War Of The Worlds Continues In Lebanon Country Censors ‘Independence Day’ Because Hero Is A Jew

With aliens poised to extinguish mankind in the film “Independence Day,” the president of the United States declares Earth “united in our common interest” to survive. “We can’t be consumed by our petty differences anymore,” actor Bill Pullman says in the movie’s climactic speech.

Evidently, he is not much acquainted with the Middle East. In Lebanon, the American science-fiction hit has been censored, for a second time, and faces demands for a ban because the character who saves the planet - computer scientist David Levinson, played by Jeff Goldblum - is a Jew.

Hezbollah, the Shiite Muslim political movement and militia with strong ties to Iran, has been loudest in denouncing the film, which plays here with subtitles in Arabic and French. A few days ago, Hezbollah issued a statement calling Roland Emmerich’s thriller “propaganda for the so-called genius of the Jews and their concern for humanity.”

Even at East Beirut’s upscale Empire theater, where a more Westernized crowd of mostly Christian viewers is flocking to see the film, many are coming away annoyed.

In a country that fought a 17-year civil war among Sunni and Shiite Muslims, Maronite and Orthodox Christians and Druse, not to mention Palestinians, nearly everyone seems to note immediately that the Jew and the black man, a Marine pilot played by Will Smith, are the heroes, while white and presumably gentile men play a drunken crop-duster and a bad-guy defense secretary with important subsidiary roles.

“Artistically, it was a very good film,” said Marwan Slim, a 31-year-old entrepreneur. “But it’s an insult to the American people, the idea that the salvation of America is a Jew and the traitor to America is a white man. It’s this Jewish notion of God’s chosen people.”

“We all know that Hollywood is very pro-Jewish,” said Joe Takla, 29, who raises honeybees. “They didn’t give (Steven) Spielberg the Oscar until he did ‘Schindler’s List.”’

In “Independence Day” as shown in Beirut, Lebanese censors removed a good deal before the Interior Ministry’s Public Security Department approved it for distribution. Gone is the scene in which Goldblum’s on-screen father, Judd Hirsch, dons a skullcap and leads a group of White House aides and soldiers in a Hebrew prayer for mercy. Gone, too, is the fleeting footage of Israeli troops working side by side with Arabs in a desert redoubt.

“Of course, it has been cut,” said Khalil Khoury, the Empire’s manager. “They had to cut all the Jewish pictures.”

Film censorship is nothing new in Lebanon, nor is it limited to things Jewish. “Striptease,” also playing at the Empire, is shown without most of Demi Moore’s marquee attractions. Even on-screen kisses that last too long sometimes disappear.

“Independence Day” also is full of small insults to the sensibilities of viewers in this part of the world. Primitive-looking Bedouins are shown running in fear when the alien spacecraft arrive, with none of the can-do resistance displayed by Americans who dominate the film.

Pullman’s U.S. president speaks nostalgically of the Persian Gulf War, a “simple” time when “we knew what we had to do.” Arab street opinion ran strongly against that war, and even those who disliked Iraqi President Saddam Hussein did not watch his country’s bombardment with anything like unmixed approval.

Nor are Arabs the only ones to single out the religion of Goldblum’s hero. Ephraim Buchwald, writing in the Philadelphia-based Jewish Exponent, said the film has exposed more people “to a positive message about Judaism than at any time since ‘The Ten Commandments.”’

That is more or less exactly what Hezbollah is complaining about, though it also takes the idiosyncratic view that the film somehow “hints that the source of danger to mankind emanates from certain parts of the Third World, particularly from the Arab and Islamic world.”

“What do you think Hezbollah would say about this film?” said Ibrahim Musawi, foreign press liaison for Hezbollah in Beirut.

“We are making the connection that this film, playing in Lebanese cinemas, is polishing and presenting the Jews as a very humane people. You are releasing mistaken images about them.”