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Iran’s criticism of Hollywood laughable
So, Hollywood has brought shame to America. That’s what Iran’s leaders told us this week, when they landed on visiting Hollywood executives with a fury unbound.
Seems that a recent movie, the “Wrestler” with Mickey Rourke and Marisa Tomei, was so insulting, Iran averred, that President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s office demanded a public apology. The problem? The wrestler in this movie went by the nom de guerre “the Ayatollah.” Even worse, at one point in the film the wrestler tried to choke Mickey Rourke with an Iranian flag. Can you imagine!
Turns out that the insults built into the “Wrestler” were just the latest examples of sleights and grievances stretching back decades — including, for example, the 1991 film “Not Without My Daughter.” It depicts Iran as an evil, dangerous place. “Total lies,” Javad Shamghardi, a cultural adviser to the president, said in a statement issued in greeting to the visiting executives.
But before we prostrate ourselves to display our shame, perhaps we might ask just a couple of questions. About that Iranian flag incident, for example. I wonder, is it possible that Iranians have ever burned an American flag — during the revolution in 1979, for example, or some other time since? If that ever happened, I am sure that the state’s religious authorities chastised or punished the people who insulted our flag, just as they are asking us to do now. Count on it.
The Ayatollah
And the wrestler’s nickname, the Ayatollah — what a grievous insult to Shiite Islam. Imagine what would happen if, in some future film, an athlete chose as a nickname the Bishop or the Rabbi! Certainly the religious authorities in Rome or Jerusalem would reign fury down on Hollywood as Tehran did this week, wouldn’t you think?
Speaking of Jerusalem, before the Hollywood executives apologize to Tehran about the religious sleight in the “Wrestler,” they might want to ask Mr. Shamghardi about the contest in Iran’s largest newspaper three years ago to find the most compelling anti-Semitic cartoon.
No, the paper didn’t style the contest just like that. Officially, the contest was looking for the 12 best cartoons about the Holocaust. In a country where questioning whether the Holocaust actually took place is a popular blood sport, asking for cartoons on this subject amounts to the same thing.
A Moroccan artist took first prize. His cartoon shows an Israeli crane lifting into place a section of the wall around the West Bank. Painted on the back is a panoramic view of a German concentration camp, with railroad tracks leading to ... well, you get the idea.
A runner-up cartoon lampoons Western hypocrisy. In the first panel, a comedian is telling jokes about Islam at “the West Club” and is greeted with riotous laughter. But when he tells jokes about the Holocaust, he’s booted out the window.
I guess there is no qualitative difference between discussing, even joking about, a religion — and questioning the existence of a great historical crime. I am sure that Cambodians would take no offense if we told them that Pol Pot had not really murdered their parents, aunts and uncles along with nearly 2 million other people.
Mr. Shamghardi, quoted by the Iranian news agency, demanded an “unreserved apology” from Hollywood for “30 years of insults and slanders.”
Iran’s baggage
Iran has more than enough baggage right now. A few days ago, Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said the U.S. now believes Iran has enough nuclear material to make a bomb. A recent U.N. report came to the same conclusion.
Benjamin Netanyahu, likely Israel’s next prime minister, has suggested that Israel might attack Iran if it put together a nuclear weapon. Is that a surprise? Just two months into his presidency Ahmadinejad said: “The regime occupying Jerusalem should be eliminated from the pages of history,” planting him firmly in the annals of infamy.
The Obama administration is bargaining with Russia to persuade its leaders to turn against Iran. Compared to all of that, just how important is a movie — any movie? And surely in Farsi, there’s a saying like ours: People in glass houses ...
My advice to Iran’s leaders: Grow up!
X Joel Brinkley is a former Pulitzer Prize-winning foreign correspondent for The New York Times and now a professor of journalism at Stanford University.