Here’s a true story: in an Iranian village in the mid 1990s, a husband with the hots for a 14-year-old girl, wrongly accused his wife of infidelity for which she was stoned to death. Her father, husband and sons all threw stones.

The story has been made into a grisly film, The Stoning of Soraya M. opening today.

In the NYT, critic Stephen Holden writes:

Almost everything is either-or. Soraya is a beautiful martyred innocent and Zahra a stormy feminist prophet. With the exception of the mayor (David Diaan), who has qualms about the execution, and Mr. Caviezel’s reporter, who appears only briefly at the beginning and end of the movie, the men are fiendishly villainous.

Mr. Negahban’s Ali [the scheming husband], who resembles a younger, bearded Philip Roth, suggests an Islamic fundamentalist equivalent of a Nazi anti-Semitic caricature. With his malevolent smirk and eyes aflame with arrogance and hatred, he is as satanic as any horror-movie apparition. The fraudulent local mullah, who collaborates in his scheme after being rejected by Soraya, might as well be carrying a pitchfork and breathing fire.

Assuming the facts of the story, how could the story not be good vs. evil? Comparing the depiction of a truly evil man with the invented, evil stereotype of Jews promulgated by the Nazis is absurd.

Jews do not kidnap Christian children to drink their blood. Primitive Muslims do stone their wives.