He's also the voice of Treebeard...

I loved an interview with John Rhys-Davies, in NRO. He's the guy who played Gimli in Lord of the Rings, and Sallah in Raiders of the Lost Ark.

....He recalled a conversation with his father back in the summer of 1955 as the two of them overlooked the Dar Es Salaam harbor in Tanzania. He remembers his father pointing to a boat and saying, "Twice a year it comes down from Aden [in Yemen]. It stops here and goes down [south]. On the way down it's got boxes of machinery and goods. On the way back up it's got two or three little black boys on it. Now, those boys are slaves. And the United Nations will not let me do anything about it."

As the conversation continued on that warm summer day, his father said, "Look, boy, there is not going to be a world war between Russia and the United States. The next world war will be between Islam and the West." "Dad, you're nuts," Rhys-Davies responded. "The Crusades have been over for hundreds of years!'" (Precocious as it sounds at age 11, he points out that he did indeed know a "bit about history.") After all, it was 1955. Dwight D. Eisenhower was president of the United States and the Cold War was front-burner foreign policy.

His father responded, "Well, I know but militant Islam is on the rise again. And you will see it in your lifetime."

Rhys-Davies says that interviews like this are going to doom his career. I'm not sure how serious he is. It will be very interesting to see what happens...

Posted by John Weidner at December 17, 2003 7:51 AM