Avoid the Apocalypse: Issue a Fatwa

Roland Emmerich has finally met his match.  The man who’s made a livingsimulating mass destruction in films likeIndependence Day, Godzilla, and The Day After Tomorrow, has found something that cannot be destroyed. Or let me rephrase that — something he’s afraid to destroy.

Emmerich’s new film 2012 looks like the mother of all apocalypse movies. However,Yahoo Movie Talk reports:

For “2012,” Emmerich set his sites on destroying the some biggest landmarks around the world, from Rome to Rio. But there’s one place that Emmerich wanted to demolish but didn’t: the Kaaba, the cube-shaped structure located in the center of Mecca. It’s the focus of prayers and the site of the Hajj, the biggest, most important pilgrimage in Islam.

“Well, I wanted to do that, I have to admit,” the filmmaker told scifiwire.com. “But my co-writer Harald [Kloser] said, ‘I will not have a fatwa on my head because of a movie.’ And he was right.”

Emmerich went on: “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, and that sounds a little bit like what the state of this world is. 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.” (emphasis mine)

For years, Christians have watched their most sacred symbols and figures cursed, ridiculed, vandalized, and (literally) pissed on. So Mecca gets destroyed — cinematically speaking — by an Israeli missile strike, stampeding swine, an army of raging Amazon women, or a suicide bomb blast gone awry. Big deal! Christianity’s been getting dissed for decades (or at least until Jon Stewart and Kathy Griffin discovered microphones).

I’m not sure what’s worse, Hollywood bigshots kowtowing to Muslims (see: Roland Emmerich), or blatant attempts by politicians and media elites to downplay the threats of global jihad. Tired of seeing the Cross submerged in urine and Madonna crucified? Maybe we Christians should take a hint from the Islamists. Forget a boycott. Fatwa anyone?