ANKARA – Ironically, the recent controversy over the Danish cartoons depicting Muhammad is only the second-biggest catalyst for anti-Americanism in Turkey this week.

The biggest would be the release of the widely-hyped new movie, “Kurtlar Vadisi Irak,” or “Valley of the Wolves Iraq.” The movie is a spin-off of “Valley of the Wolves,” a cheesy television show about gangsters in which Sharon Stone taped a cameo a little while back, playing an American gangster. The movie itself is a bouillabaisse of conspiracy theories about the American military doing nefarious deeds to Turks and Iraqis; imagine “Rambo” as written by Jane Fonda, Michael Moore, al-Jazeera, and former Iraqi minister of propaganda “Comical Ali.”

In the film, American soldiers in Iraq attack a wedding and pump a little boy full of lead in front of his mother, slaughter dozens of innocent people, shoot the groom in the head, and assist a Jewish doctor in an organ-harvesting scheme in which he strip-mines the organs of Iraqis and sells them to wealthy clients in New York, London, and Tel Aviv.

The film format for this propaganda is new, but the sentiment isn’t; last year’s hit novel “Metal Storm” depicted an American invasion of Turkey. The “Metal Storm” authors have begun creating spinoffs and copycats multiplying more rapidly than the “Left Behind” series.

Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey said he liked the movie very much, according to the Turkish newspaper Milliyet, and Parliament Speaker Bulent Arinc said it was “great.”

Ismet Berkan, a columnist for the Radikal newspaper, describes a friend’s reaction to the film: “You’re mistaken and think small if you believe the film will only fuel American enmity. It isn’t only American enmity that is fueled here; we are also told why we must hate America. Which is to say, if you haven’t found a reason up until today to hate America, don’t worry – you will have after watching the movie.”

Yet when asked if the film would harm U.S.-Turkish ties, Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul said he “doesn’t think so … This movie is nothing when compared to certain films recently made in America. Cooperation between our countries is to everybody’s interest. Such films can be made as long as they do not insult and disrespect.”

Presumably, Mr. Gul is referring to programs like the last season of Fox’s hit series “24,” which portrayed a group of not-terribly-plausible Turkish terrorists. (About 750 suspected and confirmed terrorists have been detained at Guantanamo Bay since September 11. Of the 426 prisoners whose home countries have been identified, nine are Turks. Turks were also offended by the fact that the purportedly Turkish bad guys wrote and spoke Arabic.)

One wonders about Mr. Gul’s criteria; if the movie’s content doesn’t seem “insulting and disrespectful,” what does?

Of course, the usual knee-jerk Bush opponents in outlets like the Huffington Post are claiming that “Valley of the Wolves Iraq” represents a failure of Karen Hughes’s nascent public diplomacy program. Of course, left unsaid by the critics is any sense of just what the U.S. State Department and/or White House could do to stop an independent Turkish movie studio from producing a movie with anti-American messages. Perhaps America could have filed a protest through our embassy, but that doesn’t mean that the Turkish government would or should have stepped in and prevented the production or release of the movie. In fact, it almost certainly would have been counter-productive.

Any American who doesn’t want to see his country’s soldiers portrayed as irredeemable sadists has had his efforts complicated by the movie’s American stars: Billy Zane, who plays a self-professed peacekeeper sent by God, and Gary Busey as the Jewish-American doctor. In Hollywood, it may be common to sell out your own mother for a name above the title and a share of the home video rights, but Mr. Zane and Mr. Busey have now demonstrated that they’re willing to contribute to the vilest propaganda for some Turkish lira.

The Turks will be the Turks; they love conspiracy theories, and have suspected that the rest of the world is out to get them since World War I. America is only the latest, most convenient villain in their pop culture. It’s illuminating that in many parts of the world, America is hated for what it has done – deposed the Taliban, invaded Iraq, supported Israel; among certain groups of Turks, America is hated for what it does in fictional books and movies. The American equivalent to this would be for Americans’ foreign policy views to be focused on countering the threat of James Bond villain Ernst Stavro Blofeld.

Clearly, if Mel Gibson’s “The Passion of the Christ” received some brickbats for what some Jews found to be anti-Semitic overtones, two American actors helping reenact “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion” for a modern audience deserve the fullest rebuke. A member of the armed forces who Mr. Busey has slandered might have a harsher reaction; he or she might conclude that the anything-for-a-paycheck actor deserves to get slugged in his freakishly giant teeth.

A Turk demonizing and slandering American soldiers is outrageous, but American actors helping them out is unforgivable.

Mr. Geraghty, a contributing editor to National Review, is the author of a book on terrorism and voters that will be published in August 2006 by Simon and Schuster.