Tom and Jerry and the case of the “dirty mice”
This is a story from last year, but it is disturbing in so many ways that it bears thinking about from time to time. A year ago, Iranian TV aired a lecture by University Professor and advisor to the Ministry of Education, Dr. Hasan Bolkhari.
Dr. Hasan Bolkhari has a PhD in Islamic Philosophy. He has written many papers and appears to be the author of ten books. His courses at uinversity include, “The Philosophy of Art and Aesthetics,” and “Art and Islamic Civilization,” among others. He is a board member of at least a dozen government and arts organizations in Iran. Notably, he is a board member of a censorship organization for the Iranian TV network, the “Approval Group TV Films and Serials of IRIB.” Hasan Bolkhari, Professor, PhD and cultural censor, would appear to be a pretty heavy hitter in the Iranian academic and media world.
Thus a televised lecture by Professor Bolkhari is no joke or spoof or send-up on the day before vacation. It is serious business from a professor of philosophy and the arts and is meant to be taken as literal history. You can watch the lecture here if you like. Here is an excerpt:
There is a cartoon that children like…Tom and Jerry. Some say that this creation by Walt Disney will be remembered forever. The Jewish Walt Disney Company gained international fame with this cartoon…
Some say that the main reason for making this very appealing cartoon was to erase a certain derogatory term that was prevalent in Europe. If you study European history, you will see who was the main power to hoard money and wealth in the 19th century. In most cases, it was the Jews. Perhaps that was one of the reasons which caused Hitler to begin the anti-Semitic trend, and then the extensive propaganda about the crematoria began…
The Jews were degraded and termed “dirty mice.” Tom and Jerry was made in order to change the Europeans’ perception of mice…It should be noted that mice are very cunning…and dirty.
No ethnic group or people operate in such a clandestine manner as the Jews. Read the history of the Jews in Europe. This ultimately led to Hitler’s hatred and resentment…Tom and Jerry was made in order to display the exact opposite image…
The mouse is very clever and smart. Everything he does is so cute. He kicks the poor cat’s ass. Yet this cruelty does not make you despise the mouse. He looks so nice and he is so clever…That is exactly why some say it was meant to erase this image of mice from the minds of European children, and to show that the mouse is not dirty…
Everything about this is profoundly disturbing. First, the history is just plain wrong. The Tom and Jerry cartoon series, which debuted in 1940, was created by Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera while they were working at MGM, not at Disney. Second, and somewhat amusingly, Walt Disney was a Congregationalist who was himself accused of anti-Semitism, as opposed to Bolkhari’s looney tunes version of history. Third, looking for hidden Jewish messages in the cartoons of a guy from Little Italy and his Boy Scout / Barbershop Quartet partner is a kind of insanity all by itself. Fourth, the principal audience for Tom and Jerry was in US movie theaters as a short subject before the main attraction; the cartoon series had nothing to do with Europe. Fifth, it is most depressing to watch the attentive, male students in the TV lecture looking serious and taking copious notes from this global conspiratorial fantasy.
Sixth, consider this: Professor Hasan Bolkhari believes what he is saying — he is not pretending to believe it. He believes that Tom and Jerry was produced by the Jewish Walt Disney to erase the idea in Europe that Jews were “dirty mice.” That this is nuts is beside the point. Its ubiquity is the point. Bolkhari would appear to inhabit the same mental universe of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who says 2000 Zionists rule the world. (You will recall that Ahmadinejad believed that his interviewers last year from Der Spiegel were acting under duress when they failed to repudiate the idea of the Holocaust.) In this Iranian view, people in the West are either blind to reality, or are being oppressed so they can not speak openly of the reality the Ahmadinehjads and the Bolkharis know to be true.
Those who say that Iranians should be engaged must understand that the view of reality in the Iranian regime — and their view of human destiny — does not necessarily bear any relationship to Western reality. In the peculiar superiority/inferiority equation in the Islamic world, someone is preventing the natual order of things — Muslim rule — from happening. The Great Satan and the Little Satan are not mere metaphors, but statements of theological belief. Tom and Jerry may be a cartoon, but when leading Iranians say over and over again that the Jews must be destroyed, they are not making a joke, but rather speaking from deep conviction about the necessary steps to restore the correct order of the world.