Friday, April 20, 2018

How Egypt’s Media Council did not spare the Spring’s song from its censorship

For the first time since starting to blog here, I did not publish the official anthem of Spring or Sham Nassim in Egypt this year.
Busy between work and home, I tried at the same time to take some rest.
I feel sad that I did not publish my Spring Flowers Fair post on time then as I hoped so along with “الدنيا ربيع” or “The world is springy” as a tradition of Egyptian Chronicles in Spring.

Anyhow it is never too late to publish or speak about Soad Hosni’s unofficial Spring anthem because after all, it was the talk of the Egyptian society this Sham Nassim for the wrong reason.

After 43 years of appearing in Soad Hosni’s “Amira, my love”, the cheerful song about the beginning of the spring lost one of its scenes to the censorship because Egypt’s Supreme Council for Media Regulations ”SCM” saw that scene is inappropriate for audience !!!!!

Here is the song

The scene that was censored is in “2:13” minute.
The inappropriate scene !!!

I can not believe it for real.
Some are saying that SCM decided to remove that scene because there was some sort of meme with sexual innuendo.
It seems that there were Facebook pages that took a screenshot of the scene and referred to the man carrying Soad Hosni as “The man who had seen spring for real”
This is a high school joke for real but it seems it disturbed the members of SCM too much that they decided to remove that scene.

Egyptian film critics are furious over the decision of SCM and they have to be so.

Sadly enough there is complete silence from the Ministry of Culture and its minister !!
This is SCM’s latest strike after its witch hunt against Al-Masry Al-Youm and Masr Al-Arabia because of their presidential elections coverage. p.s the High Media Council is the Supreme Council for Media Regulations, I did not know then that official translation of its name.
On Thursday, the High State security began its investigation in Al-Masry Al-Youm incident interrogating its former editor-in-chief and 8 of its journalists !! 

It had already pulled SNL in Arabic in February 2018 from local TV channels because the show contained sexual expressions.
Despite I am not a big fan of the show and its sketches as they are not funny for real and despite I believe it turned in to a Classicist and sexist show, I am totally against its ban.
Originally SNL in Arabic was aired on a Showtime-OSN network cable network but it was aired in parallel on ON TV since October 2017.
I do not know if it will continue on OSN Ya Hala channel or not.

Now there is complete media silence about what has happened and how SCM is imposing its own set of moral code in the Egyptian media and Egyptian showbiz.
Needless to say, if that happened during the rule of Mohamed Morsi, things would have been different and social media would be flooded by campaigns rejecting that sort of censorship attacking that Taliban rule in Cairo !!
I thought that among the reasons people accepted the ouster of Mohamed Morsi for was to protect the freedom of expression, thought and creativity in the country from religious fascism !!

Founded in 2017 in accordance with Egyptian Constitution’s article no.211, the SCM is supposedly an independent body in Egypt that regulates the affair of radio, television, printed and digital press but all that it has been doing lately is imposing strict conservative right wing censorship.

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