What the Right Doesn't Understand About Islamophobia
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For the longest time I thought that the Western right, generally speaking, was only pretending not to understand why the rest of us have such a problem with their constant Middle East forever-wars. Obviously it’s a mistake to label “the right” as some monolithic entity. But for a lot of them it comes down to bewilderment about the concept of “Islamophobia:” Whether such a “phobia” may be justified, actually, and whether it should be in the left’s best interest to also be “Islamophobic.”
Most will say that we’ve simply invented a new bigotry buzzword to oversimplify the myriad different military adventures such as Israel’s US-backed massacres in Gaza and Lebanon, and America’s obsession with perpetually scouring the Persian Gulf to dispense with imaginary WMDs. We have to apparently just keep bombing this quarter of the world, forever, to prevent anyone who lives there from ever seeing through a single day without traumatic existential dread, as penance for their “anti-Western ideology.”
And yet, they don’t really seem to know what that ideology is.
There’s a school of thought on the right that insists that keeping the Islamic world in a state of perpetual terror in which nobody from Tehran to Baghdad to Kabul to Gaza City is ever comfortable stepping outside for the entirety of their life is essential to global security. In the same breath they will say it’s a mystery why they hate us.
The usual answer is it all boils down to “they hate our freedom,” as though the freedoms enjoyed by people on the other side of the world from them occupy much space in their day to day minds at all, and as though their comparative lack of freedom is a personal choice rather than a consequence of the fact that, every time they step outside, there’s a nonzero risk that an American Palantir ™ drone will fly out of a nearby manhole and launch a Plutonium-tipped AI frag rocket with pinpoint accuracy into their left eye socket.
Yes, Islamic terrorism is a problem. Yes, when you hear about some large scale violent attack in a public place that isn’t a school, you can guess the motivations of the suspect with a depressing rate of accuracy. I feel a ritualistic should-not-be-necessary need, in the wake of the media scouring of people like Hasan Piker, to say that I condemn September 11 and October 7 and other calendar-date-specific atrocities committed against innocent people. But there are a lot of innocent people on both sides of this.
And this drives people nuts, not just on the far or even moderate right, but also relatively “liberal but anti-woke” circles who thoroughly misunderstand what they’re being accused of when they’re charged with Islamophobia. They say Islam is a religion and an ideology, not an innate identity, and you cannot be bigoted against a religion or ideology. They will make all sorts of inaccurate claims—some intentionally inaccurate and some just genuinely ignorant—about why people oppose specifically anti-Islamic wars and anti-Islamic domestic immigration policies. Surely, in light of these atrocities, it should be normal to want to remove Muslims from the West, chase them back to their home countries, and then bomb their home countries into a sandy crater, right?
But what exactly is the ideology of Islamism and why do they oppose it? That’s the thing—they don’t know, and that’s why it’s possible to distill so much of this phenomenon down into a simple bigotry and a phobia. And boy do I have one comprehensively stupid example of this to help make my point. Today, we’re going to be discussing Ben Shapiro and The Daily Wire’s unintentionally (actually partly intentionally?) hilarious new film, Run Hide Fight: Infidels. Yaaay!
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So, for those who don’t know, Run Hide Fight: Infidels is a movie so perplexingly-named because it’s an “anthology sequel” to a 2020 movie by the same director called Run Hide Fight. I saw the original Run Hide Fight and will dare to say that I actually liked it. It’s a direct-to-streaming action movie about a school shooting. The actor, Eli Brown, who plays the primary villain, was, I think, actually phenomenal, and might have been robbed from some award considerations for the fact that, to the film’s detriment, it was picked up for distribution by Ben Shapiro’s Daily Wire media company, which is part of a long-shot and ultimately futile attempt by the right to supplant and replace “woke” Hollywood entertainment with a superior right-wing alternative.
Run Hide Fight was not, by any metric, a commercial or critical success, let alone the kind of winner that would usually justify attaching its name to other unrelated film projects. The only reason that Infidels is being marketed as a “sequel” to that movie appears to be to simply lampshade the fact that writer/director Kyle Rankin has made yet another movie about a siege on an educational institution and it’s better to make that seem like a deliberate goal-oriented decision than have people think that’s the only type of movie he knows how to make.
This is, however, a very different type of movie. Infidels is a primarily ideological comedy-thriller that attempts to satirize opponents of the Iran/Iraq/Afghanistan/Gaza/Lebanon/Yemen infinity-wars based entirely on a complete misunderstanding about why the left oppose those wars.
In short: They think that we think that radical Islam is a leftist-progressive ideology, that this is the only reason we would oppose its violent eradication, and this film is, in part, an attempt to disavow us of that notion. The entire thesis of the film is “Haha, idiot communists think that radical Islamists are communists too.”
Here’s what’s so bizarre about it: Ben Shapiro, himself, thinks that radical Islamists are communists. He has stated repeatedly that New York mayor Zohran Mamdani, Michigan senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed, and political influencers Hasan Piker and Cenk Uygur are radical Islamists and terrorists who follow, and want to institute, Sharia law in the United States. But he also insists that these men are woke leftist Marxist socialist communists, often calling them radical Sharia Islamists in the same breath so you know he’s not just being forgetful.
How does this yoke with his snide confidence that leftists are going to eat crow and bullets upon discovering that Islamists are actually ultra-right-wing turbofascists? It’s tempting to think that he’s engaging in some kind of sophistry and that he’s lying a lot but I actually think that Shapiro is just extremely confused, as bigotries often don’t allow you to think straight. There doesn’t seem to be, in his mind, any contradiction in the belief that radical Islamists want to defund the police, seize the means of production, trans your kids, and also create an Islamic caliphate that will exterminate the Jews and throw your newly transed kids off a building.
The right’s views on Muslims generally amount to vaguely gesticulating in the direction of the “foreign Other” and aren’t even internally consistent, let alone even slightly coherent, but they still feel somehow qualified to educate you, if you’re even vaguely rattled by the US military dropping a tomahawk missile on an Iranian primary school. You need to know what Those Children Actually Believed.
Run Hide Fight: Infidels was comically easy to pirate. I wasn’t going to watch it if it meant I had to pay a subscription to Ben Shapiro’s Evil Mirror Universe Netflix, but I found a downloadable version on a knockoff streaming site in like the third search result.
In the very first scene, we’re introduced to Jonathan Majors’ character. Oh yeah, I forgot to mention this: Jonathan Majors, who was set to play the Marvel villain Kang the Conquerer in the next megablockbuster Avengers instalment, is “in” this movie. That movie had to be entirely cancelled and rewritten from scratch because Majors wouldn’t let a multimillion dollar payday deter him from beating the snot out of his girlfriend, which put him in some bad blood with Hollywood because, as you can probably imagine, film producers can hold a bit of a grudge against you if you single-handedly tank a project that costs upwards of $400 million to produce. Thankfully, the right-wing film counter-industry has made it a major project mission to protect violently misogynistic actors from the consequences of their own actions. Nevertheless, I say that he’s “in” this movie because, though he was marketed as its main character and star, he has about five minutes of screentime in the whole film, maybe less.
But I digress. At the start of the movie, Majors is introduced as a special forces soldier deployed in Somalia who has a little chat with his buddy about why it’s stupid that they have to arrest accused terrorists and put them on trial instead of summarily executing them.
So straight off the bat we have a movie about Muslim’s harboring anti-American values that apparently does not consider free trials to be a worthwhile American value. This isn’t just an incidental conversation, but a Chekhov’s gun that will reveal itself later as part of the moral of this film—that it’s a fault of Western democracy that we don’t have Judge Dredd style street executions of bad guys.
But soon we are introduced to the actual protagonist of this film: A reactionary anti-woke gamer bro mall ninja. Because this movie really knows its audience.
Now again, the writer/director, Kyle Rankin, has proven that he can make a competent film. Oftentimes, you find that, when filmmakers who made good movies early on get worse over time, it’s actually because they did not benefit from the freedom and good will afforded to them after making a decent movie. There is a reason that good movies are grand collaborative efforts. When you let a solitary filmmaker completely off the leash, sometimes they turn out to be an auteur, but sometimes they turn out to be truly rubbish. Rankin seems to be the latter.
In an interview with the insufferable Andrew Klavan, he admits to having been let off the leash and unrestrained from the studio filmmaking process here, but for the propaganda message that he was compelled to inject into it, which is why, on the heels of the tight studio-quality Run Hide Fight, we get this slop sequel that can’t even figure out what genre it is and if it’s a straight comedy or not. Leftist anti-war protesters launch into an incomprehensible parody of what campus protesters say, because Rankin has no intention of learning or understanding what they believe. The film’s tertiary villain, a blue-haired queer feminist pro-Gaza protester, is introduced with an overwritten tirade of Woke Leftist Slop, and is immediately put in her sputtering place and humiliated by our hero, who I’ll call Captain Gamergate, and who gives an extended lecture on the absolute necessity of bombing the Gaza Strip into the stratosphere.
Meanwhile, an Islamic terrorist very visibly and openly starts planting bombs around the place and everyone is too distracted to notice, and, again, I’m not sure if this is a comedy bit or not.
These college students are the people who are going to wind up getting slaughtered later, and they are absolutely not portrayed sympathetically. They are outwardly malicious, cowardly, and very stupid, with silly, straight-up comedy scenes of them doing things like clicking their fingers in lieu of applause to avoid being triggered by loud noises.
And in trying to classify this movie in terms of genre, it soon struck me that this is actually most similar, thematically, to a slasher film.
It diverges from that classification in most stylistic ways, especially the fact that a slasher will almost always target and eliminate a series of characters in succession. But the key theme of a slasher movie is that the audience roots for the villain. Characters like Jason Voorhees or Michael Myers serve as both antagonist and hero of their respective franchises. They are motivated by vengeance and their victims aren’t innocent—dumb promiscuous bimbos, brainless jocks, lazy potheads.
Usually, the doomed characters of these movies will invoke the means of their own demise via stupidity or hubris—they invoke a demon they foolishly think they can control, or read from an ancient skinbound book they find in the basement of a cabin, or solve a mysterious puzzle box. In this film, the pro-Gaza protesters contact some ISIS terrorists and sneak them into the college campus for a goal that is never quite clear except that they are all dumb enough to believe somehow that ISIS is ultra-woke and enthusiastically pro-queer.
Eventually Jonathan Majors reappears as an invited speaker on campus, who launches, without introducing himself, into a speech about how Muslims are fundamentally incapable of integrating into Western society, which opens with the trinity of Muskian white nationalist fears: Immigration, white women’s race-mixing, and “suicidal empathy.”
“What makes them so dangerous,” he says, “is that their goals are not in this life, but the next.” Then, “They desire death as ardently as we desire life.”
That’s a very interesting call to make, considering that a large percentage of this film’s core audience are Christian Zionists, who believe that the Middle East forever-wars are theologically necessary to bring about the End Times, the Resurrection of Christ, and the ascendence of true believers into Paradise. In fact, perhaps second only to the reptile-brain racial bigotry, that’s the primary reason that people want these wars to continue.
I get that Ben Shapiro, a practicing orthodox Jew, wouldn’t be particularly sympathetic to the Christian Zionist position that Israel needs to be locked into war with its neighbors until enough Jews are slaughtered that God has to appear and destroy the planet, but they have sort of inadvertently created a movie with that slasher-film dynamic, in which the killers are ostensibly evil but the audience still nods enthusiastically at everything they say.
“They don’t respect women’s rights? They oppose separation of church and state? They don’t recognize gay marriage? Fucking based!”
During Majors’ speech, the ISIS terrorists attack, and there’s a long massacre scene. Majors gets shot in the gut and then disappears from the movie again until the end. One of the terrorists’ insider henchmen, who has appeared intermittently, is an assistant campus librarian with a German accent, who rolls his book trolley around everywhere, and now rolls up his sleeves to reveal a massive swastika tattoo. That’s right, the German character is a Nazi! … Which doesn’t make a lot of sense in this context because none of the characters, so much as I can tell, are Jewish, so we’re supposed to believe that a white supremacist would be ideologically motivated for some reason to team up with some Arabs to massacre white people. Later in the film, the Nazi is shown reading from a Koran, so I think the idea is supposed to be that he converted to Islam because Muslims are very similar to Nazis?
Again, not very coherent ideology on the part of either the Nazi or Muslim characters, but there’s not a lot of coherence to be found here anywhere—Kyle Rankin was not interested in looking up what various ideologues actually believe. He wanted to make a College Students Are Bad Idiots propaganda film to satisfy the people at The Daily Wire.
I won’t go beat for beat through the rest of the movie to continue making the same point, but I’ll note again that the jarring nature of the over-the-top comedy bangers between beats of ultraviolence only serves to reiterate the fact that, while this movie means to warn the audience about Islam, you’re also supposed to view Islam as a kind of reckoning.
They’re not the villains of this film any more than a hurricane is a villain. The activists brought this upon themselves, and this whole disjointed mess of a movie is but a soulless celebration of their punishment. Islam is this film’s Jason Voorhees—it’s coming to kill you for your blue hair, for your race-mixing, for your transgenderism, for your wokeness, for your putting women in video games, for whatever else.
The scene in which the blue-haired pansexual tertiary villain and her gay sidekick discover that ISIS doesn’t align with their beliefs, and are brutally murdered for it, is smash-cut against a comedy scene where the protagonists quip about seeing too many interracial couples on TV. Truly the West has fallen.
This really cuts down to the heart of what’s actually meant by “Islamophobia.” It’s not the fear of something that exists in the world. The Islamophobe fears being a collateral victim of something that is really kind of an amorphous “other”—sort of maybe communism, sort of maybe fascism, sort of maybe foreigners, but something that was invoked upon them by their true enemies: The Western left.
I mentioned earlier that Jonathan Majors’ anti-due-process rant at the beginning of the film was a Chekhov’s gun that would pay off later. Majors does return at the very end of the movie to talk to the Big Bad behind-the-scenes puppeteer primary villain, who rattles off a list of his grievances with America—which is actually just a short list of the exact complaints that Ben Shapiro has with America, such as that abortion is legal and that climate science is woke. Jonathan Majors responds to this outburst with approximately the same restraint that he, the actor, is known to offer the women in his life:
He shoots him directly in the face, spits on his body, and quips “Actually, that’s the American way.”
Yep. It sure is, buddy. It sure is.
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