Intermap

By Shawn Powers

Press TV is reporting that Iran’s third International Urban Film Festival, which runs from March 2 to March 7, will include 20 films on Hurricane Katrina, including Spike Lee’s When the Levees Broke, Ashley Hunt’s I Won’t Drown on the Levees and “controversial filmmaker Scott Ritter’s Bush Crimes: Hurricane Katrina, which is about the Bush Crimes Commission Hearings and the testimony by experts on the abandonment of New Orleans before, during, and after Hurricane Katrina.”

We all know that Hurricane Katrina was not a high-point for America’s image abroad (also, see here), but 20 films on how bad the Bush administration goofed up seems a bit, I don’t know, obsessive? Also, very depressing.

I like to take moments like this and think about what would happen if the reverse were to take place. What if an American film festival decided to showcase 20 or so documentaries on how, according to the UN, Iran is the “sixth most disaster-prone country in the world,” and that, “for the past 10 years, an average of 4,000 people have been killed and 55,000 affected annually by disaster?” Ouch. Now that I think about it, maybe there should be a few films produced on how there is the equivalent of a humanitarian 9/11 in Iran every year and nobody is really talking about it. Given Javad Shamaqdari’s (Special Adviser to President Ahmadinejad) recent demand for an apology for the way films like 300 (where “Persians are depicted as decadent, sexually flamboyant and evil”) and The Wrestler (where Mickey Rourke battles another wrestler named–also not so subtly–The Ayatollah) are “insulting to Iranians,” I can only imagine the outcry that would take place if American filmmakers shined their collective spotlights on humanitarian failures of the Iranian government.

By Shawn Powers

Literally. File this one under “not good.”

Last July, the Iranian Parliament passed a draft law, that has since become codified, that allows judges to apply the death penalty to bloggers and website editors who “promote corruption, prostitution or apostasy.” Indeed, the so-called father of the Persian bloggosphere, Hossein Derakhshan, now faces the death penalty after being arrested on trumped up charges of “spying for Israel.” In truth, Derakhshan visited Israel in 2006 and “recently begun to express anti-Israeli views in his postings,” according to Israeli commentators.

While the Internet–and political blogging in particular–have been hyped as a critical means of opening up and even democratizing countries like Iran, this new law, permitting the use of the death penalty against any blogger or online editor that “promotes corruption” is yet another sign that the Internet will not do the hard work of building civil societies and democratic cultures. In fact, countries are using the Internet to actually track down and squash dissent, particularly in the Middle East. Egyptian authorities recently used facebook to monitor and eventually arrest 26 Egyptians that had organized a peaceful protest in Alexandria last July. Indeed, the most telling evidence of the crackdown on online communication came in the Committee to Protect Journalist’s 2008 census (titled, “Online and in Jail“), which found that 45% of journalists jailed in 2008 were online journalists, compared to the 42% who were print-based journalists. Put another way, for the first time ever, you are more likely to be jailed for being a journalist if you publish your reporting via the World Wide Web than any other medium.

On that note, I’m signing off.