Film Fuels Middle East Tensions

Assassination of a Pharaoh, which had been broadcast on Iranian TV, labelled Anwar Sadat a traitor for signing the 1979 Camp David peace accord and hailed his assassin, Khalid Istambouli as a martyr.

Sadat was shot by Istambouli, a member of Egypt's Islamist Jamaa Al-Islamiya militant group during a military parade.   A statement from the groups current leadership even joined in the criticism of the film when it stated that, while Istambouli ‘was a good young man who thought he was doing a good thing, the Jamaa now believes that if it were possible to turn back time, it would never have happened.  Sadat was the only president who gave the Islamic movements free range, but the movement did not make good use of that freedom.’

Egypt and Iran broke off diplomatic relationships following Egypt’s peace deal with Israel in 1980, which followed Egypt’s offer of refuge to the Shah of Iran in the wake of the revolution in 1979 that brought the Ayatollah Khomeini to power.   Only recently, the name of a Tehran street which bore the name of Istambouli was renamed Intifada Street by the Iranian authorities in a gesture of appeasement towards Egypt, and Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak and Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmedinejad shared a telephone conversation in January 2008. [ADD]

2008

Iran: 2008