Hollywood Bombs

I found the juxtaposition of articles about how Iran now has enough fissionable material to fabricate an atomic weapon – assuming that they have not done so already – with an LA Times piece about Iran’s quest to secure an apology from Hollywood for the way that industry has depicted Iran in its films… well ironically amusing. After all, Hollywood probably has produced more “bombs” than all the nuclear weapons on earth.

A small U.S. delegation that included Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, President Sid Ganis, and film stars Annette Bening and Alfre Woodard, met this weekend in Tehran to engage in work-shops and discussion groups. A senior Iranian cultural official demanded an apology from the Academy for the "insults and libel" propounded by Hollywood by the American film community. I am reminded of the call (a “fatwa” issued by the late Ayatollah Khomeini) in the late 1980s for loyal Muslims to kill-on-sight Salman Rushdie, the author of the anti-Islamic tome, The Satanic Verses. I note the uproar over the Danish “political cartoon” depiction of Islam in highly critical terms, igniting protests and even killings.

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s response to President Obama’s invitation for dialog – a claim that he would engage in dialog only if the U.S. treated Iran as an equal superpower (which of course carries with it the acceptance of Iran as a legitimate contender in the nuclear arms race) – is evidence of the cultural disconnect between the West and the Middle East. It’s about “respect.”

As the U.N. presses member states to pass a new provision that would mandate each member pass new laws making disrespecting, including criticizing, religion criminal – particularly Islam – we can clearly see that “speech” in Muslim eyes is vastly much less important than “respect.” A law of that kind would clearly violate our First Amendment guarantees of free speech, even though the U.S. also has a dark side of book-banning even by governmental school districts if not major religious groups.

Considering that until the Ottomans began serious decline in the 1700s, being labeled the “sick man of Europe” in the 1800s, with the small exception of the 119-year Crusades, the Islamic world wreaked havoc with the West for most of its history. Muslims were the power, even preserving our great books in their libraries as Western ancestors burned books during the Dark Ages (and at other times in European history). Since the Ottoman’s fall at the end of World War I, the lot of most of the Islamic world has continued to be one of decline and humiliation. Until oil financed and empowered a new source of pride and militancy.

In U.S. prisons, and among the street gangs of our own nation, showing disrespect is grounds for immediate retaliation, which often calls for death as the only real response. Yet the right to “disrespect” in embedded in the sanctity of our First Amendment – a right that most certainly has not found a voice in gang conflicts between Pagans and the Hells Angeles, Crips and Bloods or Norteños and the Sureños – is something that most Americans feel very strongly about. While the notion of free speech is deeply woven into the fabric of Western cultural and political thought, we see laws all over the world abridging free speech, from criticisms of the royal family in very moderate Thailand, general censorship in China to the harsh and often-viewed-as-repressive fundamentalist regimes of the Middle East.

To understand Middle Eastern politics, the problems and the possible solutions to regional conflict, is to understand that one of the driving forces of Middle Eastern politicians as well as religious leaders (often one and the same): to rise above the vast stretches of humiliation imposed on the Middle East and its people by the West and to force the West to acknowledge the superiority and pride of what many in the West consider to be a “backward” and “unenlightened” region. Middle Eastern politicians can always find popular resonance to the extent they drive home the “respect” issue to their constituents.

In the end, this conflict of fundamental values – free speech versus controlled and mandated respect, the barrier to so many of the “lasting solutions” for Middle East peace – becomes the battleground on which the fate of the world may well be decided.

I’m Peter Dekom, and I approve this message.