23 Apr 2010 | Index Index, minipost
The Belarusian Prosecutors Office has said that violent interrogation of journalists is legitimate, report Charter 97, Index on Censorship Freedom of Expression Award nominees.
The Belarusian Association of Journalists wrote an open letter to the Prosecutor in March condemning the use of violent interrogation and beatings of journalists as part of the investigation into an alleged case of slander against the former head of the KGB in the Gomel region, Ivan Korzh. Internet reports alleged that KGB officers had fabricated a case against a police officer, and abused him. In early March, the offices of Charter 97 and European Belarus were raided by the police who confiscated equipment and assaulted staff.
23 Apr 2010 | Uncategorized
Trey Parker and Matt Stone, purveyors of toilet humour, obscenity and slander of just about every celebrity and religious figure in the world, have succeeded in gaining even more notoriety for their 200th anniversary episode of the cartoon South Park.
The premise for the two-part episode is that all the celebrities of Hollywood (otherwise known as the Legion of Doom) gather forces to file a class-act lawsuit against the residents of South Park for their continual defamation of figures such as Tom Cruise, Barbara Streisand and even the Pope. However, in order to truly gain the “the power to not be ridiculed”, the celebrities must kidnap the Prophet Mohammed, the only figure in the world to hold this “superpower” and clone it for themselves.
The day after the first part of the episode was broadcast on 14 April, a post on the (temporarily defunct) Revolution Muslim website appeared not threatening, but warning the creators that “they will probably wind up like Theo Van Gogh for airing this show”.
Comedy Central in response, decided to censor Mohammed’s name from the second part of the episode which was broadcast on Wednesday. In addition, the customary concluding speech at the end of every episode, in which some kind of moral is normally gleamed from all the chaos, was also censored. According to the makers, the speeches that were made by various different characters were about “intimidation and fear”, and contained no mention of Mohammed.
The network’s decision to censor Mohammed’s name and image can be justified to some extent due to fears from religious attacks, or simply just to create greater publicity for the show. However censorship of the concluding speech is simply an over the top reaction, stifling exactly the kind of “rational dialogue” endorsed by the Revolution Muslim blog: to “create the possibility that a deeper and more productive dialogue may be initiated.”
Moreover, it is questionable whether the act of censorship itself was intentionally written into the script as part of the joke. In the one of the penultimate scenes, Tom Cruise manages to finally clone Mohammed’s “power to not be ridiculed”, and emerges out of a contraption only to end up as a censored black box himself. The only way to not be slandered or defamed it seems, is to become completely unrepresentable and inexistent, proving that absolute censorship itself is impractical, ridiculous and unrealistic.
For an interview by Xeni Jardin with the creators about the 200th episode click here.
The interview also contains an uncensored clip of Mohammed from an episode broadcasted two months before 9/11, which generated almost no controversy whatsoever. Already, there have been rumours of an uncensored version of the second episode being leaked online.
23 Apr 2010 | Uncategorized
This is a guest post by Michael Riordan
Philip Ridley’s Moonfleece is not a play about the BNP. It was not intended as a response to the recent rise of the far-right. To suggest, as news reports have done, that the play was written to raise awareness of racism and homophobia among the white working class is to reduce to a caricature a portrayal of the process of mythmaking, which eschews political dogmatism in equal measure as its leading characters embrace it.
The play is part of a series of five one-act dramas, written by Philip Ridley, which explore the cathartic power of story-telling. It is set in the living room of a derelict council flat in East London, currently home to Link, a British man from an unspecified ethnic minority. His peace is disrupted by the entrance of a group of young white men, including the brutish and gaffe-prone Gavin, campaigning for the local far-right candidate, Avalon. After setting up what seems to be a simple contrast (“You’re an illegal immigrant, ain’t you?” “No.” “What’s your bloody name them?” “Ain’t telling you!” “Illegal! I can smell it on him”), the play complicates matters by drawing our emotional responses towards the character of Curtis, who is Avalon’s stepson, and not your regular BNP member. He is, according to his friends, “a bit of a thinker”. Indeed, the play is a passage of discovery for the emotional Curtis: we find he and his friends are not here for political reasons, but in order to learn about the death of Curtis’s beloved brother Jason with the help of a disabled medium and the myths which are the mainstay of Ridley’s work.
The central lesson of the play is that the personal trumps the political. In conversation, Ridley explains that most people in the East London he grew up turned to the far right for deeply personal reasons, “to find a reason why things turn out as they do”. This explains the centrality of the myths to all the characters. So not only do we have Gavin’s tale of a “great nation” led by the Arthurian Avalon, which excludes “immigrants, cripples and perverts”, but the final resolve is provided by Zak’s narration of his encounter with Jason. It is that myth, which provides the title of the play, which forces Curtis and his friends to rethink their political allegiances. Yet, ironically for those who wish to see the play as an attack on the BNP, it is the characters who have not bought fully into the mythology who remain unaffected by the deeply personal revelations which stories provide — on stage, Emily Plumtree as Sarah leaves Sean Wesley’s Curtis looking alone and empty as the play draws to a close.
The headteacher and the governors of Dorston School, where the play was due to be shown on 1 April, did not see through the political imagery in the first scene when they pulled the play at the last moment on the grounds that it “include[d] characters and themes of a political and potentially discriminatory nature”. Influenced no doubt, by reports that this was Ridley’s “most directly political play to date”, and fearful of protests by the English Defence League scheduled — coincidentally — for the same day as the performance, the governors acted to reassure the City Council that the play would not add to their woes. Yet in doing so, they denied the people of Dudley a subtle and complex portrayal of life in deprived areas of England, which avoids the narrow stereotypes of the “liberal establishment”, who bear the brunt of the far right’s criticisms of the play and, one must add, the play itself.
23 Apr 2010 | Azerbaijan News, Uncategorized
Judges says Azerbaijan should free journalist Eynulla Fatullayev — Azeri officials announce they will appeal the ruling. Vugar Gojayev reports
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