The 'Jihad Rehab' Doc Is Not a Victim of Cancel Culture [NBCU Academy]
“Do you think that you are you a terrorist?” This is a question director and producer Meg Smaker asks of Mohammed, a former Guantanamo prisoner she interviews less than 30 minutes into her documentary “Jihad Rehab.” The documentary, which she has since renamed “UnRedacted,” features four men released from the Guantanamo Bay prison to Saudi Arabia’s Mohammed bin Nayef Counseling and Care Center, which claims to rehabilitate terrorists. Smaker said her motivation for the film was to understand how and why the 9/11 attacks happened — insight she hoped to gain from the men effectively detained at the Saudi center.
The film was selected for the Sundance Film Festival last December and garnered some good reviews. But even when the documentary’s name was just a whisper, Muslim filmmakers and advocates had criticized “Jihad Rehab” for its recycling of Islamophobic tropes and issues of consent. The documentary, which I saw online at its Sundance premiere, avoids any significant critique of Guantanamo, including the fact that the men in the documentary were held but never charged with a crime. Smaker also doesn’t question the broader paradigm of the War on Terror that brought these men to the rehabilitation facility in the first place. Nor is there much attention paid directly on the bin Nayef Center itself and how its concept of supposed terrorist rehabilitation is situated in a larger context. Then there is the issue of consent — whether, and the extent to which, the men in the film could give their approval to be interviewed since they were effectively prisoners.