By Debbie Schlussel
Leave it to Steve Martin–yup, that Steve Martin–and a liberal Jew, Jerry Nachmanoff–to make yet another insipid, “they hijacked my religion”/”Christians are terrorists just like Muslims” movie in the mold of Rosie O’Donnell’s ideology.
Now, I know why Steve Martin–who wrote and executive produced this movie–played “The Jerk.” He wasn’t really acting, apparently. His boring Bin Laden cinema, “Traitor“, debuted in theaters, yesterday.
Posters for this awful movie say, “The truth is complicated.” But, more accurately, the truth is actually very simple . . . and it’s not in this movie. Silver screen sleeping pills are, though.
When I first saw the trailer for the movie, I thought it looked like a “blame-America-for-creating-the-Islamic-terrorists” flick.

Real-Life Traitor Steve Martin:
The Jerk Wants You To Know America’s Just Like Islamic Terrorists
It’s that and more. Worse is the highly objectionable moral equivalency that swaths itself throughout this boring, sleep-inducing movie that’s a bad rip off of what was a great Showtime miniseries, “Sleeper Cell.”
The plot is similar: A Black undercover operative who is a devout Muslim goes deep undercover to infiltrate a terrorist cell planning an attack on America. (In this one, the Muslim is Don Cheadle.)
But that’s where the similarities ends.
Whereas “Sleeper Cell” was exciting and mostly accurate from beginning to end, “Traitor” manages to make even explosions, bombs, and terrorist plots extremely dull amidst the non-stop pan-Islamist propaganda pimping throughout. I literally fell asleep several times, desperately trying to stay awake through this almost two hours of drivel.
Cheadle plays Samir Horn, a Sudanese-born son of a man mixed up in the Muslim Brotherhood. His father is blown up when he’s young, and Horn is raised in Chicago by his Muslim mother who dons a hijab and looks like she walked out of Farrakhan-casting central. And yet, somehow, Horn is a moderate helping America fight terrorists? (In real life, not on this planet.) FBI agents don’t know Samir is really a CIA operative on our side.
This movie is peppered with the same old, hackneyed, false narrative about Islam, which we heard from everyone including President Bush right after 9/11.
Here’s a sampling of some of the moral equivalence dialogue peppered throughout this 2-hour ordeal in ennui:
A terrorist says to Samir:

They forget that the Americans were once terrorists to the British.

Funny, this is almost an exact quotation from real-life CAIR (Council on American-Islamic Relations) chief Nihad Awad and MPAC (Muslim Public Affairs Council) chief, Salam Al-Marayati.
When FBI agents visit Samir in a Yemeni jail, one of them tells him that he’s selling weapons to terrorists to kill innocent people. He responds:

America uses bombs on innocent people, too. They just have darker skin.

The FBI agents don’t disagree. And in real life, that’s often the FBI view.
When an investigation is done into Samir’s background, his former employer says they fired him because he’s a Muslim and that their clients don’t like Muslims. That’s the justification–we’re hit over the head with it in this movie–for getting involved with terrorism: because America treats Muslims so badly and discriminates against them at every turn (which is why they flock to live here in the tens of thousands, every year). We’re the real bad guys, we drive them into this life.
When America makes Samir a high-value terrorist target, the terrorists with whom he’s working tell him:

America put a fatwah on you.

Get it?–America puts fatwas on people just like Muslims do. We’re all terrorists. We’re all the same. We’re no better.
We repeatedly hear the hero of the movie and assorted Muslims say the same old BS–“They betrayed Islam”–about terrorists. That’s interesting, because when I watched 10,000 Muslims in Dearbornistan marching daily on the streets to show their support for Hezbollah in 2006, I didn’t hear a single one of ’em say, “They betrayed Islam,” amidst their cheering for “the martyrs.” Not one lamented how Hezbollah murdered over 300 U.S. Marines and civilians in Lebanon and countless other innocent civilians at the Jewish Community Center in Buenos Aires.
And there are plenty of quotes about how Americans, especially Christians, are just like Islamic terrorists. More on that, below.
Some of the movie is actually reflective of reality, but it’s juxtaposed with constructs that Muslims and Hollywood liberals want you to believe:
* Guy Pearce–an actor I used to like (until this movie)–plays the lead FBI counterterrorism agent on the case.
Bad suit–check, awfully-played accent (with Southern comments about “mah deddy, the Baptist minister”)–check, and horribly out-of-date goatee and haircut–check.
Pearce, like many clueless FBI counterterrorism agents I know, thinks he knows everything and is the “expert” on Arabic and Islam. He lets us know that he fell in love with the world’s ugliest language, Arabic. And being the “expert”, he, of course, notes the repeated far-left lie that Christians are terrorists as much as Muslims.

The Klan burns crosses and calls it Christianity. It seems every religion has two faces.

(Yup, remember when Christians blew up the Empire State Building and the Jefferson Memorial on 9/11 and murdered 3,000 Americans? I remember it well, as much as I remember all those embassies in Africa those awful Christians blew up in 1998. And that cruise ship, on which the evil Christians shot and killed a Jewish man in a wheelchair. And then there’s my fave terrorist group, “Christian Jihad.” Etc., Etc., Etc.)
Just to make the point, this stupid moral equivalency dialogue is uttered in response to statements made by his “ignorant”, violent sidekick/partner, FBI agent Neal McDonough (THE Jump the Shark actor for the 2000s–everything he’s in stinks and fails), who swears a lot and really doesn’t understand those peaceful Muslims, what with him uttering things like:

That’s some crazy sh-t, Muslims blowing themselves up for the 72 virgins.

He, of course, beats up Muslim terror suspects like Horn and has a thing or two to learn from the FBI agent who loves Arabic, respects Muslims, and thinks all Christians are Klan terrorists and just as bad as Muslims.
* Islamic terrorists in a terror cell get into the U.S. on student visas, and guess what? Only one of ’em is actually going to college. That’s often true in real life.
But the movie departs reality, when authorities find that out: ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) makes every single Muslim on a visa stand in line at federal buildings and go to intense questioning sessions. Yeah, like that would happen. In my dreams.
As I’ve repeatedly noted on this site, the FBI never pursued a planned program to look into just a few hundred student visas after 9/11, and ICE–for PC reasons–ignores Muslims on student visas and rarely investigates those who violate them and/or overstay. This remains the case, even after it was learned that British Muslim doctor terrorists tried to get medical internships and residencies here.
And, of course, this was used as a construct in the movie for the FBI agent to denounce profiling and comment on how it never works in finding terrorists. Uh, sorry, but it does work. That’s why we don’t do it. That–and political correctness.
* The Islamic terrorists have moles inside the FBI, including an Arabic translator who leaks everything to the terrorists.
That part is, sadly, very true to reality.
But, in this movie, it’s balanced out by very loyal-to-America counterterrorist Muslim Arab FBI agents, like a woman named “Layla.” That part isn’t true. Many Arab and Muslim FBI agents–like Nada Nadim Prouty (a Druze Arab who worked for Hezbollah), Gamal Abdel-Hafiz, and Wilfred Rattigan–have tipped off terrorists and refused to investigate Muslims. Sorry, there ain’t no Special Agent Laylas in real life.
Oh, and by the way, I learned something else Islamic terrorists and we, Americans, have in common. We both “dream in English.” Awww, I knew we were the same.
The most disturbing thing about “Traitor” is not its awful messages of moral equivalency, it’s the movie’s target audience. Because Cheadle is Black, the movie has been promoted ad nauseam in Black America. At a screening I attended, the packed audience received free passes from Detroit Black radio stations. Sadly, they clapped for the movie at the end. Even more tragic, they laughed with and cheered the various anti-American dialogue in the movie, including the line about how America is just like the terrorists because we allegedly bomb innocent victims who “have darker skin.”
Do these people who are voting for Barack Obama really hate America this much? Do these Americans really think America’s that bad? Yes, they do, if this is any indication.
But their reactions reflected naivete and ignorance. The audience, for instance, reacted with shock and laughter to the part of the movie in which Yemeni police help Islamic terrorists break out of prison. But this has happened in real-life in Yemen many times over the last several years. Yes, only a clueless crowd that doesn’t read a paper would like and ignorantly buy into the PR BS put forth in this failed flick.
And Islam is heavily pushed as a respectable, superior religion in this movie, with Cheadle being peaceful, devout, and the movie’s hero at the end. I guess we don’t have enough Black Americans converting to Islam. So, Steve Martin and Jerry Nachmanoff took it upon themselves to help in the proselytizing department. Louis Farrakhan and Ibrahim Hooper thank you, “The Jerk.”
The end of the movie is another rip-off–this time, not from “Sleeper Cell,” but from Judaism. Samir and FBI agent Pearce quote from the Koran about how if you save or take a life, it’s respectively like saving or killing a whole world. But, like much of the Koran, that’s a well-known precept stolen from Judaism. (The parts of the Koran and Islam not stolen from Judaism, are shoplifted from Christianity.)
The only briefly laudable part of this movie is when an FBI agent (Pearce) asks Samir’s mother whether or not her son is a very devout or extremist Muslim. She responds:

He’s a Muslim. I don’t believe there’s a sliding scale.

And this movie is extremely bad. I don’t believe there’s a sliding scale.
FOUR MARXES