Wednesday, November 23, 2005
In relation to the post below, Hirsi Ali: I'd like to make a Muslim 'Life of Brian', there is, oddly enough, a current-events connection to controversial films about the life of Mohammed (could there be any other kind?).
In fact, Moustapha Akkad, recently killed in the Jordan terror bombings and who the press most prominently described as the Hollywood producer of the Halloween series of movies, was also the director of a 1976 film called The Message. The film's production was problematic, to say the least, and was also the cause of a major 1977 Washington D.C. hostage and murder incident:
This didn't sit well with the devout. Bomb threats were already being called in, so Akkad hired four Islamic clerics to oversee the production, trying to quash any unfounded rumors...
Desperate to finish his film, Akkad needed a new country to shoot in and as luck would have it, Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi came to the rescue. Akkad moved the production to Libya, and "The Message," and its Arabic-language companion, "Al-Risalah," was nudged across the finish line with the help of a reviled, terrorist-sponsoring dictator...
...Then, on March 9, 1977, a group of black Muslims attacked three buildings in downtown Washington D.C. and took 149 people hostage. They had plenty of demands, but the only coherent one was to prevent the upcoming release of "The Message." Despite all of Akkad's efforts, these terrorists were positive that Anthony Quinn would be playing Mohammed.
Thirty-nine hours later, the siege was over -- a reporter was dead and dozens of hostages had been stabbed, beaten or shot. "The Message" bombed, and Akkad went on to direct one more flop, "Lion of the Desert," funded in large part by Qaddafi...
Here is another view of the hostage incident.
Something else about Moustapha Akkad not mentioned in the Boston Globe's AP obituary, he was a believer in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion:
Moustapha: "The media runs the world. Absolutely. No tanks or planes. The media and the public companies. This is what The Protocols of [the Learned Elders of] Zion [is all about].
"The Zionists, last century, were persecuted in Europe. So they immigrated to the United States. They had a target. They were united. And they did not permit [statements] critical of Zion. They went all the way to control the world and to control the minds of the people through the media. There's a lesson to learn from them.
"They have control of the media here. We know it. They did not do it through tanks or machine guns. They planned of course...
