To Counter Homosexuality at Netflix and Disney, Why Don’t Arabs Produce Meaningful Cartoons for Children?

Questions have recently been raised about the reasons for the weak production of Arab animated films for children at a time when millions of Arab families are concerned about the dangers of what Western content makers offer.

Recent years have witnessed a Western boom in the provision of cartoons and games with anomalous ideas and trends that contradict human instinct and the customs and traditions of the Arab region, in which Islam is the religion of the majority.

Arab and Islamic societies are facing a fierce and systematic Western campaign to spread homosexuality and atheism, which reached the point of promoting these trends through films for adults and cartoons for children.

These works are produced by international companies such as Disney and Netflix, in addition to the violence, anomalies, and shocking ideas that electronic games contain.

The most recent case in this context was represented by the presentation of Disney homosexual characters in the film Lightyear for children, which was shown in the United States on June 17, 2022, and then in Canada.

Lightyear is a film about an astronaut (Buzz) who tries to return to Earth with his crew via a spaceship and encounters difficulties as the film shows a scene of a kiss between two characters of the same sex.

What is remarkable here is that the character Buzz is famous in the world of Disney and the Arab and Islamic world, and many children like it, especially in the film Toy Story, which won the Oscar in 2020.

The Associated Press confirmed on June 16, 2022, that 14 countries: Bahrain, Egypt, Indonesia, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Malaysia, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Syria, the UAE, and Palestine had banned the film.

It indicated that analysts estimated that Disney earned more than $100 million from showing the film in its first week, but the producing company insisted on not to delete the controversial scene.

 

The Idea of Habituation

Through social media, Arab activists rejected this trend from Disney, warning of its attempts and other global platforms to convey dangerous messages and ideas to young people and children that threaten the Islamic world.

Palestinian preacher Jihad Helles wrote on Twitter: "It is very frightening what is happening in the world of decline and fall. Who would have imagined that the people of Lot would return again, their capabilities would be harnessed to them, and laws would be written in their hands so that you would think that they are now ruling the world?"

Sexual medicine consultant Dr. Heba Kotb warned Arab families against children watching cartoons and games with content that promotes homosexuality.

She told MBC Masr on June 13, 2022, that the child's viewing of these films may be a reason for his sexual transformation because of the idea of habituation.

Dr. Kotb stated that American reports on the phenomenon are being withheld, pointing out that "95 percent of males are subjected to sexual harassment there, and 3 percent of them continue this way, more than 97 percent of homosexuals visit psychiatrists, and 92 percent of homosexuals attempt suicide within a 5-year period."

In the first practical reaction, the Egyptian actor, Ahmed Sayed Amin, announced the project of a children's cartoon film that he would produce.

Through his Facebook account, he pointed out the concern that Arabs have over Western content, stressing that his project has been postponed a lot and that it is time, calling on production agencies and artists to join him.

What is interesting here is that Disney studios and others previously monitored their production and deleted scenes from their films when they distributed them to the Middle East, but it finally ignored that task and insisted on exporting homosexual scenes, as expressed by the film's producer, Galen Sussman.

"We will not delete anything," Sussman told Reuters on June 13, pointing out that the filmmakers rejected China's request to make amendments to it, which also prompted Beijing to ban its screening.

In a humiliating response to critics of the film, American actor Chris Evans called critics of the kiss scene in Lightyear idiots, Fox News reported on June 19.

On March 29, 2022, and in defiance of the American company's will in Arab societies and those who reject homosexuality in the world, Disney director Katie Burke announced that the company will support and promote these issues from now on, confirming that she is the mother of two children, one transgender and the other pansexual.

 

Responses and Attempts

This is not the first time that Disney films have been banned. In March 2022, Arab countries banned the movie Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness due to its inclusion of trends that advocate and promote homosexuality, but the UAE later lifted the ban on it and restricted its offer to those over 21 years old only.

Indonesia, Egypt, and Malaysia also banned the release of the fourth part of the animated film Toy Story, which grossed more than $1 billion.

The UAE, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Qatar banned the film Eternals, and the film West Side Story was banned in most Arab countries for including transgender and homosexual characters.

Cartoons are not the only thing that violates the rights of Arab children to preserve their religion, identities, and the culture of their societies. Rather, the issue has extended to video games.

In 2019, the game PUBG, the most widespread in the Middle East since its release in 2017, raised fears of children's adoption of violence, murder, and suicide, as it is based on the principle of survival of the fittest, which prompted Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Iraq, Lebanon, and Indonesia, to ban it.

On June 29, 2021, al-Azhar al-Sharif warned against the video game Fortnite because it contained an embodiment of the demolition of the Kaaba, to follow up on its warnings in February 2020 against the game Skull Crusher, then against the game PUBG in June 2020, and against the game Conquer in September 2021.

On its part, the Egyptian Dar al-Iftaa banned the game Blue Whale in April 2018, to add in 2019 the game Momo, then Pokémon games, as forbidden games due to their danger to children.

In this context, the film Perfect Strangers, which was shown by Netflix on January 20, 2022, aroused anger in the Arab street, due to the film's talk about homosexuality, in an exciting promotion of the goals of the world wide web for the first time in Arabic.

On June 02, 2022, the US Embassy in Kuwait posted via Twitter a letter of support from President Joe Biden to homosexuals attached to their flag bearing 6 of the seven colors of the rainbow.

Kuwait met this with a decisive reaction and the summoning of the Chargé d'Affaires of the US Embassy, James Holtsnider, in protest against the tweet.

In an article in Al-Jazeera Mubasher on May 29, 2022, Sudanese academic Khaled Mohamed Mohamedani wrote, "What is offered to children is a comprehensive immersion of Western culture, which constitutes the largest presence on the Internet."

He pointed out that "the internet has created a fragile child in their intellectual structure, weak in their interaction with society, and far from the arena of school competition. What Arab and Islamic sites provide for children represents a state of extreme misery in the presentation of the material and its content," calling on Arab content makers to provide an alternative.

 

Arab Production

In his vision of the reasons for the weakness of Arab production of intellectual content for children and animated films, the former head of the Culture Palaces Authority in Egypt, the writer Saad Abdel-Rahman, said: "The reasons are many, and the state shares them with individual producers and the concerned civil institutions."

He added to Al-Estiklal: "Despite all the talk about caring for the child's culture, the reality belies that. If you take a look at the National Children's Center (government), for example, you will be very shocked by its lack of budget."

"In addition, the Ministry of Culture does not have a strategy regarding the activities of its sectors working in the field of child culture, and therefore the activities of these sectors intersect and do not integrate," he continued.

Abdel-Rahman pointed out that "there is an inferior view of writing for children, and the evidence is that literary critics so far, when they write about Ahmed Shawky's poetry, for example, are confined to talking and writing in his poetry and plays for adults, and do not pay attention to his poetry for children as if it is a second-class creativity."

"So far, too, you do not find in the big state prizes a prize dedicated to writing for children, and you may wonder how many writers specialize in this," he stressed.

The writer and former Egyptian official said: "If this is in the field of writing, let alone artistic production, which requires large budgets to finance artworks directed at children. In addition, many people working in this field, such as businessmen, prefer importing over manufacturing because it is easier for them and more profitable."

In his vision, the director of the House of Creators for publishing and distribution, the journalist writer Raafat Salah al-Din, explained that "one of the reasons for the weakness of Arab production for children is the secular domination of the world of artistic production.

He added to Al-Estiklal: "Therefore, content directed at children does not represent an issue or a principle for them. On the contrary, they consider it backward content, in addition to its low profits."

"The high financial cost of producing cartoons with the lack of financial support, and the poor technical and professional level of Arab cartoons content compared to the West, especially (Walt Disney), as well as the Japanese cartoons," he said.

He noted "the emergence of productive experiences of Islamic artistic institutions, but they did not expand and did not develop," pointing to the Arab media's marginalization of any cartoon that broadcasts Islamic principles and dispensing with it by displaying superficial and vulgar content.

Salah al-Din stressed that "the main reason for the lack of interest of countries, producers, and artists is the ideological background in the first place."

He also indicated that "the secularists support and sympathize with homosexuality, as the issue does not represent an obsession for them, and if it were not for their fear of popular anger, they would have allowed it to be presented."