It’s a fact that in Hollywood, they usually favor terrorists and criminals over their victims and their country. From bashing America and bashing the President, to siding with terrorists at Gitmo and wearing orange bracelets in “solidarity”, not to mention continually bash our troops, their patriotism is definitely in question. But it’s not just terrorists who hate America that Hollywood loves. Consider mass murderer Che Guevara and the hipness Hollywood has bestowed upon him. Che merchandise can be found just about everywhere, and vapid celebrities talk about him as if he were some sort of freedom-loving revolutionary.

The truth, of course, is somewhat different.

But does that matter in Hollywood? Of course not! In fact, they’ve made a new movie honoring Che Guevara.

“I’d like to dedicate this to the man himself, Che Guevara!” announced Benicio del Toro this May, as he received a “best actor” award for his starring role in Che, a reverent new film about the communist revolutionary. As the crowd at the Cannes Film Festival erupted in thunderous ovation, the Puerto Rico-born actor gushed that “I wouldn’t be here without Che Guevara, and through all the awards the movie gets you’ll have to pay your respects to the man!”

But some stubbornly refuse to pay their respects. Thus, the actor received a much cooler reception when Che, directed by Oscar-winner Steven Soderbergh, had a private screening in Miami Beach this past Thursday. Cuban-Americans, including the mayor of Miami Beach, protested the 4-and-a-half hour glorification of the man they consider a Stalinist mass-murderer.

Miami’s media proved equally unwelcoming. At a press conference after the screening in Miami Beach’s Byron Carlyle Theater, Marlene Gonzalez of the Spanish language America TeVe network asked del Toro about some glaring omissions in the movie. What of Che’s role in ordering the executions of ordinary Cubans? And why no mention of the forced-labor camps established on the guerilla fighter’s orders? A suddenly hurried Del Toro denied that Che bore any culpability for these horrors. He refused even to admit Che’s bitter falling out with Fidel Castro, claiming that, to the contrary, the two always got along splendidly and that Castro was genuinely heartbroken when Che was captured and killed after fighting to his last bullet.

The contrast made for a moving scene. As protestors outside the Carlyle Theater brandished pictures of relatives murdered by Che Guevara, del Toro paid tribute to their murderer. Questions about Che’s brutalities – meticulously recorded in books like Exposing the Real Che Guevara – he brushed aside as the embittered fabrications of Cuban exiles.

… The Cuban Film Institute is an arm of Stalinist Cuba’s propaganda ministry. On December 7, Castro’s own press ministry announced that “Actor Benicio del Toro presented the film (at Havana’s Karl Marx Theater) as he thanked the Cuban Film Institute (ICAIC) for its assistance during the shooting of the film, which was the result of a seven-year research work in Cuba.”

That del Toro considers the Cuban regime a reliable source for the film is telling. Consider that the Castro government has jailed more political prisoners as a percentage of population than Stalin’s and executed more people (out of a population of 6.4 million) in its first three years in power than Hitler’s executed (out of a population of 70 million) in it’s first six. These figures come from the human rights group Freedom House and from the Black Book of Communism, authored by French scholars and translated into English by Harvard University Press, not exactly headquarters for the vast-right wing conspiracy.

Yet celebrities will always be the first ones to screech “CENSORSHIP!” if someone so much as dares to disagree with their opinion or say that something is too violent or sexual. See, in Hollywood, they take that whole freedom thing (that the troops they hold in such disdain fight for) for granted. They either don’t understand or don’t care that in many places, that freedom is denied to many people, and oftentimes, it’s denied by people that celebrities worship — at the same time they’re enjoying freedom.

Sad, isn’t it? Sometimes, I wish this kind of willful stupidity could be painful.

Hat Tip: Moonbattery