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Dream TV faces wrath of US, Egyptian governments Private satellite television station Dream TV found itself surrounded by controversy at the beginning of December, on the eve of the Ramadan high season for television broadcasting. Under intense pressure at home to tone down some of its more liberal content, Dream started the holy month by airing a TV series that has provoked accusations of anti-Semitism from Jewish groups in the United States and Israel. Locally, government broadcasting authorities launched an investigation of the station after popular talk-show host Hala Sarhan touched on taboo sexual subjects during an October episode exploring problems faced by young people, who are often forced to delay marriage due to financial constraints. Opposition newspaper Al Wafd had stirred up the issue, accusing Sarhan and media tycoon Ahmed Bahgat, who owns 90 percent of the station (the remaining 10 percent is owned by the Egyptian Radio & Television Union), of presenting “pornography” and scorning the views of religious leaders. In response, Sarhan told monthly magazine Al Arabi on October 27 that critics were simply trying to quash Dream TV’s unprecedented freedom to dictate the content of its programs. “They have interests in there being no free, successful Egyptian channel,” she said. She implicitly referred to Qatari satellite station Al-Jazeera, whose critical (some would say sensationalist) news programming had riveted Egyptian satellite audiences until Dream came along. Sarhan further argued that criticisms of her show came as payback for other, politically provocative programming on Dream. Also in October, political commentator and former Nasser aide Mohamed Hassanein Heikal voiced criticisms of Egyptian foreign and domestic policies in a special appearance on the station. Although Dream’s crossing of “red lines” may have irked the authorities, they stood up for the station when it came under attack for completely different reasons from abroad. The station’s first drama-series production, Faris Bila Gawaad (Horseman without a Horse) has attracted heated criticism internationally, with numerous Western media reports labeling the series – even before its broadcast – as “anti-Semitic” hate mongering. In early November, 46 members of the US Congress signed a letter to President Hosni Mubarak urging him to take the series off the air, not forgetting to mention that Egypt is the second-largest recipient of US foreign aid (after Israel). Veteran Egyptian stage actor Mohamed Sobhi co-wrote and stars in the series, which explores the origins of the arch-controversial “Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” a late-19th-century document allegedly detailing a secret plot by a cabal of Zionists to take control over the world’s political and financial institutions. Sobhi plays an Egyptian journalist-spy who adopts myriad disguises in his attempt to discover the truth behind the “Protocols,” which the show links to the Arab loss of Palestine and the creation of the Israeli state in 1948. The six-week, 41-part series – made with a budget of £E 9 million – went on the air on the first day of Ramadan, when families traditionally spend their evenings in front of the television. Dream, state-run Channel 2, and 23 other stations throughout the Arab World are broadcasting episodes of Faris over the course of the Muslim holy month. The international media has thrived on Sobhi’s provocative defense of the program and his accompanying criticisms of Zionism and Israeli foreign policy. “It honors me very much that I was capable of revealing the great conspiracy aimed at swallowing our beloved nation,” Sobhi said on November 20, in an Associated Press report reprinted worldwide. If the production “terrified Zionists,” he continued, “we will produce more series.” The show’s main scriptwriter, Mohamed Baghdadi, said writing a series that “tackles the Palestinian issue for television” was his “dream come true.” Abraham Foxman, director of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), an American Jewish organization, is one of the show’s many vehement critics. In an ADL press release from December 2001, when Foxman first received word of the Egyptian program, he called it “unconscionable that Arab television has created an entire series of programming based on one of the most hateful documents in Jewish history.” In the West, the Protocols are readily dismissed as a forgery of Russian Czar Nicholas II’s secret police, who used them to blame the country’s problems on its Jewish population. But despite the uproar, the Egyptian government is not budging. “It is neither acceptable nor reasonable to selectively heap accusations of anti-Semitism on artists,” said presidential spokesman Nabil Osman, “simply because they sympathize with the plight of the Palestinian people and thus are critical of Israeli policies and practices.” Even Sobhi does not deny that the Protocols are a forgery, but he insists that Israel has – in accordance with the general tone of the document – managed to dominate international political life, particularly in the West. Baghdadi, for his part, said that all the negative media attention has been misguided, and that the series is intended to be a political comedy, not a historical account. “The fuss that surrounded the series was quite exaggerated,” he said. The head of the Egyptian Association for Historical Studies, Ra’ouf Abbas, agreeing that the Dream series was not intended to be historically accurate, argued that, within limits, “any artist has the right to present a historical character in the way he or she desires.” Either way, the heat is on. According to a November 17 Reuters report, a newly created committee will review all programs coming out of the Media Production City – where Dream and other private channels are headquartered – for compliance with “ethical standards” geared to Egyptian social mores. US officialdom, meanwhile, will be “watching very,
very closely and raising these issues as appropriate, depending on
what actually airs,” State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said
in mid-November. Asmaa Waguih |
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