Two weeks ago, Frank Miller caused a bit of a stir by writing about the Occupy Wall Street protesters. He didn’t have anything nice to say. The backlash was impressive. A lot of fans hate him now. I feel sorry for him.

This is a serious, political post, so if you don’t want part of that, skip this and we’ll get to some regularly scheduled dick jokes later. Incidentally, Saints Row: The Third gives you a bonus if you shoot 25 guys in the nuts.

Now, as I said before, I feel sorry for Frank Miller. No, it’s not because he’s being judged unfairly by people attacking him for his political beliefs, because his beliefs are disagreeable and, more importantly, were expressed in such a vitriolic and hateful way that any dislike for him after reading his words is perfectly justified to anyone who is politically aware.

I feel sorry for him because he let 9/11 destroy him. This isn’t just about his anger against OWS, which could have been expressed in much better ways, but in the undercurrent of aggression in that, and in his recent works. The graphic novel Holy Terror came out just a few months ago, over ten years after the attacks. It was originally going to be called Holy Terror, Batman!, and be a DC-published book featuring the Dark Knight fighting terrorists. It ended up being a giant pile of helplessly enraged garbage. It also ended up showing me and anyone else how much Frank Miller has let the attacks destroy him.

Let me summarize the story to you. Not-Batman chases Not-Catwoman. Muslim terrorists attack Not-Gotham City. Not-Batman freaks out and becomes Kinda-Punisher, going after the terrorists in their comedically large Muslim Terrorist Cave, which is of course a giant mosque and not in any way related to the “ground zero mosque” controversy of a few years ago. Rage, rage, kill kill, the terrorists all die and Frank Miller plays out his impotent revenge fantasy on paper. That’s all it is. Revenge fantasy.

Also, there’s an ex-Mossad vigilante that looks like a Frank Miller version of the Hebrew Hammer, with a blue Star of David on his face and two Asian girls flanking him, but… that’s just Frank being himself.

The main thing is that it’s blind rage against Muslims, because of 9/11. Muslim terrorists are “the bad guys,” they kill lots of people because of Muslim things, and the impotent liberals in the background, like the caricature of Obama randomly thrown into a few panels, don’t do anything.

While working on the book, on the anniversary of 9/11, Miller said:

“For the first time in my life I know how it feels to face an existential menace. They want us to die. All of a sudden I realize what my parents were talking about all those years. Patriotism, I now believe, isn’t some sentimental, old conceit. It’s self-preservation. I believe patriotism is central to a nation’s survival. Ben Franklin said it: If we don’t all hang together, we all hang separately.”

Patriotism is not the same as nationalism or jingoism, the latter of which Frank Miller seems to express in his anger. If patriotism is just about self-preservation, about coming together against threats and not about respecting what we have accomplished and trying to become something better, then it’s worthless. It’s empty. It’s a panicked reaction, and not an embrace of the good of this country and the people in it. In his rant against OWS, he backed up and tainted this already extreme view with this:

“Wake up, pond scum. America is at war against a ruthless enemy. Maybe, between bouts of self-pity and all the other tasty tidbits of narcissism you’ve been served up in your sheltered, comfy little worlds, you’ve heard terms like al-Qaeda and Islamicism.”

Over the last few years, Miller’s writings have become nothing more than an outlet for his anger and frustration. Rage against an unwillingness to act against injustice was always a big part of his work, and was one of the big messages of The Dark Knight Returns, but recently it’s become an impotent lashing out against perceived threats without any effort to understand them.

Here’s the thing Frank doesn’t understand, according to what he’s written. There are evil people out there. There are people who will commit unspeakable acts for no reason sane people will understand. They must be fought. However, they do not define entire groups, and they don’t define Islam as a religion or a group. More importantly, by lashing out against all Muslims, instead of focusing on the extremists who commit horrible acts in the name of a fanatical interpretation of their faith, we only help those evil people.

I’m Jewish. I live in south Brooklyn, in a neighborhood with a large Muslim population. These people are not my enemies. They’re my neighbors. My parents rented out half of their house to a Muslim family for a few years, and after they moved they’ve kept in touch. They’re not my parents enemies. They’re my parents’ friends. They aren’t the caricatures of Holy Terror, where seemingly innocent Muslim women walk into clubs and blow themselves up, or where every Muslim man is a screaming lunatic. They’re people. They’re Americans.

Yes, we do live with the threat of fanatics, like those who attacked us on 9/11, or who tried to blow up a car in Times Square, or who tried to blow up their shoes on a plane. But we don’t live under that threat unless we allow ourselves to. Frank Miller has allowed himself to live under the threat of Islamic terrorism, and it has poisoned him and is destroying his career.

We can’t look at Islam as a fundamentally violent and terrible religion, because it isn’t. The 1.8 million Muslims living peacefully in America prove that. There are extremists who must be fought, but by lashing out against all Muslims we only empower them. We must treat Islamic extremists, whether they’re plotting something in a basement in Cleveland or in a cave in Pakistan as outcasts. As failures. As targets for their actions, not their faiths. Just because they’ve poisoned their own beliefs doesn’t mean every Muslim has, but when we act as if they have, we only alienate the reasonable and the peaceful.

People like bin Laden shouldn’t be seen as the popes of Islam. They should be seen as the fucking Fred Phelps of Islam. Jokes. Fanatics. Outcasts, who have tainted their faith with extremism. Those who associate with them should be mocked. Those who support them should be ostracized. And those who their faith and condemn their actions should be given our support, not our suspicion.

I have no doubt that Islamic fundamentalists want to make the entire world a Muslim world, and would want to see America either destroyed or changed to fit their beliefs. You know what? They’re not the only ones, and in this country they lack the military, political, or economic power to have any hope of doing that. No matter what terrorists do, they cannot change the freedoms of this country any more than we allow them. We have already allowed them to make us fear enough to pass various overreaching and useless laws and form overreaching and useless organizations, but we don’t have to continue the trend. We’re not going to blink and find that the terrorists have suddenly turned us into a fundamentalist Islamic state. They cannot do that. They don’t have that power, no matter how many bombs they build or guns they wave.

The eagle in the U.S. seal holds a bundle of arrows with one claw and an olive branch with another. That is how we can defeat any who wish to hurt us. Pursue, capture, and if necessary destroy those who try to hurt us. Those are the arrows. Embrace the moderates and liberals who share in name the faith of those who try to hurt us. Draw a line not between us and them, but between them and the extremists. That’s the olive branch. Peace is a much a tool as war.

Frank Miller has become so petrified at the very idea of Islamicism that he’s let it destroy himself and his faith in humanity. When you see threats around every corner, sooner or later you’re going to hurt an innocent person who’s turning that corner. I feel sorry for Frank Miller, for letting 9/11 and his own fear do this to him. But I forgive him, and I hope he can some day let go of all the hate and aggression he holds.

I can’t forgive him for The Spirit, though. That was just a fucking abomination.