Iran isn’t amused by Israeli Samsung ad

Israel isn’t having much luck with commercials these days. First there was the government-sponsored ad campaign late last year to persuade Israelis living in the United States to return home, which was yanked when it caused an uproar in the American Jewish community. Now, Iranian lawmaker Arsalan Fat’hipour is telling Iran’s PressTV that the country may impose a ban on products from South Korean electronics manufacturer Samsung over a commercial depicting Israelis accidentally destroying an Iranian nuclear facility.

The ad couldn’t come at a tenser time. Iranian leaders are accusing the Israeli spy agency Mossad of killing an Iranian nuclear scientist in January, and using increasingly heated rhetoric (just today, Iranian leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei called Israel a "cancerous tumor" that must be "cut"). Meanwhile, the media is abuzz with reports that an Israeli attack on Iranian nuclear facilities could be imminent.

In the commercial for the Israeli cable company HOT, four characters from the HOT television series Asfur, all (poorly) disguised as Iranian women, meet a Mossad agent in Iran who’s watching the show on his Samsung tablet. In checking out the device’s features, one of the characters accidentally presses a button that blows up a nearby nuclear plant.

Here’s the commercial:

PressTV has expressed outrage not only with the ad but also with its underlying assumptions — that Iran is a "primitive society" and that "Israel is powerful enough to easily destroy Iran’s nuclear facilities or assassinate the country’s nuclear scientists." Fat’hipour, the Iranian lawmaker, argues that Samsung produced the commercial to cozy up with Israel. But a Samsung spokesperson in Iran tells PressTV that HOT — not Samsung — produced the ad, which promotes a cable deal offering subscribers free Samsung tablets. HOT has informed CNN that it has no comment on the controversy.

Of course, in the Middle East, any ad that veers toward the political is likely to be controversial. In 2009, for example, the Israel cell phone company Cellcom aired a commercial in which a soccer ball kicked by unseen Palestinians hits an Israeli military jeep patrolling the security barrier with the West Bank. The soldiers kick it back over the fence, only for the ball to return, sparking an impromptu soccer game among Israeli soldiers. "The ad has caused outrage among Palestinians and left-wing Israelis who accuse it of whitewashing the negative effects of the wall," ABC News noted at the time, adding that the ad agency that produced the commercial claimed that the spot was intended to show "how people can overcome obstacles between them to build friendship."

Iran’s tough words for Samsung, however, may be about more than just HOT’s incendiary ad. Last month, the Korea Herald reported that the Iranian government had retaliated against South Korea’s support for Western sanctions of Iranian oil imports by demanding that Korean companies remove their billboards in the capital. One of the targets of Tehran’s wrath? Good old Samsung.