Is Arab TV Anti-Semitic?
Nov. 21 -- The streets of Cairo come alive after sundown during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, when raucous roadside vendors in brightly-lit foodstalls churn out delicacies while loudspeakers blasting music in decorated tents add to the din on the roads.
Indoors, most Cairo residents — replete with an evening meal after a hard day of fasting — settle down to doze before their flickering TV sets, joining millions of viewers across the region in a pan-Arab Ramadan tradition with a modern twist.
For Arab television stations, Ramadan is sweeps month, when an all-night mishmash of programs — from game shows to melodramatic soaps — reward the faithful for their daytime abstinence.
But while the fare is often disappointingly familiar, this year, even the most jaded viewers confessed to turning on their televisions on Nov. 7 — the first night of Ramadan — to check out the first episode of the controversial TV series, Fares Bela Gawwad (Knight Without a Horse).
Nasty controversies have an unwelcome way of hiking up viewership figures and by all accounts Fares Bela Gawwad has stirred up a formidable stink that has reeked across most of the Arab world into Israel and the United States.
Billed as a chronicle of the Arab struggle against colonial rule and the establishment of the state of Israel, the 41-part serial is produced by the privately owned Egyptian satellite channel Dream TV and is being broadcast on more than a dozen Arabic channels during Ramadan.
But it's a subplot dealing with The Protocols of the Elders of Zion — a notoriously anti-Semitic tract fabricated in Tsarist Russia — that caught the attention of Jewish groups and sparked the latest controversy.
One of history's more contentious documents, the Protocols is a late 19th century document supposedly written by Jewish leaders sketching out a plan for global domination. Although historians have conclusively determined that the document was a crude piece of forgery fabricated by the Tsarist secret police to justify the persecution of Jews, it has been frequently invoked through the years, particularly by the Nazis in Germany and other supremacist groups.
‘Practicing Neo-McCarthyism’
Weeks before the series was aired, 46 members of Congress wrote to Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak calling for a ban of the series on the grounds that it would promote hatred and the State Department expressed its "disappointment" that Fares was being aired on a state-owned channel as well as on Dream TV.
Protests and a publicity campaign against the series by Jewish groups in Washington, D.C., denouncing the perpetration of "vicious and despicable lies" were met with counter-demonstrations in Egypt.
At a "solidarity conference" in Cairo earlier this month, Mohamed Sobhi, the producer and lead actor of the series, denounced what he called "America's insistence on practicing neo-McCarthyism."
