Tel-Chai Nation

There's a new film based on the Swiss legend of William Tell (via Front Page), that shoehorns in Muslim characters for the sake of "diversity":

This is represented by the second major change to Schiller’s text. While the William Tell of the play is not directly involved in the revolutionary schemes of the Switzers, he is swift to engage himself in their action when required; in Étienne and Bis’ treatment, Tell is the personification of libertarian fervor from the off; Hamm’s Tell is different. While quick to aid a fellow in need, he is reluctant to engage himself in active resistance. A key image in Schiller’s play is reconstrued in this light. In the play, Stussi informs Tell of “a knight… on his way to court, / And as he rode along a swarm of wasps / Surrounded him, and settling on his horse, / So fiercely stung the beast that it fell dead.” Tell responds, “Even the weak are furnished with a sting,” — so he says, a single bolt in hand, ready to assassinate the tyrannical Gessler. In Hamm’s film, it is Tell who relates this story, with a key difference: they were not wasps, but bees. And so the many bees do kill the horse — his own horse in this version — but in the afterword, all die themselves. The tyrant (o, tyrannical horse) is destroyed, but so too all those who struck him. The reluctance of the hero is made endemic to his character. Hamm weaves a flashback structure into the narrative, in which Tell is depicted as a crusader in the alleyways of Jerusalem (N.B. there is no credible timeline in which it is possible for the 14th-century Tell to have fought there). Here we encounter the now classic representation of The Crusades: a confused, savage conflict, in which the Muslim Jerusalemites are terrorized by Christian men-at-arms. We see the injured Tell is nursed by Muslim civilians; we eventually see that he bolts down a fellow crusader to save his own Muslim savior — here is born his suspicion of noble causes. Is there better than to fight for God? In casting Claes Bang, Hamm makes of Tell an older, jaded character: he elopes with the woman he saves in Jerusalem, and seeks no more of battle.

Well if the filmmakers are going to depict Muslims helping Tell, but not Jews, that says all you need to know that Hollywood, or any film industry, for that matter, is still horribly dominated by antisemitism, and favoratism for the Religion of Peace, to the point where, the content of the koran is doubtless whitewashed from A to Z in the screenplay. This is not worth spending tons of money on tickets for.

If this is how the filmmakers are going to write up the screenplay, its exactly why stories like William Tell are better left for novels.

Labels: anti-semitism, Christianity, dhimmitude, Europe, islam, Israel, Jerusalem, Moonbattery, showbiz