Culture briefs

Naive newcomer

“[Ayaan] Hirsi Ali writes beautifully and with an unerring critical precision. Contrasting the Western nuclear family with the suffocating family structure in Somalia, she says, ’The infidel is loyal to his wife and children; he may take care of his parents but has no use for a memory filled with an endless chain of ancestors.’ …

“The author laments the self-censorship in the West, driven by a well-meaning, but ultimately corrosive and self-defeating politics of multicultural accommodation. … Writing of Nidal Malik Hasan, the Islamist U.S. Army major who gunned down 13 people at Fort Hood last year, she finds it ’astonishing’ that the media regarded all explanations for the murders plausible ’except the one explicitly stated by the killer, namely his religion.’ (She will cease to be astonished, I reckon, once she spends a few more years on the East Coast.)”

- Tunku Varadarajan, on “Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s Controversial Call to Arms,” on Saturday at the Daily Beast

Bad Christians

“But none of this gets to the heart of why I object to ’Agora.’ In one of the most visually arresting scenes in the film, [director Alejandro] Amenabar brings his camera up to a very high point of vantage overlooking the Alexandria library while it is being ransacked by the Christian mob. From this perspective, the Christians look for all the world like scurrying cockroaches. In another memorable scene, the director shows a group of Christian thugs carting away the mangled corpses of Jews whom they have just put to death, and he composes the shot in such a way that the piled bodies vividly call to mind the bodies of the dead in photographs of Dachau and Auschwitz.

“The not so subtle implication of all of this is that Christians are dangerous types, threats to civilization, and that they should, like pests, be eliminated. I wonder if it ever occurred to Amenabar that his movie might incite violence against religious people, especially Christians, and that precisely his manner of critique was used by some of the most vicious persecutors of Christianity in the last century. My very real fear is that the meanness, half-truths, and outright slanders in such books as Christopher Hitchens’s ’God is Not Great’ and Richard Dawkins’s ’The God Delusion’ have begun to work their way into the popular culture.”

- The Rev. Robert Barron, writing on “The Dangerous Silliness of Agora” on May 5 at Catholic New World

Martyr tale

“The Cannes Film Festival closed over the weekend, and much of the buzz out of France has been over the Grand Prix winner, ’Des Hommes et Des Dieux’ [’Of Gods and Men’ in English]. It recounts the story of a group of French Trappists who were caught in the middle of the Algerian civil war and ultimately beheaded in 1996:

” ’Conflict arises between the Government and the fundamentalist groups. Immigrants have their throats cut, female teachers are killed and the monks (who have been ministering to local villagers) are advised to leave by both sides. They refuse. … The film becomes tense and gripping as each monk decides whether to stay - and almost inevitably become a martyr - or to go. When the monks say to the villagers that they are ’birds on a branch, not sure whether to fly,’ the villagers answer that the monks are the branch itself, their protection from the chaos beyond.’

“The Church has sadly known many martyrs in Africa over the past century, but it’s the slow and deliberate nature of this particular story - the growing realization that staying in Algeria meant certain death, the struggle over the choice to stay or flee, and the final decision to remain - that intrigues me. … Someone please pick this up for distribution in the States.”

- Margaret Cabaniss, writing on “A Slow Martyrdom in Algeria,” on Tuesday at Inside Catholic