Perhaps the actors should stick to acting

I always remember Ben Affleck in that grotesquely inadequate movie Pearl Harbour, in which his character, before beating the entire Japanese military, volunteers to fight for the RAF in the Battle of Britain. The RAF, of course, that was in 1940 composed of a mere handful of Americans but thousands of British, Canadians, Australians, New Zealanders, Poles and Czechs. Ben in this movie is the best of the best, shows the others how to fly and, to the incredulity of the awe-struck Scottish fitter of Ben’s Spitfire — the wrong model for 1940 but we’ll let that pass — takes off to defeat the Luftwaffe even though he’s outnumbered and sure to die. That’s Ben though, heroic all through. 

This sort of saccharine trash is particularly irritating for Canadians because we’d been fighting Nazism for two years before the United States became involved. The point I am making, however, is that Ben Affleck is just an actor. An actor. But because people can look beautiful, read other people’s lines, charm audiences and as a consequence live a life of absolute detachment and wealth, for some reason many of them assume they have a God-given right if not an obligation to speak out on matters political, social and religious. Which is what Ben Affleck has done on television with Bill Maher and the famous atheist Sam Harris. Maher and Harris, though contemptuous of all religions, are sufficiently honest to admit that Islam is the main problem the free and liberal West now faces.