Steven Spielberg and the Chinese Olympics

Steven Spielberg pulled out from the Chinese Olympics as a political statement on the genocide being committed in the Darfur region of Sudan. China seems a little hesitant at angering a nation that supplies a large portion of its petroleum needs, and so far is by all accounts fairly silent on the issue of the Islamic death squads wiping out entire villages.

Hundreds of thousands of people have been slaughtered in this war torn region - many of them at the hands of their very government. Many killed by what one political expert has called the worst weapon of mass destruction ever employed - the machete.

How is the United States different from China?

The United States regularly and almost-fully supports the government of Saudi Arabia, one of the most politically repressive regimes in the world. A nation with strict adherence to Islamic law. A nation that beheads women for committing adultery. (The punishment for men is incredibly less harsh). This is a nation that is one of the last remaining absolute monarchies in the world.

And Saudi Arabian money is known to flow into the coffers of militant Islamic movements that have as one of their primary objectives the destruction of the United States. Groups that will strap vest-bombs on mentally handicapped women that are triggered by cell phones from a safe distance. Groups that knocked the World Trade Center to the ground in 2001, after failing to cause it much damage in 1993.

The primary source of the wealth of the Saudi billionaire-sheiks? Selling oil - of course. To the United States.

The United States just signed a multi-billion dollar deal with the Saudi kingdom to sell them high-tech military equipment and fighter planes. Which seems to my thinking to be an even more heinous travesty than the "Oil for Food" fiasco that helped catapult the U.S. into war in Iraq.

"Oil for Weapons" to a country with a social and political system completely anathema to the basic precepts under which the United States was founded. A nation that aspires to return the Caliphate into a world power, under Suni law, under Suni control, which has historically ruled by threat of swift and merciless death for anyone who opposes that rule.

Personally, I would like to see Mr. Spielberg or Mel Gibson tackle a film in the vein of "Shindler's List" or "Apocalypso" and show us what the Caliphate of the Ottoman Empire was like during the peak of its power.

But, shouldn't Mr. Spielberg's next logical move be to stop producing films in the United States?