After posting my last essay “Say My Name, Say My Name, It’s Time to Call Hamas the Muslim Brotherhood”, I watched Netflix’s “A House of Dynamite”, a feature movie that explores a US reaction to an unexpected inbound nuclear missile targeting the continental USA.

I’ve seen many such nuclear holocaust films and documentaries over the years, many made in the 1980s at the height of the Cold War. The last cinema feature being Tom Clancy’s “The Sum of All Fears”.

In the book version of “The Sum of All Fears”, that served as the basis for that movie, Tom Clancy created his adversaries as Islamist Extremists. They sought the destruction of the US by setting off a nuke in Denver and having the US believe that it was the USSR, so the two would then massively retaliate against each other and an Islamic caliphate would rise ascendant from the superpowers’ ashes.

However, in the movie that started filming in early 2000, Hollywood had already gone soft on Islamism. It changed its adversaries to Euro-based Neo-Nazis instead.

This was a silly thing to do, because 23 years later, in 2025, Tom Clancy would be proven right.

It isn’t the Ultra Right that’s posing the current existential threat to Western values and democracy (though they’re there), but Radical Islam in the form of the Muslim Brotherhood, its anarchists, financiers, mainstream media, parliamentarians, and its arms trade run by the Islamist regimes of Iran and Turkey through terror proxies across the globe particularly aimed at Israel.

Without spoiling the plot, “A House of Dynamite” teaches us that human-led leaderships are imperfect.

We’re seeing precisely this in the chaos let loose now by governments on the streets of the UK, Canada, Australia, France, Norway, Sweden, Netherlands and other EU countries because their leaders believe that they can keep power, if only they appease Islamist bullies at the expense of the weak.

So, earlier this year for that very reason, the US and Israel took out Iran’s nuclear weapons program for the world. Islamist Extremists cannot own weapons of mass destruction: Pakistan is the exception thankfully showing a relatively tempered political Islam of late and it’s saving its nukes for India.

But who is going to reclaim the streets of London, Birmingham, Oslo, Amsterdam, Paris, Dearborn, New York, Seattle, Sydney and Melbourne (and others) where anarchy threatens to explode like an atomic bomb on pluralism, freedom from fear, cultural vision, creativity and democracy?

I commend “A House of Dynamite” to you for both its story and production value.

Start thinking about tomorrow, because the West as we know it can’t be guaranteed while law, order and justice are not equal for all.

Epilogue: Why did The Sum of All Fears change its plot from Islamist Extremism?

Whether or not you’ve seen the movie “The Sum of All Fears”, I recommend that you forget it and read the book for its original plot as I’ve outlined above. Why did it ever change?

Well, the story goes that the 58-year-old Harrison Ford who’d played Jack Ryan in the prior movie adaptations of Tom Clancy’s Books “The Hunt for Red October” and “Patriot Games” pulled out of “The Sum of All Fears” due to major plot disagreements.

He had reservations with Clancy’s focus on Islamic terrorism. So, the studio re-wrote the script completely removing it. Yet that caused other plot problems and Ford walked away.

Eventually a 29-year-old Ben Affleck stepped in, accepted the new script and the film then astonishingly became a prequel to Red October because its character Jack Ryan was now 30 years younger!

As if that wasn’t bad enough, it turns out that the real reason for the plot change was that the studio itself and Islamic lobbyists such as CAIR had issues with Islamic terrorism depicting Muslims in a bad light: this was pre-9/11 but during the Second Intifada. How the world would soon change. Remember that CAIR (the Council on American-Islamic Relations) is associated with the Muslim Brotherhood.

So, do read the book. This being 2025 you will now see a remarkably believable plot. While the USSR today is Russia, Putin still exhibits the USSR’s mindset for paranoia. You will also glimpse traits of present day Iran, Qatar, Hezbollah and Hamas aka the Muslim Brotherhood as today’s global alliance of Islamic Extremism.

Tom Clancy hated the movie for its plot diversion. But his book remains a page-turner.

If you haven’t seen the movie, just don’t. By the way, if your book happens to show Ben Affleck on its cover, that’s a shame. Just ignore it. Let your imagination replace him and take the ride.

© 2025 Adam Parker.

Picture credit: The boardgame “Labyrinth” by GMT Games available at all good game stores. Labyrinth takes a look at the Global War on Terror giving you the chance to steer its progress as either the Islamists or the US-led Coalition. In this game the Islamist player automatically wins by detonating a Weapon of Mass Destruction in the USA. CAIR didn’t want you to worry about that. Security experts still do. Author’s copy.