A White Woman's Documentary About Muslim Extremists Is Being Canceled. Guess Why.Numerous critics object to the fact that the filmmaker, Meg Smaker, is a white woman.
ROBBY SOAVE | 9.26.2022
Jihad Rehab is a documentary by Meg Smaker, a former firefighter who moved from California to Yemen and then to Saudi Arabia following the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Subsequent to its inclusion at the January 2022 Sundance Film Festival, both the film and filmmaker have become pariahs in elite film circles—mostly because Smaker, a white woman, dared to make a movie about the experience of Islamic men.
"Film critics warned that conservatives might bridle at these human portraits," notes The New York Times in a recent, much discussed article about Jihad Rehab's cancellation. "But attacks would come from the left, not the right."
The film centers on four men who were accused of terrorism, imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay, and later sent to a rehabilitation center in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. The center's purpose is ostensibly to deradicalize and reintegrate its involuntary participants. The New York Times describes it as spanning "an unlikely distance between prison and boutique hotel."
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But conservatives aren't canceling Jihad Rehab. Liberals are.
"The bottom line is such," wrote Jude Chehab, a Lebanese-American filmmaker, in a review of Jihad Rehab that criticized Sundance for daring to feature it. "When I, a practising Muslim woman, say that this film is problematic, my voice should be stronger than a white woman saying that it isn't. Point blank."
Indeed, this was the visceral component of the torrent of criticism that has greeted Smaker: She is a white woman creating a film about a religion and a culture not her own. (That she has lived in the Middle East for years, enmeshed herself in the culture, learned Arabic, and gained unprecedented access to people we would be better off trying to understand apparently makes little difference.)
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Source:
https://reason.com/2022/09/26/cancel-culture-jihad-rehab-meg-smaker-film-sundance/
