Ignorant Race-Baiting From the Guardian Spike Lee

This post originally ran at The Dread Pundit Bluto on October 22, 2006. It serves again, now that race-baiting director Spike Lee has launched a fresh assault on Clint Eastwood's Iwo Jima movies.

The Drudge Report, which should know better, links to this pathetically uninformed Guardian story [in] which [Spike Lee, linked above at the Timesonline] tries to foment racial resentment, and, incidentally, attack a rarity in Hollywood these days - an unabashedly patriotic movie.

Flags of Our Fathers opened yesterday [October 21, 2006], 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.

[Lee has pretty much repeated the Guardian's charges] The Guardian is not a newspaper [and Spike Lee is not a director] 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 [or a director who makes money by provoking racial tensions], whose editors are so blindingly stupid [the Timesonline has repeated this stupid part in their Lee story] that they don't even know the difference between a soldier and a Marine, to seek to foment racial tension.