You're reading: Some in Russia oppose ban on anti-Muslim film

Moscow - A group of Russian public figures have urged President Vladimir Putin not to ban the anti-Muslim film, the Innocence of Muslims, and not to block the Web sites that broadcast the video.

“We are urging the authorities not to fulfill the demands of global terrorist organizations and not to ban either this film or other works of art that anger religious extremists, and not to punish Web sites that have not blocked access to these films, books and pictures,” says an open letter, signed by gallery owner Marat Gelman, TV host Vladimir Kara-Murza, environmentalist Suren Gazarian, architect Yevgeny As, lawyer Yelena Lukyanova, district council deputy Konstantin Yankauskas, and others.

Moscow’s Tverskoi Court is on Monday hearing a demand filed by the Prosecutor General’s Office to ban the Innocence of Muslims, and local deputies are organizing solo pickets to protest the likely ban.

“This is not the first instance when works of art are being used as a pretext for unbridled violence and popularization of ignorance and religious fundamentalism,” the letter says. To back their argument the authors cite writer Salman Rushdie’s being forced into hiding, the murder of Dutch film-director Theo van Gogh, who made the film Submission, and the events that followed the publication of cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed in a Dutch magazine.

“This pretext is being apparently used by the blackest forces of global terrorism to blackmail the civilized world, to intimidate modern civilization and to impose their will on it,” the letter says.

If the film is banned, the authors say, “this epoch will go down in history as its most shameful chapter, where a great country yielded to an offensive of barbarity, ignorance and religious fundamentalism.”