The Mainstream Media: Islamist Facilitators

Reprinted with permission by FamilySecurityMatters.org.
Author: M. Zuhdi Jasser
Source: The Family Security Foundation, Inc.
Date: April 19, 2007

In this riveting, damning exposé by FSM Contributing Editor M. Zuhdi Jasser, the mainstream media is identified as one of the most significant reasons why moderate Muslim voices are utterly silenced in America. You won’t want to take this outrage sitting down!The PBS censorship of Islam vs. Islamists highlights one of the major obstacles to hearing the Moderate Muslim Voice.

By M. Zuhdi Jasser.

Dennis Wagner of the Arizona Republic broke the story on April 10, 2007 about PBS’s censorship of the documentary, Islam vs. Islamists from its America at a Crossroads series which debuted this week. The film’s producers, Frank Gaffney, Alex Alexiev and the veteran filmmaker, Martyn Burke of ABG Films, Inc. have since presented in shocking detail their painful protracted experiences trying to navigate the censors at PBS and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting which funded the film with $675,000 of the taxpayers’ monies but now has chosen to shelve it. In just the last week of public debate, there has been a firestorm of outcry from the public who are demanding that oppressive methods of editorial content control by power brokers at PBS be investigated and the real story behind the shelving of Islam vs. Islamists be exposed. PBS’s exploitation of the public dime and the public airwaves for the narrow point of view of the Islamist sympathizers with the exclusion of the anti-Islamist Muslims is just now beginning to be understood.

As one of the subjects of the documentary, I was able to experience first-hand the professionalism and in-depth journalistic standards of veteran filmmaker, Martyn Burke, and his first-class team of consummate professionals. It was refreshing to have a documentary set out objectively to look into the deep-seated internal struggles of anti-Islamist Muslims like myself. Our work at the American Islamic Forum for Democracy (AIFD) here in Phoenix has been riddled with continual blowback and resistance in many forms from the power structure of the activist Muslim community in the Phoenix Valley . The Valley Council of Imams, the local Muslim Voice newspaper, and organizations like CAIR-AZ have provided a laboratory of typical Islamist responses to an American organization of Muslims, like AIFD, who are trying to rescue spiritual Islam from the death grip of Islamists—Islam vs. Islamists. I do this out of love for my faith and its spiritual path to the God of Abraham in order to free it from the corruption of the political imam which has become so ubiquitous.

I have previously discussed the harm of our government’s enabling of Islamists (like CAIR, MPAC, MAS, MSA, or ISNA) in the United States and how the governmental endorsement of Islamists publicly empowers them and allows them to dodge their responsibility of countering Islamism as an ideology. This order of magnitude is greater in impact when it concerns the media’s inability to wage the debate of the “struggle for the soul of Islam”. Stories about Islam and Muslims have been more and more ubiquitous since 9-11 and now are actually commonplace. Yet, the actual debate within the Muslim community has barely begun. Where’s the disconnect? Look no further than the Islamist enablers in the media.

When so many ask across the nation, “where are the moderate voices of Islam?”, one cannot help lately but exclaim that they are being suffocated by misguided political correctness and by Islamist influence within mainstream media and government. The PBS censorship of the documentary, Islam vs. Islamists, highlights one of the best examples to date of the symbiosis of both government complicity and media complicity with the Islamist ideology.

The recent RAND corporation research project highlighting the dire need to Build Moderate Muslim Networks in this new global “long war” against militant Islamism and its ideological siblings will never come to fruition with the current blinded pro-Islamist mainstream media approach. The mainstream media (MSM) is apparently blind to the real ideology of Islamism and they allow Islamists to hide their theocracy behind minority politics. The MSM not only avoids the free flow of ideas within the Muslim community, it effectively allows the Islamists completely to stifle any and all debate which would have allowed Muslims to question those in positions of authority within the Islamic community.

It is time for the MSM to stop protecting Muslims from one another and to stop stifling the debate many anti-Islamist Muslims would like to wage against leading Islamists. If Muslims are going to form a public expression of Islam which is reconciled with western democracies which separate religion and government, this debate against Islamism needs yet to begin, let alone blossom into cultural change for Muslims.

Islamists fear nothing more than credible and genuine debate against the core political ideology of Islamism from pious anti-Islamist Muslims. With an ideological counter from anti-Islamist Muslims- the Islamist emperor “has no clothes”. At every level, they are using America ’s naïveté about Islam in order to continue their theft of Islam for the political agenda of Islamism. The Islamists know that anti-Islamist Muslims rob them of their minority trump card of Islamophobia and force them to come to terms with the anti-freedom, and anti-liberty and anti-pluralistic ideology of Islamism. Anti-Islamist, pro-Islamic Muslims expose the real motives of Islamists—which is the exploitation of the spiritual path of Islam for political and governmental power and coercion.

The MSM would prefer to facilitate the current Islamist organizations and Islamist imams. Why? It could be a fear of litigation, minority victim politics, or simple ignorance regarding the goals of Islamism. As in the case with PBS, it could also be the internal influence and infiltration of Islamists within the media and government who will go to great lengths to suffocate the opinions of anti-Islamists, especially anti-Islamist Muslims.

The PBS/CPB censorship of Islam vs. Islamists exemplifies the dire need to begin to educate many in the MSM of the ideological realities of the Islamists. They may protect Islamists blindly out of ignorance, fear, infiltration, or minority politics. But, at the end of the day, if the MSM editors understood the type of society the protected Islamists would create if they became a majority, their support would vanish. Feminists, social liberals, and those that would separate religion from government would be entirely ignored under Islamist control. Just ask the feminists what type of equality they have in many Islamist controlled mosques around the country.

It is interesting that even in the recent April 18 New York Times, Virginia Heffernan appropriately critiques the vacuous nature of Robert McNeil’s documentary, “The Muslim Americans”. McNeil’s documentary which did conveniently make the cut of the Crossroads series, turned out to be a puff-piece for political correctness with no insight into Islamist ideologies and its danger to America . The question remains whether epiphanies like Heffernan’s in the Times about McNeil’s piece will translate into systemic changes in the approach of the MSM toward Islamists.

When will there be a change from coddling and enabling Islamists toward critical engagement of their deep ideological inconsistencies with Americanism? Thus far, investigative journalism, hard-hitting analysis, and identification of the clear and present danger of the Islamist ideological threat remains at best, a large blind spot and at worst an intentional omission.

Islamists sneak in their political agenda free of criticism from the MSM because they do it in the name of a religion. When moderate Muslims call them on their false representation of all Muslims and the disservice they do to the spiritual faith of Islam, the MSM so far chooses to shelve and ignore our efforts to be heard.

So the next time anyone asks, “where are the moderate voices of Islam?”, tell them that the main reason they are voices in the wilderness is that the mainstream media chooses to leave them in the wilderness and prevent them from seeing the light of day. In the PBS documentary it is only Muslims interviewed throughout the film—how could that be anti-Muslim? Simply put, PBS claims that the veteran filmmaker Martyn Burke was one-sided, but it appears that PBS and often the MSM is one-sided protecting Islamist leadership from their most effective detractors—anti-Islamist Muslim moderates.

Borrowing on the old cliché of a tree falling in a forest, if Muslims speak out against Islamists but remain unheard (in the PBS forest), did they speak out at all? Without regular opportunities in the media and government for anti-Islamist Muslims to speak out, America will never know that they ever did. Without being heard the moderate voices will be as if they never existed. Without hearing the moderate voice, it is so much the easier for Islamists to continue toward their goal of political domination and demagoguery of the Muslim community and, ultimately, of America itself.

FamilySecurityMatters.org Contributing Editor M. Zuhdi Jasser is a former U.S. Navy Lieutenant Commander and the Chairman of the American Islamic Forum for Democracy based in Phoenix , Arizona . He can be reached at Zuhdi@aifdemocracy.org.

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Note -- The opinions expressed in this column are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions, views, and/or philosophy of The Family Security Foundation, Inc.

THE FILM P.B.S. DOESN’T WANT YOU TO SEE

Background

In the spring of 2005, Frank Gaffney was among those invited to submit a proposal for a documentary film about the world post-9/11 to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting’s “America at a Crossroads” competition. Shortly thereafter, a partnership was formed by Mr. Gaffney with Alex Alexiev (an internationally renowned expert on Islamism) and Martyn Burke (an accomplished author and Hollywood director of feature and documentary films) – ABG Films Inc. ABG proposed to make an hour-long documentary about the plight of moderate Muslims at the hands of their Islamist co-religionists.

This film, with the working title of “Islam vs. Islamists: Voices from the Muslim Center,” was one of thirty-five proposals selected by CPB out of roughly 440 competitors for a research and development grant. The ABG team used this grant to produce a 35-minute short film and written treatment. The ABG proposal was, in turn, one of 20 competitors further down-selected by CPB to receive a nearly $600,000 production grant. At the time, moreover, it was announced in a CPB press release that “Islam vs. Islamists” would be one of the Crossroads series films to be aired by the Public Broadcasting Service during eight prime-time hours set aside for that purpose, initially scheduled for the Fall of 2006.

At about the same time as the latter decision was made in early 2006, personnel changes at the Corporation for Public Broadcasting began affecting planning for the Crossroads project. These ultimately resulted in the entire initiative being turned over to the Public Broadcasting Service and its flagship Washington station, WETA.

The Trouble Begins

As this transition went forward, “Islam vs. Islamists” began to experience a succession of problems that have been documented in correspondence between ABG’s principals and WETA President Sharon Percy Rockefeller. They started with an unconcealed effort by PBS executives to dissuade CPB from making the production grant to ABG. The grounds given: two of the film’s executive co-producers were associated with an “advocacy” organization (i.e., in their “day-jobs” as President and Vice President, respectively, of the Center for Security Policy ). It was asserted that PBS “guidelines” would not permit such individuals to have a role in determining the content of a film aired on the Public Broadcasting Service’s airwaves.

After ABG documented that these guidelines were routinely ignored by PBS and its affiliates – resulting in the frequent broadcasting of films and even series produced by or otherwise associated with left-of-center advocacy organizations – CPB President Pat Harrison decided to approve the production grant for “Islam vs. Islamists.” Even after this decision, PBS continued to insist that it would not broadcast the film unless Messrs. Gaffney and Alexiev were stripped of their Executive Producer roles, delaying by four months the execution of our contract. PBS asserted this position again, both orally and in writing, once the production funds were finally in hand.

Death of a Thousand Cuts

In the face of ABG’s refusal to allow members of its team to be blacklisted, the WETA/PBS Crossroads series management apparently decided to use other means to accomplish the objective of preventing “Islam vs. Islamists” from being aired on the Public Broadcasting Service. As the attached correspondence makes clear, these included:

• Hiring as a series producer an individual who made known to ABG the high regard he had for his father, who happens to be a Muslim convert with long-established ties to British Islamists. This producer has repeatedly insisted that changes be made in the structure and “context” of our film in ways that seemed intended to provide a more favorable treatment of the profiled Islamists, compromise the documentary’s central concept and greatly complicate its production.

(N.B. These changes are not to be confused with more straightforward editorial changes which were also proposed throughout the process. Wherever such suggestions were warranted and constructive, we have incorporated or otherwise responded to them.)

• Engaging an outside “advisor” to the series whose well-publicized sympathies for known Islamists made it predictable that she would object to our film. In the event, this advisor actually breached her confidentiality agreement and showed the film to interested parties, who promptly threatened litigation if it were not changed to their liking.
• Handicapping “Islamist vs. Islamist” to the benefit of other films. One also dealing with American Muslims was commissioned – after and altogether outside the Crossroads competition – from Robert MacNeil, who had been brought in by WETA/PBS to serve as the series moderator. In another case, individuals who we had advised the series producers were going to be interviewed during our location-shooting in Canada became unavailable to us when they were invited to be filmed by a Canadian Broadcasting Corporation crew working for another Crossroads film.
• On 12 February 2007, PBS and WETA informed ABG that “Islam vs. Islamists” had been rejected for airing by the Crossroads series. The reasons given amounted to a repetition of previous complaints that the Islamists and their sympathizers had not been given favorable enough treatment. On 3 April, Mr. MacNeil denounced this film on a nationally syndicated NPR program as “extremely one-sided and alarmist.”

Conclusion

PBS/WETA’s highly prejudicial treatment of “Islam vs. Islamists” seriously disserves the viewing public insofar as there is, arguably, no more important topic for American (and, we believe, foreign) audiences to understand about the post-9/11 world than the plight of moderate Muslims at the hands of their Islamist enemies – and ours.

As awareness grows about the “parallel societies” the Islamists are trying to insinuate into Western democracies – and, thereby, to undermine them – the importance and timeliness of this film which illuminates these efforts and their dangers becomes all the more apparent. CPB should immediately take steps to allow “Islam vs. Islamists” to be seen in the near future by the largest possible audience. Toward that end, it should make arrangements at once to permit this documentary’s distribution by outlets other than PBS.

The proof, evidence if you will, is right here that the show was to air. Why won't they allow someone else to air it, and what are they hiding?