Why should Saudis ban an anti-Israeli series??

Oct 22nd 2009
From The Economist print edition

Turkey is selling its televisual wares all over the region

AP

Israeli baddies on Turkish television

BAD vibrations between Turkey and Israel have been worsened by a series on one of Turkey’s state-run television channels showing Israeli soldiers shooting Palestinian babies in a place that looks like Gaza. Yet anti-Jewish propaganda has long been a staple of a popular series called “Valley of the Wolves”. In a recent episode two Turkish scientists on the verge of building weapons that Turkey usually buys from Israel get bumped off by Kurds on Israel’s payroll.

But it is unfettered romance rather than Jew-bashing that is catching the imagination of millions of Arab viewers. Particularly alluring is a soap opera called “Noor” that has been dubbed in Arabic and was broadcast last year by a pan-Arab, Saudi-owned satellite network, MBC. Starring an emancipated woman and a blue-eyed blonde former male model, “Noor” has been credited with a recent surge in Arab tourists to Turkey. Many head straight for a Bosporus villa (now rented by tour operators) where the drama was filmed.

Yet the marital bliss portrayed in “Noor” is said to have prompted a rash of divorces in the Arab world, as female viewers compare their own husbands to the hero, Muhannad, who washes up the dishes. In Jordan a man is said to have dumped his wife after he caught her with Muhannad’s picture on her mobile phone. In Syria another did the same when his wife apparently said, “I want to sleep with Muhannad for just one night and then die.”

All of this has prompted Saudi Arabia’s grand mufti to call for a boycott of the Turkish series, which he called “evil”. But MBC is unfazed. It has snapped up the rights to a score of other Turkish television dramas.