"Pop Culture" Or Anti-American, Antisemitic Incitement? The Times Leaves Out Stuff

Barry Rubin
The Rubin Report
08 January '11

Amazing. The New York Times has a long piece about how Turkey is becoming an important factor in Iraq. Fair enough. But it includes the following paragraph:

"A surprising feature of Turkey’s success is the image it has managed to project in Iraq. On the road from Erbil to Baghdad, its pop culture is everywhere....The action series `Valley of the Wolves' is a sensation, the lead actor lending his name to cafes. His own posters are computer-altered to show him in traditional Kurdish or Arab dress — grist for a graduate school seminar on the adaptability of cultural symbols."

Well, how about a graduate school seminar on how the Times censors news? After all, "Valley of the Wolves" is not just an "action series" but a show whose plot is about how Americans are genocidal maniacs trying to murder Arabs--especially Iraqis--and Turks as well as seeking to destroy Islam under the evil direction of horrible demonic Jews who kill people to steal their organs.

A Turkish Islamist newspaper summarizes the Iraq part of the series as showing "American soldiers running amok in northern Iraq," One American who has seen it calls it the first "racist, anti-Christian" film he's ever seen. Another episode shows Israeli soldiers as kidnapping children and murdering civilians on purpose as well as raping Palestinian women.

In other words, the film does and is intended to spread anti-Americanism, hatred of Israel, and antisemitism. Presumably, when people in Iraq watch the "action series" that's how it affects them. When in the Netherlands immigrant Muslims flock to see it and cheer the hero it conveys a dangerous political viewpoint likely to produce hatred and violence. So the influence of the current Turkish regime in Iraq is not some harmless "pop culture" phenomenon but the promotion of radical Islamism. An Iraqi who believes this film would be much more likely to go out and shoot an American.

(Read full "Pop Culture" Or Anti-American, Antisemitic Incitement?...")

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