Meryl Streep’s lambasting of Donald Trump during last Sunday’s Golden Globes telecast was choice. It’ll be remembered as a legendary moment in her late-career phrase. She’s been saluted as a heroic figure for taking a strong humanist stand in deploring Trump’s “instinct to humiliate.” And in so doing Streep briefly energized the dispirited liberal troops, many of whom have been in states of shock and depression since the election.
I was also personally moved by Streep’s speech. If I had been there I would’ve stood up and cheered. But in the back of my mind my feelings would have been mixed.
I had a brief chat with Streep during the 2015 Telluride Film Festival that suggested that Streep may be a little too much of a knee-jerk, Ben Affleck-style liberal when it comes to Muslims. Certainly in terms of respecting or valuing liberal segments of Muslim society, those people in favor of freedom of speech and respecting the rights of women and gays.
During that infamous Real Time with Bill Maher segment in which neuroscientist Sam Harris debated Affleck about certain aspects of Muslim culture, Harris (also the author of Islam and the Future of Tolerance) summed up his view as follows: “Liberals have really failed on the topic of Islamic theocracy [because] the doctrine of Islam is a motherlode of bad ideas. Liberals will criticize white theocracy. They’ll criticize Christians. But when you want to talk about the treatment of women and gays and liberals and free thinkers in the Muslim world they pull back.”
This is pretty much where Streep was coming from, I felt, when we briefly got into it at Telluride’s Arroyo Wine Bar.
It was during a gathering for Sarah Gavron’s Suffragette, in which Streep plays British suffragette leader Emmeline Pankhurst. I sidled up to her and asked what she thought of Davis Guggenheim’s They Called Me Malala, an affecting if somewhat sermonizing doc about teenaged education activist Malala Yousafzai.
“We’re living through quite a time, aren’t we?” Streep said. “With films like this, people are really getting an understanding what an arduous struggle it was and still is in many places to be a woman.” I replied that Suffragette really conveyed this to me, the struggle aspect.
Then I mentioned Islam’s notoriously repressive beliefs and confining policies about women. Streep gave me one of those narrow-eyed “oh, yeah?” looks.
Me: “What, you don’t subscribe to the view that Islamic culture is the worst in the world in terms of repressing women, keeping them from being educated, making them subservient to men, and all that?”
Streep: “I don’t really know all that much about Islam. Do you?” Which meant that unless I was some kind of renowned Islamic scholar who’s been to the Middle East and absorbed the culture firsthand, perhaps I, a typical Los Angeles film critic type, might not want to make too many assumptions.
Me: “Well, when you put it that way, no. I’ve never spent any time in the Middle East or studied Islamic faith. But others have studied it and the culture, and there’s a considerable body of opinion that Muslims are not what anyone would call enlightened as far as women are concerned.”
Daily Mail columnist Baz Bamigboye was listening in and suggested to Meryl that the Muslim faith has been hijacked by radicals.
Streep: “I think that Malala showed that there are some enlightened aspects of Islam…open minds, kind hearts…that Islam can be a forgiving faith.”
She just didn’t want to go there. But it reminded me of something Hillary Clinton said in the wake of the November 2015 massacre in Paris: “Islam is not our adversary…Muslims are peaceful and tolerant and have nothing whatsoever to do with terrorism.”
At the very least that’s a disputed view of things. An Pew poll from that same month found that a small but noteworthy percentage of Muslims in nations with significant Muslim populations support ISIS, for instance. Harris stated on that Real Time episode that the number of Muslims supporting nutty Jihadists (out of an approximate tally 1.6 billion Muslims across the globe) might be a bit higher.
“The bottom line,” I wrote in a piece from that period, “is that a small percentage of Muslims support ISIS, and that the possibility of a Muslim community harboring or shielding ISIS militants is not, at the very least, a crazy racist notion.”
And yet two-and-half months earlier, Streep seemed to believe (or so I surmised) that anything short of an ultra-kindly, liberal, open-armed approach to all Muslims everywhere was perhaps a little short-sighted.
I will always love and worship Streep, but it’s probably fair to say that she has her blind spots like the rest of us.
Jeffrey Wells writes the Hollywood Elsewhere blog
