There's a film festival underway in Boston right now through April 30, looks like they've got some verrrry interesting films. Film festival website with schedule here, article in the Globe here. All screenings are free and open to the public. From the Muslim Film Festival website:
"The festival is an invitation to open your eyes to a stereotype-defying tour of the Muslim world's diversity and complexity. The collage of films celebrate 'think-different women' on the frontlines of reform, challenging extremism and taboos. The strong characters who populate the festival's award-winning films offer rarely-heard iconoclastic voices."
The festival is presented by the American Islamic Congress in conjunction with the Women's Studies Program at Boston University, the Pathways Interfaith Initiative at Tufts University, the Global Film Initiative, and Americans for Informed Democracy." The curator is Mohammed Harba, a 27-year-old filmmaker from Iraq now living in Massachusetts. These are films you likely won't have the chance to see elsewhere.
So did I hear about this film festival from the local Muslim American Society or the Islamic Society of Boston or the local college Muslim student associations? Nope. MAs sent out a dozen e-mail notices about screenings of Occupation 101 or Gaza Strip, which provided a "look inside the stark realities of Palestinian life and death under Israeli military occupation." But not a peep, not one e-mail about the Think-Different Women film festival. This series includes the movie Shadya (screening this Wednesday at BU, 6:30 PM), about 17-year old Shadya Zoabi, who is "a world champion in karate, a feminist in a male-dominated culture and a Muslim Arab living in Israel. " An Israeli citizen who's an Arab Muslim wins the 2003 World Shotokan Karate Champion? Oopsy, that doesn't fit the desperate Palestinian victim narrative, does it?
This is a telling omission on the part of the local daughter organizations of the Muslim Brotherhood in the United States.
There are many corollaries between the victim-centered ideology of mainstream feminists, who allow no dissent or alternative viewpoint (as Camille Paglia noted last week at Harvard), and the victim-centered ideology of so many American Muslim organizations, who do likewise. Muslims with a different viewpoint are ignored or shunned by the MAS/MSA groups.
Hat tip to Solomonia.
If they are not spoken of or written about, they don't exist.
Posted by: Sissy Willis | April 14, 2008 at 03:30 PM