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Sunday, January 21, 2018

Nothing Like Open Societies

I had never heard of the new movie "Jungle" starring Daniel Radcliffe (who played Harry Potter in all those movies) until today.  That's when I read that the movie had been banned in Lebanon and some other Muslim countries in the Middle East.  I read the articles on the subject to see what the movie portrayed that was so dangerous that these Arab countries would ban it.  It turns out that the movie is the story of a hiker who gets lost in the jungle in Bolivia (in South America) and lives for three weeks while looking for a way out.  It surely doesn't seem like much of a threat to Lebanese society.  But here's the punch line:  the movie is based on a true story and the guy who was actually lost in the jungle is an Israeli.  That's why it is banned.

Image a society where a movie is removed from screens because someone it portrays comes from a country the censors don't like.  If we were on a college campus, I guess the administration would just call the movie "hate speech" and ban it for that reason.  In the real world, the idea that a movie is banned for a reason like this shows just how close-minded and bigoted these Arab countries really are.

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