A week from today, Roland Emmerich’s apocalyptic epic 2012 hits the big screen, and the trailer clearly shows such iconic Christian sites as the Sistine Chapel, Saint Peter’s Basilica, and the Christ the Redeemer statue in Rio de Janeiro (in the poster at left) all come a-tumblin’ down when all heck breaks loose on doomsday.
What you don’t see getting smashed to smithereens are any Islamic holy places – and that has at least a couple of bloggers mad.
Calling director Emmerich a “coward,” a blogger for The American Catholic writes, “This is just another example of Hollywood picking on us Christians. ‘Us’ Christians call this behavior bigotry in the form of Christophobia. More commonly known as anti-Christian or more specifically anti-Catholicism in the case of this film.” The blogger goes on to note that Emmerich was concerned about having a fatwa (essentially a Muslim death threat) on his head.
Meanwhile, at Big Hollywood, Greg Gutfield writes, “Where are Roland Emmerich’s balls?” He notes that Emmerich had said “he hoped to destroy the Kaaba, an Islamic holy site, but his fellow screenwriter Harald Kloser persuaded him not to” – again, out of the fear of fatwa. Gutfield writes: “Hollywood screws with Christians because Christians don’t behead people. But tweak Islam, and you could end up like director Theo van Gogh – dead on a street with a flag impaled on your chest. Roland picks the safe target because he’d rather live . . . [This] proves that Roland has the gonads of a shrimp.”
As for Emmerich, here’s his explanation, in his words, for not destroying anything Islamic: “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, you would have … a fatwa. 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.”
For what it’s worth, the early teaser trailer for 2012 shows some sort of Himalayan holy man – presumably a Buddhist – biting the dust first. (He’s pictured in the screen capture at left.) So, it’s not like Emmerich was just picking on the Christians.
Here’s the latest trailer:
