks on Muslim pilgrims and traders.
The film deviates from historical fact in the predictable ways Hollywood
always does, and in this case they are basically harmless. In the film,
Balian starts out as a lowly blacksmith, the bastard son of his Crusader
father "Godfrey of Ibelin," and follows him to Jerusalem seeking redemption
after a personal tragedy. Nothing in the history books suggests this lowly
origin, and the famous Godfrey (of Bouillon, not Ibelin) was an early king
of Christian Jerusalem who lived three generations before Balian. Nor is
there much to suggest that Balian had a torrid (or even tepid) affair with
Princess Sibylla, daughter of King Baldwin and wife of Guy of
Lusignan--although she had jilted Balian's brother Baldwin of Ibelin for
Guy when it was clear he would become king. (Got it?)
In the film, Balian wisely refuses to march against Saladin's forces in an
ill-conceived and adventurist foray led by King Guy and Reynauld, instead
choosing to stay and defend Jerusalem against the inevitable attack, and is
thereby spared humiliating defeat at the disastrous battle of Hattin, where
the Christians got their asses handed to them but good. In reality, he
fought at the battle, but escaped. (Guy and Reynauld were captured, and the
latter personally offed by Saladin, as the film portrays.)
Having fudged these earlier details, Scott is then obliged to fudge the
climax, the battle for Jerusalem--which is a shame, because the real story
is arguably better than the silver screen version. After the defeat at
Hattin, Balian returned to Jerusalem to get his wife out--who was actually
Maria Comnena, grand-niece of the Byzantine emperor and dowager queen of
Jerusalem (she had been married to Amalric, the king before Baldwin IV).
Balian intended to flee with her to Christian-held territory on the coast,
and secured Saladin's permission to enter the city on condition that he
take an oath to stay only one night. This he did, but once in the city the
people rallied to him and demanded he stay to lead the resistance. He would
only do so after securing an official release from his oath by Saladin.
This was granted, and the mutual honor between the two men served them both
well days later, when Balian sued for peace in return for clemency.
Saladin, his earlier peace offers rebuffed, had pledged to take the city by
force. He relented of his own oath, and the city was spared a bloodbath.
Finally, in the film Balian goes back to France with Sibylla and they live
happily ever after, rejecting an offer to join Richard the Lion-Hearted in
the Third Crusade to take back Jerusalem. In reality, he fled with Maria
Comnena to the rump Crusader state on the coast, where he remained an
important lord, fighting alongside Richard.
Balian's moment of understanding with Saladin would be echoed twice more in
the generations of war that followed. First, in 1191 Saladin cut a new
peace deal with Richard the Lion-Hearted, granting Christian pilgrims
access to Jerusalem. This arrangement persisted until Saladin died in 1193
and subsequent Crusades were launched, and the bloody cycle began anew. The
second came in 1229, when the abortive Sixth Crusade was cut short by a
deal between the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II and Saladin's successor
Sultan al-Kamil, establishing joint Christian-Muslim control of
Jerusalem--for which Frederick was excommunicated by the Pope and al-Kamil
assailed by the hardline mullahs as a traitor to Islam. This peace was
broken in 1249 when Louis IX of France (St. Louis) launched the Seventh
Crusade at papal behest and invaded Egypt, plunging the Holy Land into war
once again. Don't that say it all--excommunication for the peacemakers,
sainthood for war-makers!
There would be 12 crusades in all--two centuries of war. And the
meshuggenah types who are now dissing Scott seem intent on starting the
whole damn thing over again.
If Scott had really wanted to make an "anti-Christian" propaganda film, the
history of the Crusades could have provided him with plenty of material. He
could have made a film about the fall of the city to the Christian armies
in 1099, which was followed by a wholesale massacre in which Muslims and
Jews were slaughtered and burned alive in mosques and synagogues, and one
Frankish account (Raymund of Aguiles) boasted that at the Temple of
Solomon, "men rode in blood up to their knees and bridle reins." Widespread
cannibalism by the early Crusaders is nearly universally accepted by
historians--as the accounts come from both Arab and Frankish sources.
Scott could have made a film in which the hero and protagonist was Saladin
himself (is Omar Sharif still around to play the lead?). He could have had
Saladin speak the verse from the Koran which he actually invoked to justify
clemency for the Christians: "Fight in the cause of Allah those who fight
you, but do not transgress limits; for Allah loves not transgressors. And
slay them wherever you catch them and turn them out from where they have
turned you out; for oppression is worse than slaughter; but do not fight
them at the Sacred Mosque, unless they first fight you there... But if they
cease, Allah is Oft-forgiving, Most Merciful. So fight them on until there
is no more oppression, and there prevail justice and faith in Allah; but if
they cease let there be no hostility..." (2:190-3)
He could have dealt with how Jews fared as the Christians and Muslims
engaged in two centuries of mutual slaughter--not only how the Christian
soldiers massacred Jews in the Holy Land, but the pogroms that broke out
all over France and England in the same paroxysm of zeal that mobilized the
Crusades, how the Crusaders gratuitously destroyed Jewish villages en route
to Jerusalem.
Finally, if he were less self-conscious about making explicit contemporary
analogies, Scott could have mentioned that Balian's fiefdom as a Crusader
lord was none other than Nablus--today a town in the occupied West Bank
where, in a perverse historical irony, Jews are acting like Crusaders. Iraq
and the West Bank are the two occupied territories that lead contemporary
jihadis to speak of a "Zionist-Crusader Alliance." This alliance is a
relatively new phenomenon, and it will probably be short-lived. For all the
centuries-nurtured historical claims and grudges that animate the current
conflict in the Middle East, Muslims and Jews alike both seem to have
forgotten that neither fare very well when Christians get into Crusader
mode.
---------------------
Also by Shlomo Svesnik:
MANUFACTURING DISSENT
Think Before You Cheer--Michael Moore is Making a Noose for the Left's Neck
http://ww3report.com/shlomo2.html
THE LAST TEMPTATION OF MEL GIBSON
A Look Behind the Headlines Reveals "The Passion of Christ" as Propaganda
for a Fascistic Cult
http://ww3report.com/passion.html
------------------
Special to WORLD WAR 4 REPORT, May 10, 2005
Reprinting permissible with attribution
http://WW4Report.com
