Disney's Curious Silence
    By Yves Mamou
    Le Monde

    Tuesday 29 May 2007

    The American Disney Group is renowned for the pitiless battle it conducts against copyright infringers. Its battalions of lawyers fight hand to hand against all fraudulent use of the characters that have made its fortune: Donald, Minnie, Uncle Scrooge.... But when the Islamic resistance movement Hamas chose to clone Mickey to animate a propaganda program targeted at children (Le Monde of May 16, 2007), the American communications group refrained from taking any action in response.

    The Israeli government, a number of humanitarian organizations - Jewish and non-Jewish - the international press and even Fatah have protested against the puppet Farfour - a Mickey clone - who converses every Friday with a little girl named Saraa on the Hamas-controlled Al-Aqsa channel. The program is called "The Pioneers of Tomorrow," and the statements are rarely innocuous: "You must not forget your prayers nor to go to Mosque five times every day. And you must put yourself on the frontlines until we rule the world," Farfour insists. Or: "Such is Allah's will: this country, its children, its men and women, its elderly, we will conquer; we will conquer Bush; we will conquer Sharon! Uh, Sharon is dead! We will conquer Olmert! We will conquer Condoleezza ..."

    Diane Disney Miller, Walt Disney's daughter, has been up in arms against "the indoctrination of children. An act that goes against the most elementary humanity." But the group her father founded acts like it hasn't heard her - as though copyright infringement for ideological ends falls outside its jurisdiction.

    Disney's CEO, Robert A. Iger, ended up confessing that he had willfully played deaf. May 21, at a conference of American editors and writers, Disney's CEO acknowledged that the group "had neither mobilized its forces, nor demanded the puppet's withdrawal, nor still less sought to react publicly."

    It was not at all a matter of indifference. "We were terrified by the use they made of our character," he said. "An organization that exploits children this way can arouse only contempt," he added. But he deemed that a public reaction was not necessary. For the good reason that it "would not have changed anything," Mr. Iger concluded. He allowed it to be understood that a suit in a zone of lawlessness like Gaza would not have made any sense. But fear could have been the motivation. A group like Disney that manages parks where millions of tourists circulate hardly has any interest in attracting the attention of an organization habituated to violence. But on that point also, Disney's CEO was silent.