FP: Darius LaMonica, welcome to Frontpage Interview.

LaMonica: Hi Jamie, and it's great to speak with FrontPage. I'm a reader of the website and have followed David Horowitz's writings for some time so I'm pleased to talk to you.

FP: What made you produce Matamoros ? Tell us exactly what it is about.

LaMonica: My co-writer, Sleet, actually made the decision with an off-hand remark. Last year we were having a discussion about how popular culture has ignored the war with radical Islam and our talk turned to the death of Steve Rogers, Marvel Comics' original Captain America. Sleet was particularly annoyed at this event and said to me "You're a comic book fan. Why don't we write our own comic?" So we wrote a script and I decided to contact the popular political cartoon team of Cox & Forkum for an artist referral since neither Sleet nor I can draw. John Cox read the script and really enjoyed it so he decided to come on board with the project instead of referring us to another artist.

"Matamoros" follows an American NCO, Charles Sobietti, who is wounded in the war, undergoes an experimental medical procedure to recover, returns home to New York to recuperate and then discovers a radical Islamic terror cell in Queens. We put Sobietti in New York because radical Islam has been there for quite a while. The blind sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman reached New York mosques in 1990 and currently a radical group called the Islamic Thinkers Society is located in Queens. This group is believed to be an offshoot of the UK's al Mahajiroun, the radical group that is now banned by the British government. And of course we all know what radical Islam did to New York in 2001.

FP: Why the title?

LaMonica: As a comic book reader, I think it's an interesting title since it's a Spanish word and the average reader might not know what it means. There's a fun little scene in the book that involves the ranting of a media "talking head" that leads to the book's title and I thought that it was a "realistic" take on how the media might name a real-life vigilante.

When we began the writing process, we wanted a story that would address today's threat of radical Islamism but would also point out that today's jihadists see themselves as the successors to the Islamic armies who rode out from the Arabian desert to establish a Caliphate which stretched from Persia to the Atlantic Ocean. I remembered the Spanish legend of St. James, the patron saint of Spain, and how he appeared before the Spanish forces during their fight against the Umayyads at the battle of Clavijo in the ninth century. After the battle, the Spanish called the saint "Santiago Matamoros," or "St. James the Moor-slayer," and used his cross-the Cross of St. James-as an emblem for an order of Knights, the Order of Santiago, during the reconquista of the Iberian peninsula. I ran the idea by Sleet, and the name stuck.

And today's jihadists do see their mission as reestablishing the Caliphate. All one needs to do is read the source writings of today's jihadists-like in Ray Ibrahim's "Al Qaeda Reader"-in order to find this motivation. Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was especially fond of talking about trying to establish an Islamic state in the old heart of the Caliphate-modern day Iraq-until a bomb from an F-16 finally shut him up.

And our use of this word in the title has nothing to do with a desire to start some type of religious war. I've already dealt with fools raising this straw man against the book. They're completing missing the point of the title, which is to show that we've got to get inside the heads of today's jihadists to determine their motivation for attempting to restart a global jihad. These creeps are already talking about the "tragedy of Andalusia (Muslim Spain)" and how they want it back. And they're not basing these threats on some "root cause" of poverty - they're basing it on their notion that they have a religious duty to re-conquer any areas that once were held by the Caliphate. This is the same basis for their desire to conquer Israel and the people in Spain who voted Jose Aznar out of office had better realize that if Israel falls to radical Islam, Spain is going to be the next country in the jihadists' crosshairs.

FP: Why do you think most of popular entertainment and Western academia confronts Islamo-fascism with moral equivalence in comparison to our own side? And then why does it refuse to use moral equivalence in reverse? In other words, when the Islamists do something evil, they point to something Bush or America did that they consider just as bad if not worse. But when our side is accused of something, they never point to the enemy and start equivocating.

LaMonica: Part of this is related to the whole notion of the loss of an "objective" sense of right and wrong which forms the basis of moral and cultural relativism. Let's face it-the counterculture won big in the cultural wars and today it's un-PC even to call Islamofascists evil.

I think the "elitist left" frames the war with radical Islamism through a post-colonial Edward Said-ian lens. They view radical Islam as some type of "people's reaction" against western "imperialism"-as if Islamism is some type of "liberation theology" which aims to empower peasants struggling against plantation owners through the crescent instead of the cross. It's as if the left views these Islamist thugs as drinking coffee and reading Gramsci while plotting to overthrow the bourgeoisie. They're stuck in a mindset and can't seem to process the information which would indicate that Islamism doesn't fit with this post-colonial worldview.

I would love to add Efraim Karsh's "Islamic Imperialism: A History" to the reading list of leftists. I'd like to hear their take on the 1400 year expansion of Islam. This expansion was an imperial effort which didn't always involve peaceful conversions and was based in the theology of jihad. When Islamic military forces took over an area, the culture was Islamized; modern day Iraq was populated by Assyrians and Chaldeans who were later Islamized and Arabized. Again, here's some information which doesn't fit the left's view of a happy, peaceful world which was ruined solely by the European colonial powers.

Bernard Lewis concludes his excellent little book called "Cultures in Conflict" with a passage in which he states that all civilizations have evils such as slavery on their hands but the genius of Western civilization was to identify these faults and to remedy them. The British ended the slave trade on the world's seas; the United States fought its bloodiest war over slavery; today the West is outraged at de facto slavery through human trafficking and child labor. Slavery wasn't abolished in Yemen and Saudi Arabia until 1962; the Ottoman Turks based their janissary corps on slavery; Islamists see human beings as legitimate war booty and I have yet to see Yusuf al Qaradawi apologize for the Islamic role in the slave trade. Yet somehow we're to see both of these civilizational actions involving human chattel slavery as equivalent?

FP: Why won't most of popular entertainment and the media portray U.S. and other coalition troops as heroes?

LaMonica: It's amazing to me how Hollywood completely ignores the valor of our men and women in the war with radical Islamism and Arab tyrants. In 1944 Audie Murphy manned an armor mounted .50 caliber machine gun, held off a German advance and won the Congressional Medal of Honor. In April, 2003 Sgt. Paul Smith used a .50 caliber machine mounted on a troop carrier, held of an Iraqi advance and won the Congressional Medal of Honor posthumously. Smith was every bit as heroic as Audie Murphy; Hollywood put Murphy in an autobiographical movie and I'll wager the only people who know about Smith are the viewers of the History Channel.

Part of the answer is an economic one. Hollywood is now a "global" industry and they've decided to make their product palatable to a global audience. To Hollywood elites, the whole world is a cauldron of anti-American hatred and they've adjusted their product accordingly. The average Pole, Lithuanian or Czech who might love the U.S. military for liberating them during World War II or the Cold War doesn't come into contact with Hollywood liberals at their wine parties so their opinions don't enter the equation. It's the "How could Ronald Reagan have won? I don't know anybody who voted for him!" syndrome. Hollyweirdos operate in small, close-knit circles and they don't associate themselves with blue collar types in either the U.S.A. or Europe who might want to see a movie showing heroic soldiers fighting Islamists.

FP: Your thoughts on the self-loathing of many academic elites in the West regarding Western Civilization?

LaMonica: This is a topic which really frightens me. I think Mark Steyn has done an amazing job documenting the loss of civilizational confidence in Europe and I think there is a relationship between Europe's population bust and this loss of confidence. As Steyn points out, people who have a nihilistic outlook aren't exactly optimistic enough to want to have families. I just finished "Decline and Fall: Europe's Slow Motion Suicide" by classics professor Bruce Thornton and he also addresses European self-hatred.

Actually, the comic book's cover makes a point on Europe 's self-destruction. The cover shows a Moorish-style doorway with a crumbling painted Cross of Santiago Matamoros -the emblem worn by the Knights of the Order of Santiago during the reconquista-painted on the wall. It looks like a locale from the reconquista hundreds of years ago. But the cross is crumbling, old and forgotten-almost like the status of Western civilization in Europe . And instead of a European soldier, the cover shows an American soldier. It's as if the Europeans have given up fighting against the jihadist imperative to "fight until all men say ‘there is no god but Allah.'" Now it's up to the 21^st century's successor to those old Spanish knights-the American military.

I doubt many European elites know about the Order of Santiago and if they do I'm sure they would call those Knights thuggish Islamophobes who destroyed that allegedly tolerant paradise of Andalusia which was so wonderful that both Averroes and Moses Maimonides had to run for their lives from the Iberian peninsula . The Spanish knights who fought the reconquista were outnumbered, outgunned and fought the imperialistic superpower of their day. They were fighting to get their country back. Europe has nothing to be ashamed of regarding those men, but dhimmified elites are today banning images and events related to St. James and the reconquista in Spain because they're deemed "offensive."

When a civilization can't even take pride in a fight related to its own survival, that civilization is in a heap of trouble.

FP: What do you hope to achieve with your comic book and with America's first anti-jihadist comic book hero?

LaMonica: I'd really like two things to happen with the book.

First, I'd like the readers to get interested in "World War IV" as Norman Podhoretz calls the current conflict. We've added some little "clues" in the book - the historical references with Sobietti's name, a panel that references "asymmetric warfare," etc. - which add to the plot.

Second, we really want the men and women in uniform to see one pop cultural artifact that's showing them as valorous in their fight against Islamofascism. The highlight of this book for me was sending some copies to a few soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan. If they can get fifteen minutes of entertainment out of the book and know that they're fighting a true enemy of civilization then I'll consider the book a rousing success.

FP: We wish you every success in that effort. Thank you for helping in giving respect to our fighting men and women in the battle against Islamo-Fascism. They truly are modern-day heroes.

Again, to all of our interested readers, go to MatamorosComic.com and you can order and read up on the book there.

Darius LaMonica, thank you for joining Frontpage Interview.

LaMonica: Thank you, Jamie - and thanks to the FrontPage staff for its
excellent work.