The Telegraph reports on another non-cartoon related issue touching on free speech and religio-ethnic tolerance:
A virulently anti-Semitic film about the Iraq war has provoked a storm of protest in Germany after it sold out to cheering audiences from the country’s 2.5 million-strong Turkish community.
Valley of the Wolves, by the Turkish director Serdan Akar, shows crazed American GIs massacring innocent guests at a wedding party and scenes in which a Jewish surgeon removes organs from Iraqi prisoners in a style reminiscent of the Nazi death camp doctor Joseph Mengele.
Bavaria’s interior minister admitted last week that he had dispatched intelligence service agents to cinemas showing the film to “gauge” audience reaction and identify potential radicals.
Edmund Stoiber, the state’s conservative prime minister, has appealed to cinema operators to remove what he described as “this racist and anti-Western hate film” from their programmes.
The £6 million film, the most expensive Turkish production ever made, had already proved a box office hit in Turkey, where it first opened last month at a gala attended by the wife of the country’s prime minister.
I am sure the right-wing reaction to this is going to be hostile. How about the left-wing?
To be fair, I don’t know that much about the movie. It certainly sounds atrocious. And if it is as bad as this article makes it sound, it is outrageous that the wife of the Turkey’s prime minister is legitimizing it by attending. But, the proper way to deal with this kind of movie is not to ban it. The proper approach is to shame the theater owners into not showing the movie or to boycott theaters that show it and the advertisers that sponsor those theaters. At least, that is how I see it.
Because the obvious main problem is not whether or not this film should be shown.
The main issue is that soldiers (nationality irrelevant) are killing innocent wedding guests, and there is a surgeon out there (religion irrelevant) removing organs from (I guess live?) prisoners (again, nationality irrelevant).
Via Arthur’s post, comes this snippet from Salon (link) which sums up for me the road we’ve started down:
And from Morford’s latest column (link):
Is this the price we’re all willing to pay for free speech?
I’m going to dig up some reviews on this to learn more.
Valley of the Wolves: Iraq
…
In the noble tradition of mainstream genre cinema, the script takes a real-life event as a starting point and then spins off into Loony-Tunes land. On July 4, 2003, U.S. forces surrounded the HQHQ of an undercover Turkish unit in Sulaymaniyah, northern Iraq, led its 11 members out with hoods on their heads, and had them deported, even though Turkey was officially an ally in the war. The so-called “Hood Event” was seen by Turks as a national humiliation.
…
except for this:
Take it all in context and it sounds like a bad career decision for Busey.
One thing I hope everyone remembers about this movie is that it’s a movie. I don’t think the demonizing was done as a primary intent but it was done for effect in the same way our US films portray others in unrealistic light.
The cartoon, the film, the DPW controversy… is all propaganda from one side or the other and it’s all unleashed to provoke a reaction. I say the best reaction is to dig deeper and find the reasons why someone feels the need to create the propaganda.
Gary Busey = has been
Billy Zane = wooden actor (remember Titanic)
Yeah, well, what do people expect, and what is the difference between banning a film and telling everyone not to see it?
Sounds close minded. Why not admit to the issues, that the Europeans are bombing Muslim countries, that the US doesn’t keep track of civilian casualties, the massacre at Fallujah, so why all the indignation if a nano second out of all of this is made into a movie?
It brings up the issues.
Hell, David Feingold is a Jew at UNESCO and he has sat on bottlenecking the process, prevents mouuntain peoples from getting cultural preservation funds in SE Asia, and he promotes Eco Tourism to villages in Laos that don’t have enough food, so the white people can get their rocks off.
Then he’s off sleeping with the white missionaries north of Thailand who are busy taking all the mountain kids for America and Democracy.
Does it matter what race people are? abuse is abuse and a film that portrays abuse should not get hassled for showing a Jew in the cast. There are plenty of bad Jews out there just like there are plenty of bad anybody’s out there.
And once again, the American forces are heaping abuse on more than just Iraqis.
Maybe we could think of a way to globally ban the American military. Send them to the wood shed for not picking up their bombs in Laos.
If america got attacked for every little genocidal war it pulled, there wouldn’t be a US Embassy left on the planet. But for God’s sake, someone ban this film!
I’m going to say it. I’m not for 100% free speech. That means I’m not for the freedom to slander, the freedom to libel, the freedom to misrepresent, the freedom to propangdize in a way that leads to the killing of others. I’m not in favor of that kind of freedom. The problem is, who decides which is the lie, and which is the truth?
Is the rule, like pornography, “you know it when you see it?”
I don’t know. I’m not in favor of providing time to anti-semetic films or space to anti-Muslim cartoons or airtime to pro-fascist groups. But I don’t want to block serious efforts to get another point of view, one at variance with the mainstream, to the public. I’d like to think we can tell the difference between good information and bad, right and wrong. But the media is a powerfully hypnotic tool, and let’s face it, the innocent can be swayed into believing and supporting something they shouldn’t. Witness Nazi Germany circa 1936.
Some bans just don’t offend me. Maybe that’s wrong of me, but that’s how I see it. In Austria, it’s illegal to deny the holocaust. I think that’s a fair law. Some cry that shunts freedom of speech. Hey, we’re not free to yell “fire” in a crowded theatre, or to yell “bomb” on an airplane. I think some things are the physical equivalent.
yeah, and I see it our media every day. what is this if not a description of Fox News?
Slander, libel, and incitement to violence are not protected speech, even in America. You are in good company when you denounce these. Slander and libel are civil torts, and those that commit them are subject to financial penalties. Incitement to violence is criminal and those who incite violence are subject to imprisonment. And the judicial branch gets to decide what is slander, libel and incitement according to the Constitution and laws passed by the legislative branch.
I would differ a bit with you on the European holocaust denial laws, though. Holocaust denial is not direct incitement to violence, so the perpetrators should not be jailed, as one has been, recently. I think it is more akin to slander and libel, and perpetrators could be subjected to civil penalties. This seems to me to be the proper place in the framework for limiting speech from holocaust deniers.
This is what has come to pass for political discussion in the MSM and it’s a big problem. I wonder why nothing is never done about that.
Point well taken, rumi. The MSM does all this and more on a regular basis. I do believe that someone should file the appropriate lawsuits and file the appropriate criminal charges wherever and whenever the offenses are committed. However, it seems that only a few individuals and a few egregiously bad print organizations ever get sued for slander or libel…not to mention the lack of charges of incitement to violence that should be brought against some right-wing talk show hosts….
I think the point here about slander/libel is really well-taken and a good guidepost as we attempt to navigate this very contentious issue.
But maybe that’s just me.
…about Valley of the Wolves is that it stars Gary Busey and Billy Zane!
I shit you not!
Why can’t other countries do to us what we have been doing to them all along? American movies have been portraying Arabs and Muslims as blood thirsty savages with no redeeming qualities for several decades. Sometimes it’s based on a true story that is fictionalized, but isn’t that what they did with this movie too?
If you don’t understand what I mean, read this. Welcome to the Other Side of the Silver Screen!
While I can’t see many Americans being interested in this movie, I can guess that the next action movie featuring some Muslim terrorists getting blown to smithereens will be a blockbuster hit, with the audience cheering the same way this audience did. They are the enemy to us. In other parts of the world we are the enemy. It’s easy for us to be blind to our lies, torture, murder, bullying, etc unless you are on the receiving end of it.
Exactly. Before we go off harping on once minor character who happens to be diabolical and jewish in the film, we ought to take a good hard look at how Arabs are consistantly portrayed in the Western Media.
There are exceptions: see Salah in the Indiana Jones movies, The Wind and the Lion, and some others. But they are either minor characters, or smaller movies that are soon forgotten.
Hollywood is a dumping ground of stereotypes, though. All Germans are perfunctory and cold-blooded, all Irish are either alcoholics or terrorists, and all Brits are suave and well-mannered.
Talk about ironic coincidences. Abramoff(active film producer) was linked to A/Q financing through a man named Salah…so was Norquist and many others. Any idea what other names were common or any other films the Salah name shows up?
They’re using us as their villains, just as we use “them”, whomever they may be. Nazis. Japs. Raghead terrorists. Whatever.
I think they have every right to produce the film. Like I say, more speech is good. Let the extremists of all stripes be exposed.
Atom Agoyan’s film was banned in Turkey
Ararat (2002)
It was banned because it dealt with the Turkish war(s) against Armenia. Agoyan was very disappointed about this because he kept to the historical facts and he wanted Turkish audiences to know them.
I didn’t see it because there were scenes of torture of children whether direct or oblique I don’t know.
“Valley of the Wolves” I hope it flops.
Boy, you think Turkey’s sort of giving up on joining the EU?
Sad.
As for Gary Busey, this is what happens when you ride motorcycles without a helmet.
Exploiting racism and being anti-American? Sounds like they’re working on their application pretty well, catering to a wide constituency of extremists.
And last I looked this wasn’t a production of the Turkish government. Maybe they should have censored it?
what percent of your post is snark? 🙂
It was the attendence at the premiere that put the government stamp of approval on the film. They seemed to be proud of their big budget film.
I don’t know how bad the film is, but that is the issue Lisa was addressing.
You know, at this stage I can hardly tell how much of that is snark. I’m suffering an overdose supply of cognitive dissonance.
It seems to be that the clash of cultures crowd are winning the propaganda war handily.
I’ve kept largely silent on the Free Speach debates, but one incident in my life keeps coming back to haunt me. Way back when… I was in college, circa 1985-1989, an American History professor invited a member of the KKK to talk about civil rights. The shock, the horror, the outcry this decision created was deafening. The professor in question was not a sympathizer (this was a liberal college in upstate NY) and he had invited several speakers who were active in the civil rights movement. In fact, he wanted to teach his students to know their enemy so they could better defeat them. The students were ok with this, but the radical left in the school were outraged. They staged sit-ins and other forms of civil disobedience until eventually the administration and the teacher capitulated and the lecture never happened. But, one of my favorite quotes came from a black lesbian teacher who stated “I’m sick and tired of all this talk about free speech!”
I knew then, as radical a leftist as I was, that the left had gone so far to the left, that they were the right. It was an astonishing eye-opening experience for me that to this day, I am adamantly for free speech, even when it hurts.
I didn’t like the cartoons and I think this movie only incites hate and ignorance, but I think these things can teach us how some people feel. And in that understanding and knowledge, maybe, just maybe, we can learn from the experience and reach out and teach compassion and understanding.
It deserves a good run in Denmark – and all other places (USA?) where free speech is widely believed to be not so much a right as a virtue.
I may consider free speech a virtue, but that doesn’t obligate me to watch a bad movie. It only obliges me to support their right to make it.
I mean, I avoid bad movies. That’s two to three hours of my life I could spend reading a good book.
Though I think racist and hate speech should be regulated, it is not unusual to see Arabic characters portrayed in racist ways and I don’t hear as much uproar. Our policy of blind support for Israel in its racist treatment of Palestinians is worse than any move and results in making us a target of animosity in the middle east and elsewhere.
As bad as racist and hate speech is, the support of systems of imposed racism is far worse.
Sorry, but I fail to see how a controversial (even racist, I too know next to nothing about it) film is a free speech issue, anymore than the Danish cartoons are. What government is stopping it from being made or shown? Is the Last Temptation of Christ a FSP issue too? What’s the difference if not?
Organ harvesting isn’t exactly unknown in third world populations, & it sure isn’t the poor who are the recipients. There’s a great British film (Mike Nichols, maybe?) on the subject whose I don’t recall at the moment. I suppose anything that portrays Americans or Israelis as bad guys will be considered to be “anti-” here, but think about our own film industry & realize just how silly that is. Can they carry racial & cultural biases? Sure. But that doesn’t turn it into a free speech issue. Like it or not, true or not, fears of organ harvesting are sentiments of the street. (Is the U.S. Harvesting Organs from Iraqis?)(& straight from the NYC the other day: The owner of a biomedical supply house and three others were charged with selling body parts for use in transplants in a scheme a district attorney called “something out of a cheap horror movie.”)
Lord knows there are plenty of FS issues in the world today. I’ve suggested several times here that someone look at Barbara Nitke’s case, or the Free Speech Coalition’s lawsuit against the DOJ 2257 regulations. Those are live FS isssues in OUR country, targeting marginalized communities. The only blogger I’ve seen pay any attention to this is Tom Ireland. No one seems to give a shit. Hundreds of writers: journalists, poets, intellectuals are today jailed around the world for having expressed a political opinion, for exposing a fact of history, or sometimes even daring to try to imagine a better more just world. Yes, people are in jail today for writing a poem. PEN International is an excellent organization to learn more.
I’d repsectfully suggest that these would be more fruitful and valid topics of concern & targets of outrage vis a vis free speech. Framing this or the cartoons as free speech issues is BS.
First, the Telegraph is not a reliable source for information like this.
Second, when did anti-Semitism become conflated not only with anti-Israelism but also anti-Americanism?
Bernhard over on Moon of Alabama has actually seen it and makes this remark:
So the anti-Semitism is one side-plot.
I assume that you’re going to be calling for the closing down of Hollywood if this sort of film offends you. I assume you boycott all movies that caricature Arabs/Russians/Communists/Native Americans etc.