Iran bans all western movies

Nope, not joking. There won't be any liquor-swilling God-denyers on the Iranian silver screen any time soon. Drug takers, secularists, liberals, anarchists and feminists are out, too. That's what a committee of Islamic clerics, led by new hard-line President Ahmadinejad, ruled earlier this week when it banned foreign films. The clerics singled out in the ban elements of Western culture that were judged as affronts to the government's vision of Iran's Muslim culture. So no alcohol drinkers, athiests, druggies, secularists, liberals, anarchists or femenists. Any film that has any of those un-islamic characters will be banned. Hmm.. So that pretty much covers all US movies, no? Can anyone recommend to me a single US movies that came out without any of those types of people in them? No? Yeah , thought so. What's the reasoning again? The Supreme Cultural Revolutionary Council said the banned films "damage and humiliate eastern traditions and culture" and promote "arrogant powers," a propaganda term Iran's government uses to describe the United States. The move follows on the Ahmadinejad campaign promise to promote Islamic culture and confront what he called the Western cultural invasion. Ahh.. ok! As if the Iranians won't just get their movies from the black market instead. Ohh, by the way, the Iranians are not happy about this. And the ban, designed to wipe out what clerics call "corrupt Western culture," is not going down well with many in Iran. It's not right to fight other cultures. Imposing censorship is not the logical way to resist Western culture, at any rate," said Ali Reza Raisian, head of the Iranian film directors association. "If Westerners were to treat us the same way, we also would not be able to reach them through film with our messages and way of thinking." [...] "A policy of censorship never works. Hard-liners don't understand that they can't tell the people what to watch and what not to watch," said cinema fan Hasan Jamali. [...] Raisian said the ban would have little effect on cinemas where few Western films play, but it could dramatically change television, where all channels are controlled by the state and overseen by religious hard-liners. State-run television had shown foreign films after censoring many scenes deemed immoral or offensive. Films considered hostile to the Islamic values preached by the ruling establishment were already banned altogether. "This new ban appears to be part of a campaign to push Iran back to the 1980s and to impose the same restrictions that were only just eased under Khatami. But it will be impossible to take Iran back to '80s again," said political analyst Davoud Hermidas Bavand. Well, A.J. and the cleric gang seem to be trying hard to do so. When will the Iranian people rise and get rid of them, I have no idea. But it can't happen soon enough in my opinion.