I am one of the vast majority of Americans who has no intention of seeing 300 anytime soon, least of all in a movie theatre. I haven't been to a movie since Jesus Is Magic convinced me that Sarah Silverman might be a tad overrated, and I don't see what it is I get for $10 that I can't get with my monthly cable bill, where I don't get overcharged for parking and popcorn. So my critique is based not on the film's merits, but on what I understand its political message to be.

The film, as I understand, is about the Battle of Thermopolae, in which 300 Spartan warriors defended a narrow pass against the onslaught of thousands of soldiers from the Persian empire 2500 years ago. Some see the depiction as an allegory for the present-day war in the Middle East, in which the Spartans are: 1) the progenitors of "the West", defending freedom and democracy from the onslaught of the Persian hordes; or 2) the ancestors of the modern-day insurgents/terrorists, defending their liberty from attack by foreign invadors. Since the Nazis had a hard-on for the Spartans, emulating their policies on eugenics and militarism, it's good to remember that the modern day totalitarian state is every bit the creation of our Western Civilization, so both views might be right.

But there is another tie-in with Nazi ideology that I thought I would mention, and it has to do with the villain of the movie, King Xerxes. It seems strange that this film would be so embraced by neo-cons everywhere, considering that he is described quite differently in that cornerstone of Western Civilization, the Bible. As anyone who has ever attended Sunday School, CCD, or celebrated the Festival of Purim, the same Xerxes who is portrayed in the movie as a monomaniacal god-king, a prancing and swaggering homosexual, is also the enlightened ruler who stopped a conspiracy within his own palace to exterminate the Jews living in the Persian Empire.

One would be hard-pressed to find a foreign ruler who is described as sympathetically in the Bible as Xerxes the Great (or Ahasuerus, to use the Hebrew name) is in the Book of Esther. Not only was his wife one of the great heroines of the Bible, but it is also written that her uncle Mordechai "was next unto king Ahasuerus, and great among the Jews, and accepted of the multitude of his brethren, seeking the wealth of his people, and speaking peace to all his seed." Almost certainly, the Coalition of the Willing that advanced with Xerxes onto the plains of Greece, and won the Pyrrhic victory at Thermopolae, included Judeans. No wonder the Nazis identified with Sparta; when things began to go south for the Germans at Stalingrad, it was the Spartan's desperate defense at Thermopolae that Goebbels used to rally the troops.

So why isn't AIPAC denouncing this film? Why is Abe Foxman silent? Here you have a film committing a blood libel on one of the best friends Jews ever had in the ancient world, a global superpower five centuries before the birth of Christ whose alliance (at least according to Biblical legend) with the descendents of Abraham was comparable with that of the United States today, and no one is up in arms over the Jimmy Carteresque portrayal of noble King Xerxes?