Double Standard

You can now watch the trailers for "You Don't Mess with the Zohan." It looks bad. It looks very, very bad. But it also makes me realize that we still operate in the existence of a double standard.

I'm not talking about gender. If Tina Fey is any example, female comedians can make bad movies with the same lack of talent as any late-night stand-up on Comedy Central. (And Baby Mama was bad. It was catastrophically bad. The premise was banal, the jokes were predictable. Hiring a surrogate mother for a 30-something woman whose career consumed her life? How Lifetime. Tina Fey should do something very weird - like build a space station out of pretzel sticks and the hair of llamas. She could make a great movie about that.)

At any rate, I'm not talking about that double standard. I'm talking about Zohan. An Israeli "anti-terrorist" agent. We can laugh comfortably about a man whose mission and training is to eliminate suspected terrorists Bond-style.

Who is Zohan's Palestinian counterpart? Wait, you'll say, there are no Israeli terrorists. There are certain people within Israel who believe that there should be one state, and that state should be Israel, and the Palestinian Arabs who have lived in the region for years should suck it up and become Jordanian citizens (because, you know, it's merely a hop, skip and a jump to Jordan on election day and therefore, at least, a Palestinian vote will count for something even if this system is not, strictly speaking, the most democratic). There are people who believe this. Some of these people train other young people to create settlements beyond Israel's political boundaries for the express purpose of building Israel, while perhaps deliberately antagonizing the Palestinians. But it's a stretch - naturally - to call these people terrorists. After all, they haven't bombed anybody.

And anyway, even if they had, even if the Israeli government of 1948 had followed an ethnic cleansing policy that left 800,000 Arabs as homeless refugees (or dead!), even if the United Nations had issued a report condemning paramilitary settlers responsible for multiple Palestinian deaths in the West Bank and Gaza, even if Palestinians were routinely treated up to the present day with such brutality by Israeli checkpoint soldiers that even President George W Bush felt compelled to weigh in: even if these absurd hypotheticals were true,

Who would make a movie called "Don't Mess with the Abu Bakr?" Who would laugh at it the way they laughed at "Borat"?

Let me be clear - I have no reason to side with Islamic militants. As a first generation American whose parents and grandparents grew up in majority-Hindu India, members of my family and friends have lost their property and sometimes their lives to religious extremism. But for me, my family, or the Indian government to suggest that the Hindus and Muslims did not each play an equal part in antagonizing the other would not just be naive - it would be criminal.

But the violence in the Middle East ebbs and flows, while Hollywood endures.