In yet another attempt to discredit U.S. President Donald Trump’s chief strategist, Steve Bannon, The Washington Post inadvertently did just the opposite.
In a piece on Friday, national reporter Matea Gold revealed that she had obtained a draft of a movie proposal written in 2007 by Bannon — at the time a Hollywood filmmaker — aimed at warning viewers about radical Muslims turning the U.S. into the “Islamic States of America.”
According to Gold, the envisioned three-part documentary, titled “Destroying the Great Satan: The Rise of Islamic Fascism in America,” was to open with a scene showing the flag on the U.S. Capitol building emblazoned with a crescent and star, while chants of ”Allahu akbar” emanate from inside. Quoting from the film’s outline, she said its purpose was to caution not only against jihadists, but against the “enablers among us.”
Gold said Bannon wrote that these unwitting Americans, with the “best intentions,” were the media, the Jewish community and government agencies engaged in appeasing Islamism and paving “the road to this unique hell on earth.”
She made sure to remind readers that the author is the same Bannon who helped Trump forge his executive order restricting entry into the U.S. of citizens of certain Muslim-majority countries. This unsubtle juxtaposition was supposed to give credence to the claim, widely circulated prior to and since Trump’s election, that Bannon is both an anti-Semite and an Islamophobe.
But the stab at a double whammy fell flat on its face. If anything, Gold’s account was cause for optimism about Bannon’s role in the administration that is taking shape in Washington.
Indeed, anybody outside Israel who grasped 10 years ago that radical Islamism was a force not only to be reckoned with but guarded against in the West is a person who has been paying attention. Despite the national trauma caused by the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon in 2001, Americans quickly covered themselves in ostrich feathers and put their heads in the proverbial sand, hoping that the war against al-Qaida that was being fought far from their homestead would remain something they might catch a glimpse of on the nightly news, but not feel, smell and taste.
Unlike Israelis — virtually all of whom are soldiers even when in civilian clothes — citizens of the United States are blessed with a choice about the extent of their involvement in matters of national security and defense. As a result, many can and do go through life without ever encountering men and women in uniform, let alone marching alongside them.
