Jim Goad on ‘Exodus’: Since When Are Egyptians Not White?

Jim Goad writes:

Irascible octogenarian multibillionaire media oligarch Rupert Murdoch says that Egyptians are white. He also says you need to calm down if you disagree. Twentieth Century Fox—one of Murdoch’s many long, slithering, pipe-snaking media tentacles—will be releasing the biblical epic Exodus: Gods and Kings on December 12, and already the howling uteri of the social-justice battalions are squalling that the film is by its very nature racist since Caucasian actors portray the main Egyptian characters.

According to the film’s director Ridley Scott, the Caucasoid cast was neither a stab at racial revisionism nor an attempt at historical accuracy; it was a matter of financial expediency. Scott told Variety:

“I can’t mount a film of this budget, where I have to rely on tax rebates in Spain, and say that my lead actor is Mohammad so-and-so from such-and-such. I’m just not going to get it financed.”

Still, this didn’t stop the complaints. Nothing ever stops the complaints. Sometimes these days it seems like the only thing that could possibly stop the complaints would be bullets, but that’s a subject for another article entirely.