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August 3, 2006

Turkey: TV Drops "Jewish" Movie After Islamist Pressure

We reported on June 17 that Turkey's state television channel, TRT, removed the series of Winnie the Pooh, because of the depictions of the bear with very little brain's best friend, Piglet. The decision to remove the Disney show was made following pressure from the government. Employees of the station had then been complaining that the Islamist government of Recep Tayyin Erdogan, the Justice & Development Party (AKP), had been increasingly interfering with their scheduling.

Now, it appears that Islamist pressure has once been brought to bear upon the officially secular nation's state channel. AKI reports that the government-linked daily newspaper Yeni Safak had complained about the placing of an Oscar-winning film, "The Pianist", was an example of "bad timing while Israel was continuing its bombing campaign in Lebanon."

The powerful and moving film won three Academy Awards, including Best Director, for Roman Polanski. It documents a true story of a talented pianist (Adrien Brody) who is taken from a life of success to degradation in the Warsaw ghetto as Nazis gradually decimate the population and reduce the enclave to rubble. Polanski's own mother, who was Roman Catholic, died in Auschwitz because she had married a Jewish man. Polanski himself had escaped the Warsaw ghetto, when his parents were captured.

The movie was to have been shown yesterday, but instead, the station broadcast the movie "Wall Street". Today, the liberal daily newspaper Radikal launched a criticism of TRT, stating that the station had succumbed to pressure from the Islamist paper Yeni Safak.

TRT would not give its reasons for pulling the film from its allotted point in the schedule, but said that it had received calls from the public not to show the movie.

AKI states that TRT and several private stations have shown the movie. Erdogan and his party have been highly critical of Israel, since it responded to Hizbollah's Katyusha rocket attacks and kidnapping of its two soldiers on 12 July with a military assault upon southern Lebanon. Until Erdogan's public attacks, Turkey was one of the few Muslim countries to have good relations with Israel.

Having seen the film, there is nothing overtly "pro-Israeli" about it. It documents the gradual erosion of life under the Nazis in the Warsaw ghetto. The only reason for condemning the film is the anti-semitism which is currently running rampant in the Muslim world.

The vicious and maniacal leader of Hizbollah, Hassan Nasrallah, is currently, according to an article in Mercury News fast gaining superstar and idol status in the Muslim world. The fact that he started the current events through cross-border kidnappings of two Israeli soldiers on July 12, and has been sending Katyusha rockets at Israeli civilians for years, only seems to increase his appeal for the virulently anti-Israeli Muslim Ummah.

Posted by Giraldus Cambrensis at August 3, 2006 3:25 PM

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