Damascus-SANA
The connection of cultures with each other and their influence on each other, or what is known as the process of acculturation, is an inevitable necessity imposed by the current reality of life, but on the other hand it formed an entry point for advocates of intellectual invasion to impose their projects and obliterate the features and identity of peoples’ cultures.
From this idea, researchers and media professionals from Syria and Iran, in the symposium held by the Cultural Center in Abu Rummaneh, sought to differentiate between acculturation and cultural invasion and the need to adopt a comprehensive and broad national intellectual project that accommodates all arts, especially cinema, which faces attempts at intellectual alienation.
The symposium titled “Facing Cultural Invasion…Art and Media”, in which the Cultural Counselor of the Embassy of the Islamic Republic of Iran in Syria, Dr. Syed Hamid Reza Asmati, spoke that distinguishing between culture and cultural invasion makes us face the need to know the friend from the enemy and to work on a cultural education that pushes the individual to open up to the other. Without losing its identity and roots.
Asmati referred to the cultural cooperation between Syria and Iran and the latter's adoption of positions that seek to protect Syria, defend its rights and support it in the face of conspiracies that affect it, given its just positions and its strategic location.
Dr. Esmati indicated that American cinema spreads through its films a distorted image of the Arab man in order to market these works in all parts of the world.
While the head of the Union of Journalists, Musa Abdel Nour, saw that the cultural invasion aimed to control society with everything in it and distort its identity, and this was what appeared in the Turkification and French schemes followed by the Ottoman and French occupations to obliterate the features of Arab culture because it constitutes a dam that prevents the penetration of strange ideas into our societies.
Abdel Nour pointed to the need to confront the media war and pay attention to the Western art presented in series, cinema and children's programs in order to achieve what the military invasion failed to achieve. He called for the production of media materials that address young people with national concepts and a developed style, and to make the national media a reference for the renaissance cultural project.
Meanwhile, film director Ghassan Shmait presented a reading of the reality of Syrian and Arab cinema in general in the face of cultural invasion projects, pointing out that the terrorist war and successive crises in the region kept the audience away from national cinema, and this called for making all possible efforts to present a seventh, elegant and thought-carrying art that confronts the poisoned ideas it broadcasts. foreign films.
Media poet Muhammad Khaled al-Khidr, who moderated the symposium, saw that the ideological invasion project has existed for decades, and confronting it begins with supporting national affiliation in our educational, media and cultural systems.
In her intervention, the head of the Cultural Center in Abu Rummaneh Rabab Ahmed spoke about the importance of modernizing methods of confronting cultural invasion in a way that keeps pace with the times to establish our rights and defend our identity.
The symposium was followed by interventions on the ideas presented in the symposium, which focused on the need to update the contents of the intellectual and media discourse to keep pace with the times, based on our national and patriotic constants and the defense of our rights.
Muhammad Khaled Al-Khidr
