A film that has been harshly condemned as anti-Semitic has now been altered, in the hands of Hezbollah, to make it unequivocally anti-American. Al-Manar, the Hezbollah-backed satellite television channel that is based in Lebanon, has recently begun broadcasts of an altered version of the trailer for Mel Gibson’s film, The Passion of the Christ; the piece is titled The Passion of the Iraqis.

Al-Manar has changed the trailer for The Passion of the Christ to highlight the recent events at Abu Ghraib prison, and according to the BBC:

As the portentous music plays, a blood-stained hand flexes in pain. The screen fades to black as the words “No Mercy” fade up in white. A nail is seen being driven into the hand. The words “No Compromise” appear … as the music reaches its crescendo, the words “The Passion of the Christ” are replaced by “The Passion of the Iraqis.” Then one of the images of alleged American abuse of Iraqi prisoners that shocked the world flashes up on screen. It is the picture of a hooded Iraqi prisoner, arms outstretched, standing on a box in a mock electrocution.

Al-Manar — popular, political, and available in the Middle East where there is a satellite dish — constantly and effectively combines an unwavering political stance with entertainment and a strong reliance on a sense of pan-Arab suffering and solidarity. According to the BBC, al-Manar “has attracted a growing audience in the Arab world partly because of the emotional pull of its video edits of Palestinian and Iraqi suffering set to mournful music.”

Last year, al-Manar broadcast a 26-part mini-series, aired during the month of Ramadan, titled “al-Shatat” — the Diaspora — a highly controversial series which critics denounced as virulently anti-Semitic. “Al-Shatat” depicts the development of the Zionist movement between 1812 and 1948 and the foundation of the state of Israel in 1948, and features segments about the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a document which asserts that there is a Jewish conspiracy for world domination; scholars consider the document to be a forgery, created in czarist Russia, the purpose of which was to justify persecution of the Jews.  

Horrified at the content of the series, coupled with al-Manar’s rising popularity across the Arab world, Richard Boucher, a State Department spokesman, stated: “We view these programs as unacceptable.”

Equally unpalatable for many but successful for al-Manar is “The Mission,” a quiz show in which contestants who successfully answer questions advance on a virtual map, step by step, towards Jerusalem. If a contestant accomplishes his mission and steps on Jerusalem, the producers of the show play a Hezbollah song, the lyrics of which unsurprisingly proclaim “Jerusalem is ours and we are coming to it.”

The United States government considers Hezbollah — a movement that appeared in the early 1980s — to be a terrorist organization. It is now also a recognized, even mainstream, Lebanese political party; there are nine members of Hezbollah in the Lebanese parliament.  

Not only do we now have an unapologetically jingoist Fox to an unapologetically political al-Manar and wildly popular al-Jazeera, we also have the American ventures into Arabic language media, such as Hi, a lifestyle magazine targeted at the 18- to 35-year-old age bracket for both men and women, and the U.S.-run Arabic language television network, al-Hurra, and Radio Sawa. In recent months, the dividing line between physical and propaganda warfare has become increasingly blurred, as evidenced by the violence that erupted after the Coalition Provisional Authority shut down al-Hawzah, a weekly newspaper run by Muqtada al-Sadr, a radical Shiite cleric in Iraq. Such violence should serve as a warning and a reminder that media organizations must be cognizant of the fact that what is flashed across their screens and what is pawned off as news may have direct and violent repercussions.  

Mimi Hanaoka