by Giulio Meotti
The famous animated film “Persepolis” by the Iranian Marjan Satrapi was condemned as “anti-Iranian” by Tehran for having denounced the Islamic revolution of 1979. This complaint led Satrapi to emigrate first to Austria and then to France, a country from which she can no longer return.
Persepolis has since become a “cursed” film.
Islamic fundamentalists even tried to burn down (with journalists inside) the television studios of the Tunisian channel Nessma during the “Arab Spring” (which was a freezing Islamic winter). The station was broadcasting Persepolis at that time. Nessma director Kabil Kaorui was also prosecuted for showing the film.
Now it’s Europe’s turn.
French students were supposed to attend a screening of “Persepolis” in a cinema, when their teacher preferred to cancel everything (brave, however, for having wanted to show it). It happened in the Ardèche, where “for fear of the reaction of Muslim students”, reveals the Journal du dimanche, self-censorship has taken power.
“Some students are Muslims and their reactions could put me in danger,” confides the professor. And he added: “We are not safe from fanatics.”
Yes, who is safe?
Certainly not the professor who was just placed under guard in Mantes la Jolie, also in Francistan.
Isn’t it ironic and tragic that in the France that gave asylum, hospitality and help to Khomeini, it is not possible to show an Iranian film critical of the ayatollahs?
And what a strange fate that of many Iranian exiles in the West.
The Iranian writer Chahdortt Djavann, arrested at thirteen for demonstrating against the mullahs, then exiled to Paris in 1993, made an observation on French TV that should make our right-thinking people think: “You have to be blind to only see the dogmas that they crush Muslim countries and increasingly govern our European societies.”
Sooreh Hera is an Iranian artist who was supposed to exhibit a series of photographic works portraying gay couples, including Muhammad and Ali, in a museum in The Hague. Threatened with attacks and death, the exhibition was cancelled. The Hague, a strange place indeed, the “city of peace” where next week Israel and the Jewish people will have to defend themselves from the accusation of genocide brought against them by South Africa, this failed state that protected the genocidal Sudanese dictator Bashir.
Not far from The Hague, in Maastricht, Bart Drenth meanwhile had to resign after just six months as director of “Tefaf”, the most important art fair in the world, for having “offended Islam”.
After all, Khomeini, the wise man, has said it: “There is nothing to laugh about in Islam”. And as Satrapi explains, in the West today it has to suffer liberal censorship that accuses it of “Islamophobia”.
At Macalester College, in cold Minnesota, the exhibition of an Iranian artist, Taravat Talepasand, who had created a sculpture that reads “Woman, life, freedom” in English and Farsi (the slogan of the Iranian women’s revolt) and a satire is censored because of Khomeini and women wearing the niqab while pulling up their robes.
At the same time, an Iranian-born professor at San Francisco State University was being investigated after Muslim students complained that the academic showed an image of Muhammad during a lecture. “This is the first time this has happened,” said Maziar Behrooz. “I wasn’t prepared for someone to be offended, in a secular university, talking about history rather than religion.”
Not to mention the Iranian dissident Maryam Namazie banned from some English universities, such as Goldsmiths and Warwick. Her defense of her free speech would have “offended” students of the Islamic faith. But it offends no one that Israeli academic Amira Halperin this week talks about receiving physical and digital death threats in the same British universities.
Ayatollahs know better…
Bizarre, if we consider how it went for the most famous poet of the young Iranian generation, Payam Feili. Israel issued him an entry permit to the Jewish state. Yes, the evil Zionists have opened the doors to the citizen of an enemy state, an Iranian. Feili’s visit coincides with the mass scene at the theater in Tel Aviv of his work The Three Seasons, banned by the ayatollahs. Feili suffered censorship, arrests, threats and harassment from the Iranian regime, before fleeing to Turkey and then to Israel. It had been eleven years since one of his works had been produced and the ayatollahs even forced the publishing house for which Feili worked as an editor to fire him.
In Kenya a publisher has just sent a book to the pulp mill because it contained a portrait of the Prophet Muhammad.
Kenya is far away, right? But is Germany far away? In Germany a book was withdrawn from sale because it was “offensive towards Islam”.
And a popular children’s book in the “Biff, Chip and Kipper” series has been withdrawn following complaints that it was “Islamophobic”, reports the Telegraph. Oxford University Press is the publisher of “The Blue Eye”, in which young characters are transported to a foreign land with the help of a magical key. The children find themselves in a crowded street market, which appears to be somewhere in the Middle East, where the men wear white turbans and a woman is dressed in a niqab. The publisher said: “The book has been completely withdrawn from print and we have destroyed our remaining stock of the book, although a small number of copies may still remain in the supply chain. Some older titles may still be available in bookstores or as second-hand copies”. And it doesn’t matter, as the Times reminds us, that “millions of children in England have been educated on the books of Biff, Chip and Kipper”. “Turbans and niqabs are not appropriate”, says the BBC.
Iranian artist Sadaf Ahmadi was also just censored in Sweden. Ahmadi created ten veiled heads hanging like ghosts from a rope. But due to “security problems” they canceled it. “I was shocked, I was scared again,” Ahmadi, born in Tehran, tells Euronews. “The same thing was happening to me that happened in Iran.” Expressen’s head of culture, Victor Malm, writes: “If the culture managers and other bureaucrats who have power are starting to think like this, the mullahs have already gotten what they want.”
It is not so?
We exhibitionist Westerners, who now morally censor even the first films of that straight white chauvinist James Bond, have cut off a colored lock of hair. They cut out our tongues. Rahim Safavi, head of the Iranian Pasdaran, promised: “We will have to cut someone’s throat and someone else’s tongue.”
Considering the level of cowardice and compromise, there is not much left to cut in Europe. Only ostriches’ bodies can be seen. And Islam doesn’t need to laugh at itself, because it’s already too busy laughing at us.
Banned under Islam. Self censored in Islamicized Europe | Israel National News – Arutz Sheva