I love The Daily Wire, and besides the fact that we are ideologically aligned, over the past few weeks they have amplified my message. Ben Shapiro had me on his show, and The Daily Wire ran three articles of mine. So naturally, I would praise the movie Run Hide Fight: Infidel, and I already posted about how much I enjoyed it.
However, I believe that while the movie said many of the things a lot of us think about and would like to say, it could indirectly do more harm than good to our war in the West against Islam.
Don’t worry, I’ll do my best not to spoil anything. The plot is simple: a group of ISIS terrorists takes over an American university campus. The useful idiots who refused to believe that the war in Gaza is an Islamic war against Israel end up becoming the first victims of this ISIS group. The emasculated, cowardly leaders of American institutions become complicit in the shedding of innocent blood, and, eventually, the patriots save the country.
The moment the movie came out, useful idiots and Muslim groups in America condemned it as “Islamophobic,” accusing it of reducing Muslims to a collection of caricatures and portraying the Muslim faith, Muslim practices, and Sharia as inherently threatening to America.
There is no doubt that useful idiots and Muslims would have called the movie Islamophobic without even watching it, even before it was released. The fact that The Daily Wire produced it was enough to earn that label.
Hollywood has been castrated for years, whitewashing Islam until that became the norm. Simply portraying Muslim terrorists is now treated as Islamophobic, regardless of the fact that Islamic terrorism has struck America multiple times this year, while dozens of Islamic terrorist organizations operate around the world and thousands of Islamic terrorist attacks take place every year.
But I wish the movie had actually succeeded in doing what the useful idiots and Muslims accuse it of doing. Unfortunately, it didn’t. The movie was great, entertaining, and full of powerful messages, but it failed to show the point that really matters now: how Islam itself poses a threat to the West.
I don’t actually expect an American screenwriter/director, funded by seven American producers, to successfully show the nature of the existential threat Islam poses to the West. I don’t actually believe there are many people capable of doing that; otherwise, I wouldn’t have started the Ideological Defense Institute.
There are certainly remarkable Western writers who understand the problem, but almost none of them ever get the chance to oversee a major film project. The filmmakers with enough courage to tackle Islam are also making a commercial product, so they have to think about return on investment as much as the message itself. Inevitably, that shifts some of the attention away from the precision of the ideological message and toward the plot, pacing, entertainment value, and making the film work for a broad audience.
Even though Run Hide Fight: Infidel gets the Arabic wrong, except for the curse words, misses some Sharia rulings, and quotes Quranic verses from a whitewashed English translation of the Quran, the film provides an accurate picture of what an authentic Islamic state would look like. Gays would be executed. Women would be distributed among the fighters. Non-Muslim men would be offered Islam; if they refused, they would be required to pay the jizya, and if they refused that as well, they would be killed.
This Islamic state is what ISIS built in Syria and Iraq beginning in 2013, formally declaring its caliphate in 2014, until its final territorial stronghold fell in March 2019. The beheadings people saw on television, the burning of people alive, and the sex-slave markets were not the practices of some psychopathic group of people. They were practices identical to the practices of Muhammad and his companions, to what the Islamic Caliphate practiced throughout 1,300 years when it faithfully applied Sharia, and to what an Islamic state would look like if it were given the chance to be built again.
The Caliphate collapsed at the beginning of the twentieth century, and Britain and France imposed the modern nation-state system on the Middle East. Arab rulers embraced that system, even though it is antithetical to Islam. The Muslim Brotherhood was founded in 1928 to reverse that transformation, rebuild Islamic political unity, restore Sharia, and ultimately revive the Caliphate. It has not succeeded so far.
The reason Israel has been under attack for the past 80 years is that Israel stands in the way of the project of Islamic political restoration: the Caliphate.
For Muslims in general, the borders created by the modern nation-state are temporary realities to be tolerated until Muslims can once again be united under a single Islamic order. Thankfully, they have repeatedly failed to achieve that project in the Middle East, mainly because they were crushed by unfaithful Islamic authoritarian regimes. Now that project is being carried into the West, where Muslims have found freedoms, institutions, and political systems they can exploit to bring about what they believe is Allah’s promise: that Islam will rule the world.
The mistake I believe the movie made is that it portrayed the Islamic threat to the West as the establishment of an Islamic state, the Caliphate. The movie showed, rightly, what life under the Caliphate would look like for the infidels. The conquered university is, in effect, that Caliphate, and the students are the infidels living under its authority.
But the problem is that such a state, as I said, has failed to materialize even in countries where Muslims make up nearly 100 percent of the population, and attempts to build it have been fought by coalitions of both Islamic and non-Islamic countries. So I wonder how the filmmakers imagine that an Islamic Caliphate would come to rule a Western country. When is that supposed to happen, in 10,000 years?
You don’t really expect people to take the threat seriously if you only show them what the final stage would look like once it has fully materialized according to Islam, but skip the long process required to get there.
That is where the movie falls short. The threat feels remote, almost science-fictional.
A caliphate does not appear overnight. It is preceded by decades, perhaps centuries, of ideological normalization, demographic change, institutional accommodation, erasure of individual liberties, political organization, legal pressure, cultural retreat, and the gradual weakening of the society resisting it. If you show only the end result, people can dismiss it as fantasy because they cannot see the road connecting their present reality to that future.
That is the threat the movie should have shown: not merely terrorists with guns, but it is the Muslim police officer who answers a domestic-violence call and, instead of treating the woman simply as a citizen protected by the same law as everyone else, pressures her to remain silent because he believes a wife should submit to her husband. It is the traffic officer who tickets everyone for double-parking but looks the other way when the cars belong to worshippers outside a mosque. It is the public institution that begins with one religious accommodation, then another, until an exception that was granted as a courtesy is treated as an entitlement.
It is what happens socially, behind closed doors, when Islamic teachings about unbelievers, women, apostasy, blasphemy, or loyalty to the Muslim Ummah are allowed to shape conduct while a completely different language is presented publicly. It is what happens when a religiously motivated group ethic becomes stronger than the civic ethic that is supposed to apply equally to everyone.
It is people beginning to self-censor because they are intimidated by aggressive Muslims occupying the public square. Every accommodation becomes a precedent. Every precedent becomes a right. Then comes the next demand. What began as an exception slowly becomes the expectation, until laws that supposedly apply equally to everyone are weakened by exception after exception.
It is the nice Muslim individual submitting to the group dynamic until his personal niceness becomes politically irrelevant.
It is when parallel communities become large enough, isolated enough, and hostile enough to the surrounding society that they begin demanding autonomy and separation. That is when Islamic enclaves turn into Gazas, semi-separate territories permanently at war with the nation around them, a permanent thorn in its side.
It is more Muslim politicians capturing positions of power, altering U.S. foreign policy, standing against the Jewish state, which already exists in an ocean of enemies, making millions of Jews vulnerable, while at the same time supporting Islamic regimes hostile to Israel and the West.
Who knows how many Muslim politicians will be in Congress when the first Islamic Gaza forms in Western Europe, and how they will pressure the system to support their ummah against the infidels.
That is the story the movie should have told.
I think the book, "Submission", by French author Michel Houellebecq gave an example of how this 'creeping' of Islam throughout the society does, in fact, create the Muslim nation. It is a harrowing story.
Islam is an infection that slowly takes over the body. It has a single goal. It never sleeps, never stops. Those smiling Muslim politicians we see now here in America are just one part of it. They've already well infected the universities (move over, leftists). They are much further into their infection in Europe, but we're going to catch up quickly unless we wake up.
Difficult to show slow subversion of a society in a 2-hour movie. A 10- or 12-hour miniseries, and now you're talking. It would have to balance the sensational and the cerebral however...a tricky proposition.