CBC SPREADS ANTI IRAN PROPAGANDA WITH OUR TAX DOLLARS

SPET 1ST UPDATE: SInce the publication of the article on CBC web site,  I have left several messages on Matthew Hays' answering machine at TIFF but no call backs so far. Also Tanaz refuses to be interviewed by Iranian journalists about her documentary.  This was communicated to me by the press office of Montreal's World Film Festival, which featured this film in the Labour day weekend as part of its documentary section. 

How dare to make a controversial movie yet fail to feel the importance to talk about it. I call this extreme cultural arrogance, to betray your subjects' trust, to spread lies and to hide afterwards. 

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I started my morning by reading this on cbc web site about Tannaz Eshaghian and her documentary called "Be Like Others" about transgendered people and homosexuals in Iran. Great. According to our Concordia professor turned expert on the Iranian culture, Iran has a "...culture so steeped in hatred of gays and lesbians that it deems a sex change preferable to simply accepting differences in sexual orientation."

As far as I am concerned, Iran should be praised for allowing transgendered people to receive public funding for their sex change. Imagine if Iran had created a program to force transgenders to commit into their male gender. I bet Matthew would have seen that as another sign of hate, One way or another, Matthew is determined to see hate in Iran.

I thought to myself, If Israel Asper's children and CanWest GlobalMedia like to trash Muslims, Palestinians, Arabs and Iranians on a daily basis, one can shrug and blame capitalism, after all they own the media company they use as a propaganda vehicle, but what about CBC? Where is public integrity? Dear Mr Robert Rabinovitch - President and CEO of our publicly funded broadcasting network, you can't do the same with our money.

Then I started reading on the film, its producers and the CBC writer Mr. Matthew Hays, a professor at Concordia University and a programming director at the Toronto International Film Festival. Before I even tried to write something on it, I noticed my friend Hossein Derakhshan already had done a great piece about the film and its pushers back in February 2008. Here is a link to Hossein's brilliant piece on the film.

As Hossein comments about the director, "If you are a Jewish Iranian, living in the U.S. from the age of 6, it is very likely you don't like Ahmadinejad. So of course you would like to show how you hate him and how he is such a liar and how evil the entire government he represents is, in any way you can."