"Ahmadinejad," a film by Oliver Stone

At last, something to unite American hard-liners and Iranian hard-liners!

They both hate Oliver Stone.

The American film director has suddenly turned up in Tehran, or may be about to. Read on:

U.S. conservatives, of course, have long despised Stone for his politics, for his denunciation of the Iraq war, for his chumminess with Fidel Castro and for certain attributed quotes, like one calling President Bush "an ex-alcoholic who believes in Jesus--what could be more dangerous!" and another saying, "If I were George Bush, I would shoot myself."

Now it turns out that Iranian hard-liners may revile Stone even more. The director of docu-dramas like JFK and Nixon and of a documentary about Castro evidently wants to make a film about President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Last summer, Ahmadinejad's spokesman flatly rejected Stone's proposal. Mehdi Kalhor agreed that Stone was part of the political opposition in the U.S., but he said that still made Stone "part of the Great Satan"--Khomeini's famous epithet for America.

Ahmadinejad is prepared to give Stone a second chance. It seems that the Iranian president is not as automatically anti-Yankee as people think. As Stone was reportedly set to arrive in Tehran to discuss his proposal with the president's advisors again this week, the hard-line Kayhan newspaper launched a particularly harsh attack on Stone and questioned his good intentions. Kayhan's problem is not only that Stone is part of the Great Satan, but he is part of America's Zionist media empire, too. In light of the U.S. media's past record of smearing the Islamic Republic, wrote commentator Elham Rajabpour, "being optimistic about Oliver Stone's request...is an irreparable mistake which will bring us nothing but regret and remorse."

Rajabpour went on to catalogue some of what he considered to be Hollywood's worst offenders: Not Without My Daughter, a film about the struggle of an American woman married to an Iranian to get her child out of the country amid a custody dispute; 300, a movie about the Battle of Thermopylae that depicts 300 Spartans as heroic and 1 million Persians as barbaric; and Alexander, who Iranians loathe for sacking the Persian capital of Persepolis.

Oh yeah, Stone was the director of that last one. "Alexander is a hated figure among Iranians," Rajabpour reminds Stone, who is rebuked for portraying Alexander "as a free, justice-seeking person" and for depicting "the Iranian nation as barbaric and a savage race." At no point in the film, he adds, did Stone "point out the burning of the glorious Persepolis structure, which represented the Iranians' civilization and the height of Alexander's savagery."

Nor does Kayhan have much time for Stone's other films, either. Rajabpour complains that World Trade Center "tried to show the 9/11 event as an attack by the world of Islam against the western world and western civilization." JFK and Nixon were overly sympathetic to their subjects, revealing Stone's "affiliation to America's key policies," even if Stone "introduces himself as one of the critics and opponents of Bush's and the White House's warmongering policies." What is really too much for Kayhan is Stone's fascination with Jim Morrison; Stone's film The Doors, Rajabpour complains "was in commemoration of one of America's perverted and half-mad singers, someone who urinated on the head of his fans during his concerts and enjoyed doing so and who finally died in Paris as a result of a drug overdose."

Kayhan wonders if such a movie director can be trusted to produce an objective account of Ahmadinejad's life. "Has Oliver Stone, suddenly and single-handedly, risen to reveal certain truths and to enlighten the American nation?" Rajabpour asks. He detects a clue to the answer in Ahmadinejad's treatment at the hands of Columbia University two months ago. "Contrary to academic conduct and procedure and manipulated by White House politicians, they tried seriously to discredit him and to portray him as extremely savage and inhuman," Rajabpour complains. "How can we now trust such a deceitful culture?"

In that vein, I wonder if Ahmadinejad's advisors will ask Stone about his reported response last summer when his documentary proposal was initially turned down with the "Great Satan" jibe. "I've been called a lot of things, but never a Great Satan," the apparently miffed Stone was quoted saying in Variety. "I wish the Iranian people well and I only hope their experience with an inept, rigid idealogue president goes better than ours."

How do you say "ouch" in Farsi?

President Bush, meet President Ahmadinejad. You're going to get along well together. What's your favorite Oliver Stone film, by the way?

--By Scott MacLeod/Cairo