February 11, 2002	Monday	Ziqa’ad 27, 1422

NEW YORK: Ex mayor Rudy Giuliani, who until recently was as much a superhero as one can be in the US, is now beginning to see his popularity erode. Especially last week, as he took heat from New York City’s police and firefighter unions who criticized the former mayor for supporting the just-released Arnold Schwarzenegger action movie Collateral Damage.

In the film, which has just been released in America, Schwarzenegger portrays a Los Angeles firefighter determined on avenging the “terrorists” responsible for killing his family. Warner Brothers originally scheduled the film for an Oct 5, 2001 release, but decided to hold off following the Sept 11 attacks. For the protesters who rallied around the World Trade Centre site last Sunday, no delay could have been long enough, as far as they are concerned. They attacked in particular the film’s depiction of the “terrorists” in question, who happen in this case to be Colombian villains, and accused the studio of unnecessarily exploiting last year’s tragic events.

Giuliani became the target too of the protesters’ criticism when he announced his intention of attending a special screening of the film, which supposedly would be attended also by police officers and firefighters who had taken part in rescue operations at the World Trade Centre. The presence of Giuliani, a friend of Schwarzenegger’s, was evoked in a Warner Brothers press release, which linked his appearance to the Twin Towers Fund he established while in office.

After declining to comment on the allegations of insensitivity and opportunism the film has stirred up, Warner Brothers sought to remind journalists that Schwarzenegger, who is on the board of directors of the Twin Towers Fund, had already donated $1 million to the special fund destined to assist victims of the tragedy and their families.

The reaction to the film comes in the wake of a joint decision by Hollywood and the White House of George W Bush to undertake a number of film projects supposedly intended to alert public opinion, that of the US, but eventually also that of the world, as to the nature and dangers of “terrorism,” although the images expected to be given of terrorists are already worrying US civil rights activists, especially if they are anything like those given in the most recent Schwarzenegger blockbuster.

Another movie that is expected to evoke the concern of activists is Black Hawk Down, a film about the 1993 raid on Somalia that resulted in the death of eighteen US military, a film that has just received the support of the US Department of Defence.

Though the incident is widely regarded as a military debacle among the US public and elected officials, the movie - produced by Jerry Bruckheimer and based on the 1999 Mark Bowden book of the same name - portrays the mission as a qualified success.

After reviewing the script, the Defence Department’s Los-Angeles based public affairs office - which coordinates Hollywood’s coverage of the US defence establishment, chose to support the movie by providing boot-camp training to the actors, technical advisors, eight helicopters, and more than 100 soldiers - at an estimated cost of $2.2 million.

But then, with the plethora of such films - with their questionable depiction of “terrorists,” indeed of their ambiguous definition of terrorism - that are being presently shot with the support of President Bush and the Defence Department, the belief in Hollywood these days seems to be that the US movie public, indeed that of the world, seems ready to support such ventures for the foreseeable future.