Rihab’s Post On Censorship

Posted on February 25, 2007
Filed Under Culture |

Interesting:

A while back I noticed the most bizarre thing while watching an American movie on an Arabic channel (I think it may have been MBC or Dubai One)… the words “lesbian” and “Jew” were not translated in the Arabic subtitles! And today, while watching the Sopranos the word c**t was not censored!! The broadcasting channel was Dubai One and it was around 4pm Dubai time so it was before the watershed hours… come to think of it… do watershed hours even exist on Arabic channels??

The censorship standard seems to be censor whatever may not be culturally acceptable… but if it’s not culturally acceptable why show it in the first place? I mean if you want to censor something because it’s deemed to be culturally inappropriate then simply don’t show it at all instead of showing it and doing a partial censor. Plus, as much as we like to deny their existence, homosexuals do exist in the Arab world and have been around for forever, and they have not occurred as a result of Western brainwashing attempts as conspiracy theorists would like to believe. This means that censoring “lesbian” in Arabic subtitles won’t stop nor reduce the occurrence of homosexuality in the Arab world (and it wasn’t even a complete censorship since you heard it in English!). Now we come to the word Jew… yup, things aren’t great with Israel but since when did Jew become a word worthy of censorship?? Isn’t censorship applied to things we deem inappropriate… so how is a faith inappropriate? If we start censoring “Jew” in subtitles should we apply it on a wider scale and start removing it from holy scripture???… No, I didn’t think that would be sensible either, so why censor it at all?! Was the censor hoping that by doing so he would have liberated Palestine??!

Read it all. Go girl!

Comments

19 Responses to “Rihab’s Post On Censorship”

  1. howie on February 25th, 2007 6:47 pm

    Drima-

    I guess you call it blind hatred.

  2. OLIVE GROVE BOOKS on February 25th, 2007 9:35 pm

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    “Why would he have done any differently with the 30,000 centrifuges he supposedly had on a decentralized basis inside Iraq before the war?” Spirko asks. “Isn’t it strange that Iran could come up with a nuclear weapons program in about six months to a year when it took the United States six years under the Manhattan Project with 5,000 of the world’s most brilliant scientists like Robert Oppenheimer, Niels Bohr, Seaborg, Einstein, Fermi, and others working on it?”

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  3. Roman Kalik on February 25th, 2007 10:18 pm

    Oh dear, the spam strikes yet again. I’ve seen this little bugger going through the blogs, and if I hated middle-east spy-pulp before, I hate it even more now.

    As for the censorship, we simply have two levels of thinking here, most likely Upper Management and Lower Management. UM wants money, so it goes for the high-rating shows with little regard for content. It is then up to LM to make these selections “culturally acceptable”.

    This is actually a step forward, money before hatred and bigotry.

  4. Roman Kalik on February 25th, 2007 10:41 pm

    Not to say that this is a *good* situation, mind, when editors believe they have to use hate-based censorship to keep their ratings up or just to soothe their own pride.

    “Jew” and “lesbian” aren’t translated because some people believe they’re not people. Not human. That’s the kind of belief that makes taking their human rights away very easy.

    By the way, I’ve ran into some publications over the ‘net, by so-called Muslims, saying that Jews today aren’t the same Jews mentioned in the Koran.

  5. Roman Kalik on February 25th, 2007 10:49 pm

    To elabourate on that, the article that comes to mind claimed that the European Jews were the descendants of false converts (the kingdom of Khazar was mentioned as “evidence”) and are thus not entitled to set foot in the Holy Land. Or to live, for that matter.

    He also claimed that while there *may* be true Jews in Arab lands, most assist the “false Jews” and thus damn themselves.

    It was a fun read, really. David Irving meets radical Islam.

  6. nominally challenged on February 26th, 2007 9:23 am

    Roman, I think it’s a little more subtle than that. It’s not that it’s out of a belief that Jews and lesbians (and, I’m sure, many others) are not people, but rather, that they are not *normal* people, which is probably the way they were portrayed in the show that Rihab is talking about. Try out the following for size:

    Authority figure to young person - the Jews are blah blah blah blah control the world blah blah blah power, money, sex, evil, satan blah blah blah.
    Young person replies to authority figure - but I saw this show on TV, and it was translated and everything, and there was this Jew on it and he was just … um … normal.
    Authority figure - TV is wrong, I am right.
    Young person - but this was State TV and you are the State …
    Authority figure - note to self: censor all references that make Jews out to be normal.

    See?

    Which brings me to Rihab’s point about censorship - censorship is not about protecting people from what is “culturally unacceptable”, it is about controlling (or at least attempting to control) what people think. It has an increasing tendency to backfire, though, because, with the internet, information on so many things is becoming more and more accessible.

  7. Roman Kalik on February 26th, 2007 1:30 pm

    NC, we’re saying the same thing here, really. What is attempted here is to show a clear separation between “them” and “us”. As long as the “them” are portrayed as monstrous or abnormal enough, then they will not be thought of as “real” people, or “not our kind” of people. Which is the same as saying they’re not really people, and makes anything that results from not thinking of “them” as people all the easier.

    It’s subtle, yes, and it only really registers in the subconscious at first, but the end of the road is all too easy to see.

  8. nominally challenged on February 26th, 2007 3:18 pm

    Having said that, though, every society does it, Roman, including ours …

  9. Roman Kalik on February 26th, 2007 3:43 pm

    *nod* It’s a matter of how extensive this is, and the reasoning behind it.

    Each society does this. Each religion, each nation… Hell, each family. We live and think in groups, like it or not.

    But do we do this to justify our hatred? Or some kind of perverse ideology? And do we separate the “they” from the “us” to the point where the “they” become so different in our eyes, so alien, that we can do nothing other than hate them?

    This is where the line is drawn. Some could say that it’s best not to think in groups at all, to shake away everything that might identify us as part of a group and to be purely individuals, but this is just wistful thinking. To be true pure individualists, we would either have to be loners or erase everything that defines us as human.

    Because the first separation is between what is in front of your eyes and what is behind them, and you can only take that away by destroying the recognition of self.

  10. The Raccoon on February 27th, 2007 8:39 am

    Excellent points, RK and NC.

    And yes, communal thought is part of being hunam. You’re herd animals, what did you expect? And mind you that the IQ of a group equals to its average IQ divided by number of group members :)

    But the question is one of… acceptance. Every group considers every other group to be alien; but in the West, it is customary nowadays to accept that while alien, the other groups at the very least deserve a chance (at worst, it deteriorates into self-loathing and claiming that alien is good and your group is bad by definition).

    RK -

    “Because the first separation is between what is in front of your eyes and what is behind them, and you can only take that away by destroying the recognition of self. ”

    You could have been quoting Buddha, or maybe The One-Handed Barbarian (founder of Shaolin monastery) :)

  11. Roman Kalik on February 27th, 2007 9:12 am

    And mind you that the IQ of a group equals to its average IQ divided by number of group members :)

    Nope, it’s the IQ of its dumbest member, divided by the number of mobsters. Pratchett knows best.

    You could have been quoting Buddha, or maybe The One-Handed Barbarian (founder of Shaolin monastery) :)

    Heh, does this mean I can open a monastery here in Israel? I don’t really remember what Judaism’s monks are about, beyond the long hair and lack of wine consumption. ;)

  12. nominally challenged on February 27th, 2007 2:48 pm

    Roman

    Pratchett knows best

    Amen to that :)

    And do we separate the “they” from the “us” to the point where the “they” become so different in our eyes, so alien, that we can do nothing other than hate them?

    I’d be inclined to think that, unfortunately, there are those of us who do. The difference is, I think, that it’s individual rather than collective - and I agree with you, that is an important difference.

    Raccoon:

    but in the West, it is customary nowadays to accept that while alien, the other groups at the very least deserve a chance (at worst, it deteriorates into self-loathing and claiming that alien is good and your group is bad by definition)

    I sometimes wonder whether there is a happy medium between these two poles at all … on a group level, of course. Individuals are rarely the problem in this respect …

  13. The Raccoon on February 27th, 2007 11:03 pm

    RK -

    I am sure you could get together with these guys, get a land grant somewhere deep in the Negev and spend the next 80 years of your life meditating, praying and kicking ass (no bubblegum allowed).

    All you have to do is grow a long beard, lose an arm and get enlightened when some guy picks a flower :)

    NC -

    “I sometimes wonder whether there is a happy medium between these two poles at all … on a group level, of course. Individuals are rarely the problem in this respect …”

    This is very deep question of social psychology - a field suffering from a dearth of research. I am inclined to answer “yes, for a while” - hunams seem naturally inclined to extremism when in a herd. Maybe this is why holy men spend so much time alone in the wilderness. One can hardly hear oneself think, much less listen to divinity, when immersed in the endless sussuration of collective hunam “thought”.

    And I wonder what’s up with Pratchett’s next book… mmmm… the man’s like good garbage - getting better with time :)

  14. nominally challenged on February 28th, 2007 3:00 pm

    Raccoon - I wish I knew. I’m twitching for the new one already … so much so that I’ve re-read about four in the past month (and am now re-reading the Science of Discworld I, just because it’s so much fun) …

  15. Roman Kalik on February 28th, 2007 5:13 pm

    Mind you, of his recent works Monstrous Regiment was fairly… bad. The jokes were good, the small scenes were good, but the overall book was sad.

    Going Postal and Thud! were a return to form though, but it’s apparent that Pratchett loves Vimes as a character so much, that he wants to keep using him but doesn’t quite know what to do with him anymore.

    I’m can’t wait for his sequel to Going Postal.

  16. Roman Kalik on February 28th, 2007 7:30 pm

    *make that I

  17. nominally challenged on February 28th, 2007 10:54 pm

    Thud!

    I knew I’d missed one …

    Going Postal was brilliant. Monstrous Regiment was indeed saddish although I agree, there were some cute scenes.

  18. Rihab on March 2nd, 2007 2:26 pm

    Hey Drima,

    Thanks for the link, glad you enjoyed it! :)

  19. Hipster on March 5th, 2007 9:26 am

    Raccoon,NC & RK, thank you for an interesting discussion.

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