by Giulio Meotti
Ten years ago, “the ‘blasphemous’ film that inflamed Egypt and Libya” was:The Innocence of Muslims. To record their objections to the “movie” (a trivial YouTube trailer), 10,000 British Muslims besieged Google’s UK headquarters.
A UK cinema chain now canceled all screenings of a film about Mohammed’s daughter after branches were besieged by Muslim activists.
Cineworld has made the decision to cancel all screenings of The Lady of Heaven to “ensure the safety of staff and customers”.
A cinema director even came out to where Muslims protested in order to apologize. The video shows him humbling himself to the cry of “Allahu Akbar”. More than 117,000 people have signed a petition to remove the film from all UK cinemas. Cineworld was supposed to screen it in Bradford, Birmingham, Bolton, London, Glasgow, Sheffield and Wolverhampton. The cinema chain did not want to end up as did the publisher of the novel The Jewel of Medina, whose house was set on fire in London.
As a cinema manager, used to making money from trivial B-movies, he would like to fight for freedom of expression, but not ending up like the English teacher forced to leave his school subject to heavy death threats, guilty of having shown in class the cartoons of Charlie Hebdo during a lesson on freedom of expression, and who now lives in a “safe house” with his wife and children due to the fear of being killed…
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The film The Lady of Heaven would therefore be considered “blasphemous”.
Like Deborah Samuel, the Nigerian Christian who was just stoned and burned in Nigeria, Malik Shlibak, the film’s producer, said cinemas had to “defend the right to show the film. Freedom of speech is being jeopardized ”.
Ah, freedom of speech. We have that only to denigrate Christianity and Judaism, while anyone who touches Islam runs into serious trouble.
-The Tate Gallery in London censored itself by withdrawing John Latham’s God Is Great because it showed a copy of the Koran.
-An adaptation of Aristophanes and his play Lysistrata, in which the women of Greece go on a sex strike to stop their men from going to war, was canceled from the Royal Court Theater because in the version that was to be staged Islamic virgins strike to stop suicide bombers.
-A British artist, Grayson Perry, censored himself for fear of ending up like Theo van Gogh, the Dutch director killed by a Muslim extremist for making a film about women in Islam. “I censored myself,” Perry said. “The reason I no longer attacked Islam in my works is that I have a real fear of ending up with a cut throat.”
-Christopher Marlowe’s Tamerlane, where the Koran is burned, was censored at the Barbican Theater in London under the direction of David Farr. In place of the Koran, the director set fire on the stage to a bunch of anonymous books.
-The Victoria and Albert Museum has withdrawn the portraits of Muhammad. “British museums and libraries house dozens of these images, mostly miniatures of ancient manuscripts that remain out of reach of the public,” the Guardian explained.
-Sky News blacked out the Charlie Hebdo cartoons during a connection in which French journalist Caroline Fourest tried to get them to be framed from the camera. Sky Newsdisconnected, went back to the studio and apologized “to those who feel offended by these images”.
-The BBC aired a documentary about Charlie Hebdo after the massacre and refused to show the cover of the satirical weekly, covering it with pixels. The BBC has also decided that jokes, even irreverent ones, can continue to be made about Christianity and Jews, but not about Islam. Director Mark Thompson established it. The motivation? Muslims “are more susceptible”.
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