There won't be any liquor-swilling God-denyers on the Iranian silver screen any time soon. Drug takers, secularists, liberals, anarchists and feminists are out, too. That's what a committee of Islamic clerics, led by new hard-line President Ahmadinejad, ruled earlier this week when it banned foreign films. The clerics singled out in the ban elements of Western culture that were judged as affronts to the government's vision of Iran's Muslim culture. With the decision, Iranians felt one of the first cultural reversals of the opening to the outside world they enjoyed under their former reformist President Mohammad Khatami.And the ban, designed to wipe out what clerics call "corrupt Western culture," is not going down well with many in Iran.
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