In your recent piece for Jewish Action, the official magazine for the Orthodox Union, you claim Hollywood is executing “a brilliant, insidious stealth attack” on Jewish values and American culture. Is that because you would prefer Hollywood to foreground your own conservative values?To be fair, I'm not sure Hollywood pushed wholly conservative values in the yesteryear, because if you know where to look, there were movies and TV programs where the filmmakers made no secret of their preference for leftism over rightism. Granted, there was more respect for Judeo-Christianity back then, but the liberal bent they were so obsessed with upholding might have taken its toll as time went by.
Robert Avrech: Obviously I would prefer that there be conservative values pushed in Hollywood movies, the way it used to be. But what’s happening now is that the values that are being pushed in Hollywood are pretty radical. There was a tremendous turning point in the culture when the sitcom “Friends” put on a lesbian marriage. And the redefinition of marriage is a radical idea, whether you agree with it or not.
You seem bothered by the preponderance of same-sex marriage in television and film.Yes, he has a point there. It's bad enough that mainstream TV and film have become so obsessed with featuring a predisposed view of homosexuality, and worse if politicians are going to go miles out of their way to persecute Christians and Judaists who oppose the belief system or just don't want to service it at the expense of their own faiths. Now, making this law of the land and forbidding Judeo-Christians the right to decline services is going to open the door to polygamy in the USA, with Muslims guaranteed to exploit every bit of it. Ironically, there's little or no chance Muslim homophobia will be opposed or even remotely condemned by propagandists like GLAAD
I’m not really interested in gay marriage. I believe gays should get married if they want to get married. I have no problem with that. I want people to love each other. It’s the state intervention that bothers me, because then the state is going to have to involve itself in polygamy. One has to accept that when gay marriage becomes the law of the land in a majority of states. Then a Muslim is going to come forward with two wives, and he’s going to demand the right to marry his two wives. And once that happens, the door to Sharia in America is opened.
What values should Hollywood promote?Without a doubt, this was also a studio that was most kowtowing to such a vile organization. I don't know which one it was, but their modern MO makes it one studio that probably doesn't deserve any sane person's dollars.
[My first choice] would be Hollywood admitting that the greatest danger to civilization itself right now is jihad and jihadists. Hollywood should confront that the way they confronted the Nazi threat and the imperial Japanese threat. [...]
In your article, you sound kind of peeved recalling a time when a studio hired you to write a script for a film (that ultimately didn’t get made) with the caveat: “Don’t malign all Muslims.” Isn’t that a reasonable request?
If you read the script, you would see that there were sympathetic Muslims within the movie. One of the characters was quite heroic, as a matter of fact. The problem is CAIR [the Council on American-Islamic Relations], which is a front for the Muslim Brotherhood. Their position is clear and unequivocal: No Muslim should ever be presented as a terrorist. Period. End of story.