SUBMISSION on Italian TV
Italy’s state-run Rai Due channel will be showing in its Thursday night news magazine four to five minutes of murdered director Theo van Gogh’s 11-minute film Submission: Part 1, a highly critical statement against the treatment of women under Islam. Submission, which consists of a series of images of a woman wearing a see-through burka, her body covered with words from the Koran, was shown on Dutch television last year and is believed to have been the cause for van Gogh’s murder at the hands of a Muslim fanatic last November.
According to the BBC, politicians from the leading Italian parties urged Rai to show Submission in full in order to combat intolerance and support artistic freedom, but the station says it hasn’t acquired the rights to the film. Critics of the broadcast claim that the Northern League, an anti-immigrant and fervently anti-Muslim political party, is behind the move to broadcast the controversial film.
Unsurprisingly, Rai and right-wing Italian politicians didn’t seem that eager to protect artistic freedom when Rai’s executives axed several shows that portrayed right-wing Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi in a negative light. Nor have they seemed too eager to combat intolerance, since the Italian far-right has tried to invoke an old law so as to forbid Muslim women from wearing the chador in public.
Muslim historian Khaled Fouad Allam argued in La Repubblica that censorship of a motion picture is not the issue at hand, complaining that the real problem is the censoring of a culture and the depiction of “the Muslim danger through the construction of a simplistic picture and the reduction of that civilization to a series of schematizations and generalizations [that] lead popular world opinion to a growing hostility in the confrontation against Muslims."
Clips of Submission have already been shown by two state-run television stations in Denmark, angering Muslim communities in that country. And earlier this year, Submission was withdrawn from the Rotterdam Film Festival because of security concerns. Italian Muslim leaders fear that the broadcasting of Submission will serve to heighten tensions and help the cause of religious fanatics.
Recommended reading: Dennis Lim’s Village Voice review of Submission: Part 1 “The Day I Became a Martyr: Islam Protest Brings Fatal Fatwa.”
SUBMISSION PART II: Gays and Islam
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