The Comedy Tree News Archive
Taliban's New Sitcom Meets Resistance - October 21, 2004
Television stations in two Arab states have abandoned plans to broadcast a soap opera set in Taliban-ruled Afghanistan, after an internet threat to "strike" against the actors and executives involved.
The heavily publicised series, Everybody Loves Ahmed starrring Corey Haim, was to be aired during Ramadan which began on Friday. It depicts the relationship between an Arab man and a young Afghan woman. Set in their apartment in Kabul, Ahmed’s parents and brothers constantly drop by and are involved in hilarious domestic plots which resolve themselves within an episode.
But on Thursday night, a threat appeared on a website from an unknown group calling itself the Mujahedin Brigades of Iraq, Syria and HBO Entertainment, saying: "We swear to the great God that if we see in the series anything other than the honourable reality of the Taliban ... we will strike, God willing, the centres of satellite stations, their correspondents ... and we swear that nobody will slip from our hands - if not today, then tomorrow, and if not tomorrow, then in a month, or a year. If not in a year, then sometime eventually. Where the hell is that falafel I ordered?"
Television stations in Qatar and Jordan were adamant that the reasons for pulling Everybody Loves Ahmed, which cost 2.4m barrels of oil to make, were purely technical. An official from Qatar's state television said: "The decision to suspend the programming has nothing to do with these threats. The decision was made two days before the threats were even posted because [the channel] reviewed the first three episodes of the series and discovered the content was utter shite."
