I think its a mistake to go around boycotting everything we happen to disagree with. When the Da Vinci Code came out and there were protests I thought they were justified due to the historically dishonest nature of the film. With the movie you bring up its not so clear that it is going to be full of deliberate factual distortions; it sounds more like its going to cover an unfortunate event from a perspective many of us (myself included) would probably take issue with. But we can’t go out and encourage that every viewpoint we don’t like or criticism of our position be stifled.
The rape and murder of this Iraqi girl by U.S. troops is something that actually happened, a person has a right to point that out in the medium of film and offer their own perspective no matter how objectionable we might find that perspective to be. For a long time I’ve wanted to serve in our nation’s armed forces upon my graduation. That may very well happen. I have nothing but the deepest respect for the men and women who choose to serve in the military, especially now as so many of them are guaranteed to end up in a combat zone in Iraq or Afghanistan. That being said, my respect for our military and the fact that I like to express that respect to others doesn’t give me the right to say that those who don’t share my worldview shouldn’t also be heard.
As for the possibility of this being used as propaganda to hurt our troops, my opinion on that is that the jihadists are going to make propaganda anyway, they don’t need our help. There’s plenty of material already available to them-they could take a televised speech from our president, doctor it as they see fit, and put it in a video to recruit more jihadists. I don’t know if they actually do this, my point is they wouldn’t need to, they’re already having plenty of success in recruiting and the contribution of some Brian de Palma film to global jihad will most likely be negligible.
