German Movie Chain Pulls Anti-American Flick

[ECH1969]

Germany's largest movie chain, CinemaxX, has pulled the hit Turkish film Valley of the Wolves: Iraq, following accusations that the film is anti-Semitic and anti-American. The film depicts American soldiers in Iraq as villains, with Billy Zane playing a sadistic U.S. officer and Gary Busey, a Jewish doctor who harvests the organs of Iraqi prisoners and sells them to clients in the West and in Israel.

"The controversy surrounding this film has really heated up," CinemaxX spokesman Arne Schmidt told today's (Friday) Hollywood Reporter. "We didn't want to add oil to the fire, so we decided to pull the film." Earlier this week, Bavarian state premier Edmund Stoiber called on all German theater owners "to pull this racist and anti-Western hate film immediately." However, Anil Sahin, head of Maxximum, the film's distributor, told the trade publication. "This is being used as a political football to score points.

http://www.imdb.com/news/sb/2006-02-24/

[AlamoDemoc]

1. Well! if the most media

Arabs are told to reflect on muslims with their prophet wearing head-scarf explosives, I would hope whey would retrieve any given movie, and would still reflect....not to mention the masses

[Sabriel]

2. If they pulled the American films with "anti-Arab" themes...

There would be a lot fewer films out there. Maybe they should...hit them at the box office.

True Lies
The Siege
Executive Decision
The Black Stallion
The Mummy
Rules of Engagement

[barb162]

3. I think this is really a bit much

"...Jewish doctor who harvests the organs of Iraqi prisoners and sells them to clients in the West and in Israel"
especially when we have a very avid Holocaust denier running Iran and people killing each other over cartoons right now

[rpannier]

7. Have to agree there

The harvesting organ part is just lame and idiotic.

[IndianaGreen]

26. Organ harvesting is a fact! Here is a Christian Science Monitor

article on this topic:

What is a kidney worth?
Every day, 17 Americans die of organ failure. In Israel, the average wait for a kidney transplant is four years. In response, a global gray market has bloomed. In India, for example, poor sellers are quickly matched with sick buyers from Taiwan. Critics call it "transplant tourism." Proponents say the market is meeting a need.

The Monitor follows three men: an unemployed Brazilian and an ailing Israeli, as well as a South African investigator who helped bust an organ-trafficking ring.

The case raises anew hard legal and ethical questions, such as: Who owns our bodies? Should it be illegal to sell an organ if it could save someone's life? What is the government's role in protecting two vulnerable groups - the poor, who are willingly exploited, and the sick, who are desperate for healing?

On a warm afternoon in Recife, a city on Brazil's northeastern coast, Hernani Gomes da Silva sits alone in the Bar Egipcio, quietly nursing a drink, ruminating about his predicament. He is 32 years old and still lives in his mother's two-room house. Rain comes in through the roof, and cockroaches and rats scuttle across the cement floor. He has three kids, a wife who loathes him, and a mistress 20 years his senior. He is unemployed with no money, no skills, and a criminal record. The future is bleak.

http://www.csmonitor.com/2004/0609/p01s03-wogi.html?s=spworld

And another story that is more relevant to the topic of the film in question. Here the US State Department denies that organ harvesting is taking place, mind you this is the same State Department that has never told the truth about Iraq:

Is the U.S. Harvesting Organs from Iraqis?

Allegations from a Saudi newspaper proved incorrect

A disinformation allegation in the December 18, 2004, issue of Saudi Arabia's Al-Watan newspaper falsely claimed that U.S. forces in Iraq are harvesting organs from dead or wounded Iraqis for sale in the United States. The sensationalistic nature of the fictitious allegations, in an article by Brussels-based reporter Fikriyyah Ahmad, caused them to be repeated in other media.

False rumors that Americans and others engage in adoption for organ trafficking first appeared in January of 1987, in Honduras. This rumor has been repeatedly investigated since then, and no evidence has ever been found to support it.

The current story appears to be a variation on this old theme, falsely accusing U.S. physicians of accompanying troops in Iraq to harvest organs for sale in the United States.

The sale or purchase of organs for transplant has been illegal in the United States since 1984, when the National Organ Transplant Act was passed. Joel Newman of the United Network for Organ Sharing (UNOS), the U.S. organization that matches organ donors to recipients, stated on December 20, 2004, that there have never been any cases of attempted illegal organ transplantation in the United States. UNOS officials and transplant physicians have stated emphatically that it would be impossible to successfully conceal any U.S. clandestine organ trafficking ring.

http://usinfo.state.gov/media/Archive/2005/Jan/14-475342.html

And yes, you can harvest tissues from the dead:

4 charged in human-tissue scheme

By Tom Hays

The Associated Press

NEW YORK — The owner of a biomedical supply house was charged along with three other men Thursday with secretly carving up corpses and selling the parts for use in transplants across the country.

The case was "like something out of a cheap horror movie," Brooklyn District Attorney Charles Hynes said.

Prosecutors said the defendants obtained the bodies from funeral parlors in three states and forged death certificates and organ-donor consent forms to make it look as if the bones, skin and other tissue were legally removed. The defendants made millions of dollars from the scheme, prosecutors said.

The indictment was the first set of charges to come out of a widening scandal involving scores of funeral homes and hundreds of bodies, including that of "Masterpiece Theatre" host Alistair Cooke, who died in 2004. The investigation has raised fears that some of the body parts could spread disease to transplant recipients.

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/health/2002825504_bodyparts24.html

[Dogmudgeon]

4. I thought Gary Busey was a Bushista

I know the man's half out of his mind, but he's always been a supporter of Bush, a vocal (a VERY vocal) Evangelical right-winger, and a flag-waver.

I don't get into a lot of hatred of RW actors, and I don't hate Busey, either. But this is a damn strange turn of events.

--p!

[thebigidea]

6. nah. Like all RW whores he likes money.

You expect someone like Gary Busey to have principles?

[Psephos]

5. Germany has a huge unassimilated Turk "guest worker" population

After seeing what happened in Britain, France, and then Denmark, the Germans are starting to realize they have a potential problem as well. Needlessly fanning the baser emotions of their domestic Muslims with such a movie is in no one's best interests.

Peace.

[Orrin_73]

13. Thats b*llsh*t

to say that the Turks in Germany are a potential threat is a grave mistake. There we no problems with Turks in Germany until now and there will be no in the foreseeable future. The only problem is coming from German rightwing and the skinheads attacking Turks.
You are talking like a freeper, are you sure you are on the right blog?
This movie is no different then the ones made by hollywood against muslims and arabs in gerneral like: True Lies
The Siege
Executive Decision
The Black Stallion
The Mummy
Rules of Engagement and many more.

[Psephos]

15. You're entitled to your opinions, but not entitled to dissing a DUer

When you attack me instead of my opinion, that says your argument sucks, so the only recourse is to try discrediting me as a freeper.

Whatever, dude. You have your opinion, I have mine. There weren't a lot of people here thinking France was going to have the problems it had, either. They all seem to have gone silent lately.

Ironically, it seems you're the one on the wrong blog, because you are violating the DU rules.

Let me quote the rules:

3. Civility: Treat other members with respect. Do not post personal attacks against other members of this discussion forum.

4. Content: Do not post messages that are inflammatory, extreme, divisive, incoherent, or otherwise inappropriate. Do not engage in anti-social, disruptive, or trolling behavior. Do not post broad-brush, bigoted statements.

Look 'em up yourself.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/forums/rules.html

Peace.

[enigma000]

18. I would guess Hollywood has made more anti-alien and anti-Nazi

films in the last decade than anti-muslim and anti-arab films. And I thought The Siege and Rules of Engagement weren't all that grossly anti-Arab - The Siege focused on Bruce Willis' character as a bad guy at the end

I'm not for censoring this Turkish movie at all.

But I do wonder, if a couple of B-list American actors went to Franco-ruled Spain during WWII and made an anti-American propaganda file, wouldn't that be considered improper.

[Kellanved]

17. actually: no

The Turkish population isn't the demographic causing problems. Assimilation is slow and the society is only slowly coming to terms with immigration.

The "problems" however are not caused by the Turkish immigrants or the "guest worker" in general. The demographic appearing most frequently in the statistics are north-African nationals, who immigrated in the 80s and 90s.

[sandnsea]

8. But but but...what about freedom of speech

They pull this movie but they can't restrain themselves from printing anti-Muslim cartoons?? :crazy:

[Dutch]

9. Does CinemaxX publish any newspapers or political magazines then?

Or is this the royal "they" popping up again?:crazy:

[Behind the Aegis]

10. I am going to guess the "royal" they.

BTW...I love that saying! :thumbsup:

[Karmakaze]

11. Or it could mean they...

- the German government - that makes it a crime to for example say the Holocaust didnt happen and that pressures a movie chain to not show a movie that paints Americans or Jews in a bad light, but then talks about the freedom of speech of newspapers that print cartoons depicting Mohammed as a bomb carrying terrorist.

Double standards are rife - even here on DU.

On edit: here is a good example for you in regards to the cartoons:

"Why should the government apologize for something that happened in the exercise of press freedom?" Germany's Wolfgang Schaueble asked. "If the state intervenes, that is the first step toward limiting press freedom."

Of course should a German paper print a cartoon that even suggests that the Holocaust didnt happen, the people involved could face 5 years in prison. So apparently the press is only free to insult Muslims.

On edit again:

On January 3, 2004 The Straits Times ran an Agence France Presse article that reported, "If a Muslim headscarf is an expression of faith, so is a monk's habit or a crucifix and they should be on equal footing, said German President Johannes Rau, prompting fury from Roman Catholic politicians and clerics. Mr. Rau has appealed for all religions to be treated equally in schools. If headscarves are forbidden in German schools, then so should other outward religious symbols, he argued...His remark drew an outraged response from Mr. Edmund Stoiber, Bavarian state prime minister and head of the ultra-conservative Christian Social Union, the Bavarian wing of the Christian Democratic Union, Germany's main opposition. Mr. Rau has no right to 'cast doubt on our national identity, distinguished by the Christian religion', he said. He described Islamic headscarves in schools as 'a political symbol incompatible with our democracy.'"

Yep Germany is all about human rights and equality. Unless you are a Muslim.

[Behind the Aegis]

12. Double standards are rife - even here on DU.

That is so damn true!

[Karmakaze]

21. Of course it is...

I mean If I was to seriously say that all Jews are inbred and uneductaed like I saw someone say Muslims are, I would be tombstoned. But the person talking about Muslims was not only not tombstoned, but the post wasn't even deleted and on thread that had at least 10-15 people participating I was the only one to even criticise the post.

You see it is alright to be racist and bigotted as long as the targets are Muslim or Arab.

[Orrin_73]

14. Stoiber should shut the f*** up

He is one of those politicians in Germany stirring the hate against all non Germans. He is the defacto hero of the nazi/skinheads in Germany.

[Jack_DeLeon]

16. Interesting I didnt know random no name foreign films...

Hired American actors too often.

Yeah I guess Billy Zane and Gary Busey really arent huge names or nothing, but I just thought that it was odd.

Anyways I'll keep an eye out for this film on my favorite p2p services and download it when I can just to see what this is all about.

Censorship is never good.

[daleo]

19. I would like to see this film too

It is always interesting to see how "the other" sees you when you are "the other".

[fujiyama]

20. Understandably, Germany has it's own history to deal with,

but I still don't believe in censorship. I personally don't know much about the film, but the Jewish organ harvesting doctor bit is way over the top and kinda ties into that whole blood libel myth. Of course Gary Busey playing a Jewish doctor is quite honestly one of the dumbest things I've ever heard! Talk about miscast... I guess a paycheck is a paycheck.

[Harper_is_Bush]

22. So....are films that depict Arabs as villians "anti-Arab" flicks?

The term "anti-American" is being tossed around so much these days it's lost all meaning.

Any critisism of America is now "anti-American" in Canada.

[da_chimperor]

23. They're showing it in the Netherlands

http://www.pathe.nl/filminfo.asp?film_id=1896&bios_id=-1

[Orrin_73]

25. da_chimperor ben jij Nederlands?

[DemExpat]

27. Eindhoven staat op zijn user profile....

:hi:

DemEx

[Orrin_73]

28. Ok ik zie het nu

Ik zag dat blijkbaar over het hoofd. Dat betekent dus dat ik niet de enige Nederlander hier ben. DemExpat ik dacht dat jij een Amerikaan was die hier in Nederland woont?
:hi:

[DemExpat]

29. Ja, dat ben ik, Orrin....

maar ook al 7 jaar Nederlandse.

:hi:

DemEx

[IndianaGreen]

24. The film is based on real events and real people

It is too bad that the war apologists and the AIPAC Thought Police don't like it!

There is a thread about it in Editorials, but here is the post I did on the BBC story about the incident in which the film is based:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=103x193335#193352

[IndianaGreen]

30. Roger Ebert's website has a review of film by Jim Emerson

Turkish Rambo-spy takes on USA

Jim Emerson / February 2, 2006

The latest in a new genre of Turkish popular culture that vilifies the United States, a Turkish movie shows American soldiers in Iraq crashing a wedding and pumping a little boy full of lead in front of his mother.

They randomly machine-gun dozens of people to death, shoot the groom in the head and drag those left alive to Abu Ghraib prison — where a Jewish-American doctor cuts out their organs, which he sells to rich people in New York, London and Tel Aviv. <...>

(The film) opens with a true story: On July 4, 2003, in northern Iraq, troops from the U.S. Army’s 173rd Airborne Brigade raided and ransacked a Turkish special forces office, threw hoods over the heads of 11 officers, and held them in custody for more than two days. The Americans said they had been looking for Iraqi insurgents and unwittingly rounded up the Turks because they were not in uniform.

Still, the incident damaged Turkish-U.S. relations and hurt Turkish national pride. Turks traditionally idolize their soldiers; most enthusiastically send their sons off for mandatory military service.

http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20060202/SCANNERS/60202001