At Slate, Richard Morgan has a piece on the rise of virulently anti-American popular entertainment in Turkey: Turkey’s anti-American pop culture. (Hat tip: Fjordman.)

Allies aren’t supposed to behave like this. In Turkey—a stable secular Muslim democracy that’s practically European—the country’s biggest-budget-ever movie, Valley of the Wolves: Iraq, is preparing to hit shelves on DVD and is scheduled for a U.S. theatrical release this summer. Based on a television series that has been a record-breaking hit for four seasons, it’s a military thriller about an elite Turkish intelligence officer who near-single-handedly smites a group of reckless U.S. soldiers who make Abu Ghraib look like a Sunday picnic. The film, which received some press coverage in the States, is only part of a wave of anti-American pop culture that’s sweeping the country.

Valley of the Wolves: Iraq starts off factually enough, with a depiction of a July 4, 2003, incident in which around 100 soldiers from the U.S. Army’s 173rd Airborne Brigade stormed the barracks of a Turkish special forces office in Iraq, arresting 11 Turks who allegedly were planning to assassinate the Kurdish governor of the oil-rich city of Kirkuk. The Americans not only handcuffed the Turks but also forced hoods over their heads and held them in custody for more than two days. The U.S. government later apologized, explaining that its soldiers couldn’t tell the difference between Turks and Iraqi insurgents because the Turks were not in uniform. Turkey didn’t buy it, and this blockbuster is the payback.

As the flick takes a sharp turn toward fiction, one of the 11 Turks in the 2003 debacle commits suicide to regain his warrior honor. His suicide note is sent to Polat Alemdar, the Turkish intelligence officer who stars in the Valley of the Wolves television show. Alemdar heads to Iraq to find U.S. Special Forces Cmdr. Sam William Marshall (played by Billy Zane), who, in his role as a self-described “peacekeeper of God,” is busy leading a massacre of machine-gun fire on unsuspecting civilians at an Iraqi wedding. Survivors are sent to a facility where a Jewish-American doctor (played by Gary Busey) pulls out human hearts with Mengelian apathy and sells them to aristocrats in London, New York, and Tel Aviv. When one of the American soldiers expresses concern that a truckful of Iraqi civilians are packed in too tight to breathe, a fellow soldier stops the car and bullet-soaks the trailer and its human cargo. “I was making sure they could breathe,” he quips, pointing to the holes in the truck.

Morgan doesn’t seem to notice that the character played by Gary Busey in this film is an appalling antisemitic caricature. And after recounting the near-psychotic, often delusional hatred of America that’s so prevalent in Turkey, Morgan’s conclusion is that we’re just as bad. After all, there was Midnight Express.

During a recent vacation to Istanbul, I did hear one complaint more than a few times, a long-lingering wound to their national pride: the hugely popular 1978 American film Midnight Express, which was nominated for six Oscars and won one for its writing. In it, Billy Hayes, an American tourist jailed for smuggling hashish, tells a Turkish court, “For a nation of pigs, it sure seems funny that you don’t eat them! Jesus Christ forgave the bastards, but I can’t! I hate! I hate you! I hate your nation! And I hate your people! And I f**k your sons and daughters because they’re pigs! You’re all pigs!” So perhaps one good movie deserves another.