Sunday, October 22, 2006

Ignorant Race-Baiting From the Guardian

The Drudge Report, which should know better, links to this pathetically uninformed Guardian story designed to foment racial resentment, and, incidentally, attack a rarity in Hollywood these days - an unabashedly patriotic movie.

Flags of Our Fathers opened yesterday, and the Guardian immediately launched their assault[emphasis added]:
in Flags of Our Fathers, Clint Eastwood's big-budget, Oscar-tipped film of the battle for the Japanese island that opened on Friday in the US. While the film's battle scenes show scores of young soldiers in combat, none of them are African-American. Yet almost 900 African-American troops took part in the battle of Iwo Jima, including Sgt McPhatter.
The Guardian is not a newspaper that likes to let a little fact-checking get in the way of a good rant. If they were, they might have found out that the United States sent 110,000 Marines to invade Iwo Jima. That means that the 900 African Americans who participated represented eight tenths of one percent of the invasion force.

So, if the movie, as the Guardian says, portrayed "scores of young soldiers" (and by the way, they weren't "soldiers", they were Marines, you insipid socialist limey jackasses), and we generously allow "scores" to mean "100," that means that a proportional representation of African Americans would require that eight tenths of a Marine be portrayed as black. Given the ferocity of the battle for Iwo Jima, perhaps that would be appropriate.

What's not appropriate is for a foreign leftist scandal rag, whose editors are so blindingly stupid that they don't even know the difference between a soldier and a Marine, to seek to foment racial tension.