Screening the movie may cause troubles and harm social peace.
Such religious issues, raised in previous times, caused crises.īut it wasn't just the alternative concepts of divinity and free will that made the censors uncomfortable. The movie tackles the issue of the creator and his creations, searching the origin of creation and the issue of compulsion and free will. The committee said thatĭespite the high technology and fabulous effects of the movie, it explicitly handles the issue of existence and creation, which are related to the three divine religions, which we all respect and believe in. The Matrix Reloaded was banned in Egypt in 2003 by a 15-member censor committee made up of film critics, professors, writers and psychologists. Though some Iranian characters in the film were treated sympathetically, Not Without My Daughter earned a ban from the Iranian leadership for embarrassing the mullahs and for exposing their oppression and the grim reality of life for women under sharia law. Mahmoody was being kept a virtual prisoner by her husband, who beat and threatened her, and by his strictly devout family, who pressured her to conform to the life of a submissive Muslim wife. Released only a few days before the Gulf War began, and based on one of the two "most hated" books in Iran (the other being Salman Rushdie's infamously blasphemous The Satanic Verses), it depicts the daring real-life escape of American citizen Betty Mahmoody and her daughter from Iran. With the exception of the Oscar-nominated French-Iranian film Persepolis, which I chose because Iran rated it as "more dangerous" than 300, I limited my selections to well-known Hollywood feature films, although Iran's Ahmadinejad banned all foreign films in late 2005 and even many from Iranian filmmakers.ġ991's Not Without My Daughter, starring Sally Field and Alfred Molina, is a movie that probably no studio exec would dare "greenlight" today, thanks to a stultifying Hollywood environment of political correctness. What follows is a mostly chronological list of ten movies that for various reasons particularly offended Islamic values or regimes in the Middle East, especially Iran, which takes any opportunity to spew blustery propaganda about our warmongering, cultural aggression. That doesn't mean that such movies don't circulate underground in very Westernized Iran, for example, the mullahs do their best to keep a lid on the populace's preference for American cultural decadence, but pirated DVDs are eagerly consumed by viewers privately. Movies, especially of the Western variety, are often banned as un-Islamic in sharia-controlled areas, especially ones that flaunt sexual immodesty ( Sex and the City), homosexuality (even the merely metrosexual Zoolander), or the depiction of drug use. But our Islamic enemies, like the Communists and Nazis before them, fully recognize the cultural power of cinema and work hard to control it.
We in the West usually take movies for granted and accord them little more significance than mere entertainment. Most Hollywood infidels would be right onboard with that. So Hollywood infidels are expected to publicly acknowledge and embrace their dhimmi status. If Hollywood wants to correct its behavior towards Iranian people and Islamic culture then they have to officially apologize. Hard to fathom how America was supposed to benefit from the exchange, but cultural advisor Javad Shamaghdari told the Hollywood reps exactly what Iran wanted: "We will believe Obama's policy of change when we see change in Hollywood too." In other words, no more movies critical of Islam or Iran. A year and a half ago, giddy and hopeful in the wake of Obama's inauguration, an unofficial but self-important delegation from Hollywood's Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (including actresses Annette Bening and Alfre Woodard, among others), set out for Iran as part of a "cultural exchange."