John Rhys-Davies Lashes Out at Political Correctness, Islamic Terror

Perhaps John Rhys-Davies was channeling Gimli, his character from The Lord of the Rings‘ trilogy, because the Welsh actor delivered a soliloquy late Monday about good and evil and even warned of the end of days courtesy of radical Islamic terrorism and political correctness.

“There is an extraordinary silence in the West,” said Rhys-Davies on Adam Carolla’s podcast posted Monday night. “Basically, Christianity in the Middle East and in Africa is being wiped out — I mean not just ideologically but physically, and people are being enslaved and killed because they are Christians. And your country and my country are doing nothing about it.”

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Carolla elicited laughter from Rhys-Davies when he asked him when it became fashionable to refrain from judging outsiders.

“This notion that we’ve evolved into a species that’s incapable of judging other groups and what they are doing, especially when it is beheading people or setting people on fire or throwing acid in the face of schoolgirls — I like that kind of judging. It’s evolved!” said Carolla.

Carolla joked that if Bill Maher had a show during World War II, Americans would not have fought the Nazis because the comedian’s guests would have been “screaming” about tolerance.

“This is a unique age. We don’t want to be judgmental,” said Rhys-Davies, who’s also known for his role in the Indiana Jones franchise. “Every other age that has come before us has believed exactly the opposite. I mean, T.S. Eliot referred to ‘the common pursuit of true judgment.’ Yes. That’s what it’s about. Getting our judgments right.”

Rhys-Davies was on Carolla’s podcast — which has been recognized by Guinness World Records as the world’s most popular podcast — to promote the DVD release of Return to the Hiding Place, a film about Jews in Holland during World War II that was directed and written by Peter C. Spencer, also a guest on Monday night’s podcast.

“It’s an age where politicians don’t actually say what they believe,” said Rhys-Davies. “They are afraid of being judged as being partisan. Heaven forbid that we should criticize people who, after all, share a different value system. ‘But it’s all relevant. It’s all equally relative. We’re all the same. And God and the devil, they’re the same, aren’t they, really? Right and wrong? It’s really just two faces of the same coin,’ ” he said, mocking what he sees as politically correct doctrine.

“We have lost our moral compass completely, and, unless we find it, we’re going to lose our civilization. I think we’re going to lose Western European Christian civilization, anyway,” said Rhys-Davies.

Listen to the podcast here. The discussion of politics, good and evil and Islamic terror begins around the 14-minute mark.

Email: Paul.Bond@THR.com