The Cancellation of ‘Jihad Rehab’
nationalreview.com
nationalreview.com
I would encourage folks to resist seeing this as “white versus brown” or “Muslim versus non-Muslim.” Identity politics is not sectarian politics—groups of people with common interests aligning against other groups with different interests. It’s about using identity as currency in politics.
Note the phrasing: “the Muslim [view] … my voice.” The same people who say they don’t want white people to speak also usually don’t want other Muslims, with different viewpoints, to speak either. What she wants to do is to speak for Muslims—use them as silent weight to bolster her own point of view.
That said it is important to keep in mind that the biggest defenders or retarded practices are often the ones victim of it. Same for excision in Africa.. its often the grandmother who take the little girls to the "doctor" to have it "performed".. so its not a generality
As I recall there have been other famous examples of us vs. them rhetoric dating back to the Roman empire. However it's tough to be rigorous about the frequency of this ocurence.
The idea that a white American can't understand non-white non-American views, makes the same amount of sense the other way around. Both ways around need a great deal of research by the ones trying to understand, and I believe she's tried her best.
I'll go even further and say that she understands some things better than those in the culture she's covering, since she's an outside observer, giving her some objectivity that those inside can't have. I know I have this with the particular "white" culture I'm integrating into right now.
I will say that there are some things she'll find difficult to impossible to grasp -- and might not even realise she's missing -- but to say she's not even allowed to try belittles us as human beings. This exclusionary race mentality can go away.
This comes close to denying that there can ever be an understanding between cultures at all.
It is about time for people to look at the core ethics that guide either thought and at least draw the association between the two. What to name this collective community is anyone's guess, but at least the cognitive dissonance will be gone.
To aspire to understand each other is at the core of facilitating diversity and inclusion. That includes asking stupid questions, difficult questions and sometimes offensive questions. It includes tolerating faux pas and cultural appropriation.
And lastly, it requires treating other communities with the capacity for occasionally just as much good and at other times just as much malice as any other community suffering from the human condition.
Having spent so long fighting against something, the movement has accepted the premise of the things they were fighting against and started fighting for it. Reinforcing separation between people, putting labels on a person, and declaring what a person is allowed to do based on those labels.
They are explicitly for dividing people into races and giving each of those groups permissions.
Racism = being in favor of dividing people into races.
We need more dialogue between cultures, not less.
Thank you for posting this. Many of us agree with you.
there's a very big center. (dare I say it's the plurality?)
despite the news most folks are solidly boring when it comes to politics, and the loud minorities are ... loud minorities.
redefining (the already barely useful) left/right because of them is an unforced error IMHO
In America the Democrats, as the left-er of the two major parties, tend to bend heavily to the will of any adjacent loud minority and eagerly adopt their rhetoric, even if they don't adopt their policies. This gets amplified in both directions by social media, especially Twitter, where advocates press politicians for vocal sup[port, that when given increases the demand and visibility of these requests, ad infinitum.
In the Anglosphere and much of Europe, there is a common pattern of some subset of (usually young) people viewing all issues, even local ones, through an American lens. I have no idea how America established such an overwhelming level of political-cultural imperialism in the last decade or so, but at this point it seems ubiquitous. A discussion on America's policies causes everyone else to examine and start dialogue on their own policies, almost without fail. This leads to any American hot button issues becoming the issue of the week for dozens of countries, and it's all framed through American battle lines.
I've only had much experience with US culture in the USA, and living in Japan. I guess the language/cultural barrier between the US and Japan is still substantial enough that US politics don't really make their way into the Japanese zeitgeist, since I never heard anything about US politics from anyone I know living there other than Americans.
When Hetherington was killed in 2011, The Half King was soon filled with Hetherington's incredible war photography, which was an odd thing to look at if you were there for a quick pint after work, but a good way to remember an incredible photojournalist.
Incredibly sad, but fantastic interview.
https://www.samharris.org/podcasts/making-sense-episodes/298...
I don't see that as good or bad, but merely a confusion of ideas counter to everything the world seems to bombard and repeat and echo, on some kind of loop.
I just wish everyone would make up their mind and move on with living.
I hope this doesn't come off as sounding "preachy" since I've been warned by the mods in the past for "preaching". I think it does fit the topic though:
"Food will not make us acceptable to God. We are not inferior if we don’t eat, and we are not better if we do eat. But be careful that this right of yours in no way becomes a stumbling block to the weak."
1 Corinthians 8:8-9 (HCSB)
I see it as something to the affect of, no matter what time we look at the world, posturing of some sort, over some reason, carries an inherent risk of: belittling those who do not do as we do, while artificially glorifying our own position, through a means of self-defined terms and metrics. That there is a push to not just to do what is right because it is right, but instead to do what is right because of how it makes us appear.
I think that there is a matter of arrogance, pride, and glory that each of us needs to struggle with on our own terms, to find a means to humble ourselves and show humility to others. Some way of reminding ourselves that our "greatness" (good + extra works) is merely a thing that is defined by some arbitrary, outside force of what is right. Instead, we raise ourselves up because of whatever stick we use to measure by.
I'm not even sure if the people who enact this kind of rhetoric perceive their own actions in the heat of the moment. There is a sort of self-induced high we get through "going the extra mile" by insisting on be not just right, but extra right.
I hope that makes sense. It's hard to really put into words; it sounds kind of pseudo-intelectual. I just mean something like: if a man is sitting in a chair, he is not raised up off the floor just because he pulls upward from the legs of the chair. I think it's a thing we're all prone to doing. It really seems to be a matter of recognizing the risks of that thing, and being able to say "I was wrong" and turn away from it when we finally see the error.
I hope that the sorts who push for this voluntary segregation stuff do see the severe error in it. I guess I just still have some kind of twinge of regret in even holding them accountable for it, because I have absolutely tried to posture myself as better than everyone else many times, for very little reason or incentive - I just had the luck of it not making it to a national/international spotlight.
Though it does seem almost schizophrenic that everyone preaches the opposite as the highest virtue, while doing it.
Some groups and even countries do it more than others.
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2022/jul/29/jihad-rehab-for...
Sounds like it isn't a "woke mob" coming after her, but the actual subjects of the film really feel like they're being taken advantage of, their perspectives are really distorted and they felt she was re-interrogating them. The idea that the film is being cancelled solely because the filmmaker is a white woman seems to be being pushed by the filmmaker.
Suppose we did a film about the Sackler family https://www.hulu.com/series/the-crime-of-the-century-63a06ef... and the Sackler family says they don't like it -- they feel they were misrepresented, and claim they didn't consent to participation, despite having signed consent documents. Is that legitimate grounds to censor the film?
Some may feel that the Sackler situation is different. You might see the Sackler family as known "oppressors" and "bad guys". And you might see Guantánamo detainees as "victims of oppression" -- perhaps you even think they're "good guys".
I don't think this argument works -- it is exactly through documentaries such as this that we can form accurate opinions about who is a "good guy" or "bad guy"; who is the "oppressor" vs "victim of oppression". If we allow anyone claiming to be a "victim of oppression" to censor stuff that makes them look bad, that just serves to lock in our current views regarding who is a "victim of oppression" -- which means we won't be able to update those views as more evidence comes in, or as circumstances on the ground change.
If someone doesn't like a documentary that was made about them, they can do a point-by-point refutation. Censorship doesn't seem like a good solution.
The flipside is also quite reasonable here. I don't need to watch a documentary in order to decide that people horribly abused in American prisons are victims, the facts are pretty clear on that. (A bad person can, also, for reference, be a victim simultaneously.)
As for whether a point-by-point refutation is the best and only remedy, that seems to require that the victim automatically have access to the resources necessary to air their refutation where viewers of the documentary will see it. Will the National Review bump an opinion column by a Republican senator in order to publish an opinion column by a Muslim detainee instead? "The remedy for speech is more speech" style defenses assume that everyone has equal access to speech and everyone's speech will be heard equally. Neither of those are true when we're talking about released films.
The world is in fact full of examples where victims are defamed in public and are not offered a real opportunity to refute it, in some cases in fact in the National Review, which published this piece. I think it's generally fine that things work that way, but you need to keep it in mind when making arguments of the sort.
Just in the past few years we've seen some major examples of conventional wisdom being overturned. For example, very early in the COVID-19 pandemic, conventional wisdom was that wearing a mask wasn't helpful. Then the conventional wisdom was that wearing a mask should be obligatory. In 2016, the conventional wisdom was that Donald Trump couldn't win, and that didn't work out so well either.
The real world is often complicated enough that careful analysis is required to get to the bottom of an issue. If conventional wisdom doesn't derive from someone somewhere doing a careful analysis in some way shape or form, I consider it suspect -- akin to an uninvestigated urban legend.
To do a careful analysis you'll want to look at all the important facts, including new facts, and facts that are problematic for your current point of view. If people are suppressing the circulation of important facts by saying "we know these facts are harmful due to [conventional wisdom]", they're interfering with the very process by which conventional wisdom can be made accurate. It's like climbing to the top of a tree and chopping at the trunk below you.
The global war on terror is actually a great case study here. Right after the Sept 11 attacks, it was conventional wisdom that terrorism was a Big Deal, Something Had To Be Done, and people who asked inconvenient questions were Helping The Terrorists. If those inconvenient questions had seen the light of day instead of being suppressed, maybe conventional wisdom would've come more in line with a careful analysis which accounted for all the important considerations, and we could've conducted the "war on terror" in a more intelligent and humane way.
>As for whether a point-by-point refutation is the best and only remedy, that seems to require that the victim automatically have access to the resources necessary to air their refutation where viewers of the documentary will see it. Will the National Review bump an opinion column by a Republican senator in order to publish an opinion column by a Muslim detainee instead? "The remedy for speech is more speech" style defenses assume that everyone has equal access to speech and everyone's speech will be heard equally. Neither of those are true when we're talking about released films.
When it comes to speech suppression I think this is almost always an orthogonal issue. It seems clear in this case that the subjects of the documentary have a big platform -- big enough that they were able to get the film pulled from Sundance. If the film is a misrepresentation, they can use their platform to explain why, rather than using their platform to get it pulled. If Sundance is worried that festivalgoers won't hear their side of the story, they could let the subjects of the documentary send a video of themselves doing a rebuttal, and play that video as an addendum to the main film.
I don't advocate using government force to compel film festivals to show particular films.
If you do an adversary investigation about the Sacklers, using public footage or even private conversations that you obtained without them participating in any way, then sure you don't have to care about what they think.
But if you do a documentary where you ask for your subjects' help, then you owe them something, and the least you can do is not exploit or spin their testimony to fit a specific point of view -- esp. a point of view they would discover after the fact. That's a betrayal.
(I don't know if that applies to the film in question, which I haven't seen.)
It sounds like you are saying that it's unethical to include interviews in a documentary unless the interviewee is on board with the message of the documentary?
I don't agree with this claim either.
Suppose I'm a documentary filmmaker approaching the Sackler story with an open mind. I call up the Sacklers and say: "Would you like to tell your side of the story on camera?" They say yes. I interview them.
As I continue investigating, I discover lots of evidence that the Sacklers are villains, and their villainy ends up being the message of my documentary.
The Sacklers watch my film and discover it has a point of view they dislike. They feel that they've been exploited, that their testimony was spun, and that I owed it to them to not betray them this way, since they helped me with the documentary.
Do you agree with the Sacklers in this hypothetical?
Personally, I don't find the argument as stated particularly persuasive. If the Sacklers could demonstrate that their interview footage was cut in a way that misrepresented what they said, then I'd find fault with the documentarian on the grounds of making a misleading documentary. But I don't believe in a reciprocity obligation of the kind you describe. It seems to me that such an obligation is incompatible with the idea of investigative journalism.
Side note: In practice, it is already in the self-interest of journalists to play this kind of "I'll scratch your back if you scratch mine" game, in order to gain continued access to their subjects. I don't think it is a good idea to pile additional enforcement on top of the incentives that already exist.
> Mohammed Al-Hamiri, one of the men featured in the film, told the Guardian that he wasn’t aware the film would be accessible internationally and only found out that it had been made available online after its showing at Sundance. “My life is already difficult but this film poses a serious threat to my life and that of my family,” said Al-Hamiri.
> *Another man said that he had explicitly told the film-maker that he did not want to be featured in the film but his wishes had been disregarded.* The film’s director Meg Smaker says that all the participants in the film signed consent documents and denied that the men expressed any fears in correspondence with her.
Personally, I am more or less ambivalent to the film currently as I've only heard about it due to the controversy and that Sam Harris covered it. Perhaps it's extremely meaningful and perhaps not, I haven't had time to process it.
Yes, I think I would. I think the proper behavior in that case would be to return to them after you decide they're the villains, and let them respond to that. If they chose not to, fine, you can go ahead with the original footage. But if they choose to answer your new questions, you should include those too.
Just absolutely wild to read this sentence in the National Review of all places.
The National Review was a loud mouthpiece for the politicians promoting the war on terror, including the use of enhanced-interrogation-teqniues-don’t-call-it-torture. A piece of that national shame is all theirs.
I guess it’s nice they don’t seem to support it anymore, but it looks more like a shift of convenience to me — the better to stroke the current conservative narrative to redefine “free speech” so as to cast speech they dislike as “cancellation”, that it can be repressed while still claiming to own the moral high-ground.
Do you have a citation for this?
- - -
Supposing a journalist submits an article to the editor-in-chief, and the article expresses disagreement with a position that the publication took in the past. If the editor-in-chief says "no you can't say that, we need to present a consistent perspective for our readers", I'm less interested in reading their publication. This appears to be a case of the editor of the National Review passing that test.
>I guess it’s nice they don’t seem to support it anymore, but it looks more like a shift of convenience to me — the better to stroke the current conservative narrative to redefine “free speech” so as to cast speech they dislike as “cancellation”, that it can be repressed while still claiming to own the moral high-ground.
I wasn't able to parse this sentence.
Yes, it's impossible to know for sure to what extent and how the men might have been threatened. That doesn't mean you throw up your hands and say "whatever, I now have no moral obligations".
> The accusation was rooted in the question of free consent: Even if the men signed release forms — which they did — they might have done so only because they were under the control of a “carceral system.” If that were true, though, it could be equally true that the men were forced to criticize the film and affirm the claims in CAGE’s letter. Either way, the idea that Smaker had coerced her subjects into cooperating and put them at risk became a doc-world trope that was impossible to disprove, because, by order of the Saudi state, the men were prohibited from communicating with anyone outside the country without permission.
Smaker asked ~150 inmates to participate, and only a tiny handful agreed.
All ethical filmmakers carefully consider ethics in situations where people might feel compelled to participate. Prison is one such situation.
I'm not saying it's impossible to ethically film inmates, but it is very worrying she brushes off the possibility she might need to carefully consider it.
It's (almost always) unethical to interview inmates held in repressive dictatorships because there are so many different ways you can violate their rights and put them at risk.
Smaker, who had already been cleared for contact, was in touch with three of the men throughout the months after Sundance. None of them ever brought up issues raised in the CAGE letter, and one even called recently to say — in a voicemail — that he missed her and wanted to know when she was coming back to Saudi Arabia for a visit.
Even on the face of it, a white woman in Saudi Arabia, probably isn’t running around a rehab centre without authorities knowing what she was up to.
The article acknowledges these men are being held captive until the Saudi government decides they're properly reformed, and restricts what they're allowed to say. How can you trust they're genuinely consenting in that environment.
> Even on the face of it, a white woman in Saudi Arabia, probably isn’t running around a rehab centre without authorities knowing what she was up to.
You've got the problem completely backwards: I'm not worried she's sneaking behind the government's back, I'm worried because she let the Saudi government puppet her into making propaganda for them.
When people say that people signed a letter denouncing the documentary without seeing it that's a little bit wide of the mark also. If free speech is a right that is to have any meaning whatsoever, it must certainly include the right to be wrong, not fully informed etc. If that's not the case, then speech can be shot down by saying the speaker doesn't have the right because they haven't done their research or the sources are inaccurate etc.
How is this not insane?
Nowadays the concept of "free speech" is developing a new meaning among some crowds:
"free speech for me but don't call me out if I say something socially unacceptable and hurtful"
"Withdraw the movie from the program and defund it," is a call for hostile action. Not as bad as "burn the director at stake", but still. I don't think it should be illegal to call for such measures, but it should be considered deeply shameful, on the level of advocating for slavery or torture.
E.g. we're not talking about holding signs at the conference. We're talking about calling translators who worked on the movie, and telling them "denounce this film or we will make sure you never get another arab translation job again".
Not all speech is equivalent. Speech which is arranging a hit job is not protected free speech. Speech which is fraud is not free speech.
Essential time piece for everyone who lived through 9/11
Make sure to watch it if there is a screening nearby
Doing these cancellations is effectively risk-free, and only incurs the opportunity cost of not deploying time onto a higher ROI target.
No idea what can be done about that in the current cultural climate.
This film was 'cancelled' and that's why it was written up in two publications with national audiences.
AFAIK the movie is still in red because of all the cancelled festival screenings - a major problem for the director who isn't wealthy.
That is absolutely cancel culture. That there is subsequent news coverage (still no easy way to watch the film!) doesn’t change that.
Introduce mandatory "what did the author mean" classes in schools, where children write down the one true interpretation of a corpus of sanctioned texts from preferably >100 years ago, under dictation, for many years; until they are completely incapable of approaching a work of art to understand it for themselves.
It's not 100% effective, but the remaining few percent end up mentally ill, so it's a win-win!
The Prussian system of education, which is at the root of contemporary compulsory schooling, was designed to produce machine operators and obedient soldiers, not necessarily to educate anyone - the idealism of individual teachers notwithstanding.
This is standard operating procedure, and definitely my own personal experience during middle and high school. Do this over a couple of generations and you get a population largely incapable of basic reflection.
And since this form of "education" is, in fact, nonsensical, parents end up paying for tutoring so their kids can pass an equally nonsensical mandatory exam, so that they (supposedly) get better prospects. So teachers get a lucrative side gig giving private lessons to keep the system going, and as they get complacent, they become complicit.
Maybe in your community things are laid out different. Either way, larger populations still end up having a "critical mass" of eloquent people maintaining the tradition of the written word, and the benefits it provides to society; smaller ones just get dispossessed at scale. This contributes to consolidation of power, the establishment of global oligopolies that hold back progress for the sake of their bottom line, etc.
It is just a new mutated form of the plain old racism and we should probably call it neo-racism.
Sounds like a great movie.
https://www.google.com/search?q=Jihad+rehab
https://www.bing.com/search?q=jihad+rehab
https://www.grid.news/story/podcasts/2022/09/30/bad-takes-ep...
With a lot less whining about 'the woke mob'.
According to that recently renamed film “The UnRedacted.”
National review is going to do its thing, though the times seemed to take a dim view of its Sundance cancelation.
Here’s a nytimes “gift” link
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/25/us/sundance-jihad-rehab-m...
And while there are definitely understandable concerns about interviewing a basically imprisoned population, 1. the fact that only a handful of prisoners opted to speak while the rest declined shows that they did have at least some degree of choice, and 2. the viewer can balance what the documentary presents against the circumstances in which it was created.
Considering the actual content of the documentary it’s hard to see how else this story could be told.
Finally, I thought we were past the whole “only people of a community can make stories about that community” thing. It would be one thing if someone with a similar background had stayed in the facility for a year and also made an equivalent story. Arguably they should get higher weight. But no one else did. This story is not displacing anyone else. In its absence all we have is a vacuum.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/film/2022/j...
> But attacks would come from the left, not the right. Arab and Muslim filmmakers and their white supporters accused Ms. Smaker of Islamophobia and American propaganda. Some suggested her race was disqualifying, a white woman who presumed to tell the story of Arab men.
> Sundance leaders reversed themselves and apologized.
> Abigail Disney, a grandniece of Walt Disney, had been the executive producer of “Jihad Rehab” and called it “freaking brilliant” in an email to Ms. Smaker. Now she disavowed it.
> The film “landed like a truckload of hate,” Ms. Disney wrote in an open letter.
You may not refer to it as a "woke mob", but that really seems what happened. As someone who has always identified as liberal, it is absolutely shocking to me how large swaths of the American left are OK with the idea that "Some suggested her race was disqualifying, a white woman who presumed to tell the story of Arab men". To me, telling someone they aren't allowed to do something because of their race is the absolute antithesis of everything I felt it was to be "liberal".
I don't really think of racism as a strictly partisan thing, the biggest partisan divide is regarding who the mob is most likely to be racist towards.
Blue collar racism is much more inclusive than white collar D&I. The expectation is to be able to take and give shit there.
Edit: after a quick search online, I could not find a way to watch it (paid or unpaid) so why the fuck are we talking about this?
I suspect Marxist view of that is similar to their view on other cases of US destroying entire regions just to win the next elections.
Just a reminder that the far ends of the political spectrum loop back and connect.
[1] https://www.britannica.com/biography/Adolf-Hitler/Rise-to-po...
So yes.
So not even a little.
If you support terror groups - and I mean in the strictest sense, as in people that attack civilians - you're on the far edge of politics. Before you shout that Corbyn was 'reaching out' to terrorists by saying they're his friends, that punishing people that killed innocent people in Brighton was a show trial, or laying wreaths at their funerals: everyone involved in Northern Ireland or the Middle East peace processes claims that Corbyn, a Labour back bencher at the time, had nothing to do with either of the Northern Ireland or the Middle East peace process.
> People that liked Corbyn joined Labour
Because of a Momentum campaign that cynically exploited a brief moment allowing anyone to join the Labour party for 5 pounds.
> antisemitism accusations were used cynically by the right of Labour for years
And obviously the far left is still denying them even after the party's own investigation found they had substance.
Pardon? What specifically of the very specific, widely accepted points of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33215270 was not based in fact?
If you think my points are issues with the mainstream left rather than the far left I don’t think you’ve been reading the posts you keep writing replies to.
It's interesting how easy it was to ignore and ridicule those movements at the time, we'd go "ah, those silly fundies", how quaint. Remember Kevin Smith picketing with them outside of movie theaters at the Dogma premiere? We got a good chuckle out of it.
Yet look at how seriously the same people are taking the current flavor of moral panic.
On the other hand, these claims turned out to be excellent marketing for those records.
I wouldn't be completely shocked if some of the initial outrage about Jihad Rehab was triggered by a shrewd marketer, similarly how marketers would tip off the Tucker Max movie screenings to feminist organizations around campuses in the hopes that they would call for a cancellation.
Doubt we'll ever see the evidence for that though.
The PMRC was an absolutely bipartisan effort. Tipper Gore was a founding member, and probably the most prominent person amongst their leadership. Probably a good idea to try and project your biases onto history a little less.
Edit: actually ignore me. I don't think we have matching definitions of left and right wing. And I definitely don't have knowledge of whether the US Democrats are left wing by any definition I'd use
In the 80s and 90s, about 90% of US adults identified as Christian. So your question here doesn’t really make sense.
> I don't think we have matching definitions of left and right wing
I’m getting the impression that your idea of “right wing” is just all the things that you don’t like, such as Christianity. Irrespective of actual the histories of right and left wing politics…
As for Christianity, I hope we can agree that the teachings of Jesus are quite to the left on the political spectrum.
It is depressing how blind the left (my side!) are to it, you still see them denying it or - now that the mainstream has become aware of it and they are on the defensive - excusing it with nonsense about "accountability/call-out/consequence culture".
Shameful.
"Terrorist rehab" would be quite an ill-suited name. There is no indication that the men in the documentary ever were terrorists, aside from one of them.
You could have suggested "Guantanamo rehab". That would have better qualified the men in the film than "terrorists". Even then I think it's unfair to call racist her decision to name the film after that Saudi program.
It is also sad that the National Review which paints itself as this bastion of objectivity publishes such breathless headlines.