In response
to last year’s Oscar-winning film Argo,
based on the real-life rescue of a handful of American citizens during the 1979
Iranian Revolution, Tehran plans
to sue Hollywood filmmakers who participate in the production of such
“anti-Iran” propaganda films.
In the movie, in which director Ben Affleck also plays the
lead role, Iranian officials are shown being outwitted by an elaborate CIA plan
to camouflage the U.S. diplomats fleeing the country as part of a team scouting
locations for an outlandish science-fiction film.
Iranian authorities have labeled Argo a propaganda attack against their nation and humanity. The
country’s state-run broadcaster Press TV complains that the film is “a far cry
from a balanced narration” and is “replete with historical inaccuracies and
distortions.” The film was
banned from the general public – not that this accomplished anything, since an
estimated “several hundred thousand copies” have been sold by DVD bootleggers
who say
it’s their biggest seller in years. As an additional measure, Iranian officials held
a private screening of Argo as part of a conference called “The Hoax of
Hollywood” and called it a “violation of international cultural norms,”
whatever those are.
Press TV detailed its objections to the film in an online
article: “The Iranophobic American movie attempts to describe Iranians as
overemotional, irrational, insane, and diabolical while at the same time, the
CIA agents are represented as heroically patriotic.” At the risk of speaking
for Ben Affleck, I would respond that the movie does not depict all Iranians
this way, only the murderous Islamic fundamentalists who took over the country,
and who already do a great job living up to the description “irrational and
diabolical.”
Nonetheless, Press TV reports that offended Iranian
officials have talked to an “internationally-renowned” French lawyer about
filing a lawsuit. “I will defend Iran against the films like Argo, which are produced in Hollywood to
distort the country’s image,” said attorney Isabelle Coutant-Peyre. In a
curious, Hollywood-worthy twist, Coutant-Peyre just happens to be the wife of
mega-terrorist Carlos the Jackal, currently imprisoned in France where he converted
to Islam.
And it looks like they intend to do just that. To counter Argo, Iran plans to fund a movie
entitled The General Staff, about
twenty American hostages who were handed over to the United States by Iranian
revolutionaries (Iranian
screenwriter Farhad Tohidi has also announced plans for a TV series, The Broken Paw,
about the seizure of the U.S. Embassy). “This film,” said The General Staff’s director Ataollah
Salmanian, “which will be a big production, should be an appropriate response
to the ahistoric film Argo.” He said he hoped to secure funding from
the Art Bureau wing of the propagandists at the Islamic Ideology Dissemination
Organization.
The General Staff,
which will begin shooting next year, will be based on eyewitness accounts,
Salmanian said. Press TV cited him as saying that his film would depict “the
historical event, unlike the American version which lacks a proper view of the
story.” And by “proper,” of course, he means Iran-centric. Kenneth Taylor, the Canadian ambassador portrayed
in the film, told The New York Times, “It
will be amusing to see what they take issue with.”
Affleck too responded
to Iran’s plans:
You have to understand, this is a sort of Stalinist regime in this place
that is extremely repressive. It's governing a nation full of millions of
wonderful, amazing people, so to be part of this movie Argo that seems to have kids up and paying attention – so this
Stalinist regime feels the need to sort of push back somehow, I think is a
tremendous badge of honor.
It is, and good
for him for not sucking up to the Iranian regime like some other Hollywood
luminaries have. Four years ago an
unofficial delegation from Hollywood’s Academy of Motion Picture Arts and
Sciences set out to visit Iran as part of a “cultural exchange” that might
soothe tensions between our countries. Iranian cultural advisor
Javad Shamaghdari laid
out for the Hollywood representatives exactly what Iran wanted out of the
meeting: “If Hollywood wants to correct its behavior towards Iranian
people and Islamic culture then they have to officially apologize,” he
said.
D. Parvaz, an
Iranian journalist for Al Jazeera, recently wrote a defense of Iran’s sensitivity to Argo (and to other less-than-flattering
portrayals of Iran as in films like 300
and Not Without My Daughter) for the reliably pro-Islamic Huffington Post, in which she expressed
her and her countrymen’s weariness at the treatment of her “fatherland” in the
media: “It’s all nuclear this, human
rights that” she complained. [Emphasis in original]
Yes, how terribly
unfair that the media dwell on Iran’s stated intention to wipe Israel from the
map or to bring the Great Satan America to its knees with the nuclear weapons
it is acquiring in the face of international condemnation. How biased of the
media to shine a light on the fact that Iran publicly hangs teenage gays from
cranes, stones adulterers to death, rapes and tortures female protesters, and
publicly assaults women for wearing western jeans and hairstyles.
If Parvaz wants
her fatherland to quit producing such public relations faux pas, perhaps she could speak to the regime there about reining
in their medieval insanity and hatred. Perhaps she could recommend to the
mullahs that they disband their terrorist minions in Hezbollah, stop exporting
IEDs, and enter the 21st century. That will go a long way toward rehabilitating
Iran’s image problem.
(This article originally appeared here on FrontPage Mag, 5/9/13)
