Jordanian media upset at Ramadan series that doesn't demonize Jews

The antisemitic author

I've mentioned the popular Egyptian Ramadan TV series "Jewish Quarter." That series is virulently anti-Zionist but it treats Egyptian Jews who were loyal citizens in the 1950s as normal people.

This caused some controversy, forcing the actors who played Jewish roles to defend themselves and reiterate that, indeed, they really hate Israel.

Nevertheless, Egyptian media has been very supportive of the series, which follows a popular movie documentary called "The Jews of Egypt" that also nostalgically looked back at the time that Egypt had many Jews integrated into society and how they were forced out of the country.

Syria also has a popular, multi-year Ramadan historical series called Bab Al-Hara. It takes place in the 1930s before Syrian independence, and it follows a number of Damascus clans. while Jews are not the focus of this series, they are shown as normal members of Syrian society. This year, the seventh year of the series, focused much more on the Jewish section of Damascus.

This rankles a writer in JordanZad. In an explicitly antisemitic article, Samaher Abdullah Alsaaida says that this series is calling for "normalization" with the enemy. she quotes the Koran about how Jews cannot be trusted and says that the series whitewashes how evil Jews really are. She's upset that a rabbi in the series calls for good relations between Jews and Muslims when, in fact, the Jews were scheming against Muslims and the series is whitewashing their historic evil in Syria.

"The screenwriter and director of the series and those who support it forgot that Jews are not part of human civilization, but they have only one message: the message of corruption on earth and the dissemination of bad ideas and obscene culture," says Assaaida.

She is also worried that Muslim children will grow up and want to marry Jews as a result of thie series, and she laments the fact that it was not properly censored.

(h/t Ibn Boutros)