There is always intense interest in the Arab world about the miniseries that are broadcast during Ramadan.
This year, there is additional controversy.
The Arab MBC network is presenting "Um Haroun," a series about the history of the Jews in the Gulf and specifically in Kuwait, told through the story of a Jewish nurse of Turkish origin who moved between Iran and Iraq before settling in Bahrain, and the antisemitism she and her people experienced.
Here is the trailer:
Arabs are upset that a Ramadan film is actually sympathetic to Jews. The comments on the trailer include:
Jews teach their children from childhood to hate Muslims and love to kill themThere are some sarcastic responses as well, saying that the Arabs aren't exactly the most peaceful people and that there are plenty of good Jews.
A prelude to accepting and marrying the Jews, and this is essentially forbidden
This is a prelude to normalization with the Jews
It is our duty to fight every normalization act that promotes normalization with the enemy and / or dilute forms of conflict with it and / or falsify the reality of terrorism that it engages against Palestinians and Arabs
A malicious trick to establish the idea of the presence of civilian Jews before the usurping Jewish Zionist entity in the Arab land of Palestine in 1948 and that they are part of the fabric of Gulf society !!! It becomes clear to the inattentive viewer about the goals of the writer and director, the true Zionists or Zionists, which are the safety of the Jews' intentions, their humble life and their desire to live benignly, despite the people’s rejection of them and the oppression that occurred to them !!!
On Twitter, Arabs are saying things like, "A hashtag must be made to boycott MBC channels because of a Gulf series for sympathy for the Jews."
Um Haroun star Hayat Al-Fahad, who also co-produced the series, has been hitting back at critics.
Al Jazeera interviewed a professor on why Arabs should be upset at the series.
Professor Tariq Al-Tawari, professor of interpretation at the College of Islamic Law at Kuwait University, says that there are two concerns.While Arab antisemitism is evaporating ever so slowly - as is evidenced by the series itself, and a very pro-Jewish documentary in Egypt several years ago - it is still open.
The first is that it opens the way for claiming the existence of a historical right for Jews in Kuwait or in other Gulf countries, which is not baseless because these families came to Kuwait at the beginning of the ninth century from Iraq and Iran....
The second fear of the series is that it could be an introduction to normalization by paving the way for penetrating the Kuwaiti consciousness that ultimately leads to Jews being accepted in the social structure.
Arab antisemitism will disappear when it is considered more shameful to be an antisemite than to embrace Jew-hatred.