The Federalist: Muslims Burn Barbie Dolls in “Death to America” Protest

Tuesday, January 12, 2016

Muslims Burn Barbie Dolls in “Death to America” Protest

"Death to America"

Muslim girls burn Barbies and chant Death to America.

(Iran Wire) - They look just like normal school girls. Wearing black chadors over pink manteaux and headscarves, they stand around the yard gazing at a tin can marked “Death to America.” A fire is burning inside the tin.

One by one, the girls approach the fire. With a show of fury and hate, they snap the heads of the dolls off and throw them into the fire. The camera comes to rest on a school official, who holds her chador tightly around her face. “Barbie is a propaganda agent for Western culture,” she says. “So they are destroying the dolls in this ceremony.”

The schoolgirls throw the rest of the Barbie doll bodies into the fire. As a reward for their actions, they are given dolls with covered hair. The national TV news program 20:30 broadcasts a short clip of the ceremony, which took place at a school near Tehran.

Barbie dolls are very popular in Iran, and it is not the first time that they have been called a symbol of Western cultural invasion. On January 20, 2012 the national police force warned toy shops that it was an offence to sell Barbies and that those businesses caught selling them would be forced to close and the proprietors punished. “Tehran’s Public Places Police will carry out an operation to seize Barbie dolls across the city,” reported Mehr News Agency at the time. “The declared goal is to counter Western symbols, which promote moral laxity.”

“Up to now, the police have closed the shutters of at least 20 toy shops selling Barbie dolls,” the news agency reported, quoting an informed source.

The police operation followed the introduction of a new generation of made-in-Iran “Sara and Dara” dolls. According to Mohammad-Bagher Adousi, who at the time was the cultural deputy at the Institute for the Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults, these dolls were not produced to counter Barbie dolls, but to make dolls inspired by authentic Iranian traditions available to children. Adousi also said that the ban on selling Barbie dolls was necessary because the toys set bad moral examples.

In 1996, officials of the institute came up with the idea of homemade dolls to fight the “destructive” popularity of Barbie dolls. The first batch of Sara and Dara dolls — which were actually made in Hong Kong, not Iran — was introduced in 2002. But they have never been able to outsell Barbie dolls, even though they are cheaper.

The Dara and Sara dolls — eight-year-old twins marketed wearing a variety of Iranian folk costumes — come with different accessories, including an audiobook and a notebook. A third, improved generation of Sara and Dara dolls was introduced just before autumn 2015. The arms and the knees of the new dolls are bendable, and they are lighter than Barbie dolls. But despite all of this, Iranian children still prefer Barbie dolls.

Barbie has a wide range of outfits, from evening costumes to nightgowns, pregnancy dresses and bikinis. With the right outfit and accessories, Barbie can morph into different characters, including a dentist or a construction worker. It is no wonder, then, that a search on the web for “Barbie doll” in Persian will result in floods of articles about the West’s use of Barbie dolls as a tool of cultural invasion.

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