CAIR: “Jump!” FOX:
“How high?”
By
Robert Spencer
2005/01/19
Bosnian terrorists, German terrorists, South American
terrorists, and terrorists from a shadowy and evil Halliburton-like
conglomerate: they’ve all been featured on Fox’s 24, a gritty drama about terrorism. Any kind, apparently, will do,
but recently 24 has featured
Muslim terrorists — or at least
terrorists who look Middle Eastern. But while no Bosnians, Germans, South
Americans or Halliburton execs contacted the network to complain about the
way they were portrayed on the show, when Fox ventured into Islamic terror
territory, the network immediately aroused the ire of the Council on
American Islamic Relations (CAIR).
Sabiha Khan of
CAIR’s
Anaheim
chapter worried that 24’s
Muslim terrorists would “contribute to an atmosphere that it’s OK to
harm and discriminate against Muslims. This could actually hurt real-life
people.” CAIR scheduled a meeting with Fox executives in
Los Angeles
to air their concerns.
Meanwhile,
IslamOnline, a popular Muslim news portal run from
Qatar
, had its own ideas of who was behind 24’s
introduction of Muslim terrorists: Fox Entertainment Group, it said, was
“part of Jewish billionaire Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation.” It
asserted that 24’s new plot direction was “hailed by Jewish groups and
lobbyists as a bid to reveal Muslims’ ‘true nature,’” and noted
that “Jewish writer Daniel Pipes wrote in the Israeli Jerusalem
Post and the American New York
Post hoping Fox would not bow to Muslim objections on the series.”
IslamOnline
dropped “Jewish” from in front of “billionaire Rupert Murdoch”
when informed that Murdoch is not, in fact, Jewish, but the implication of
the article is still clear: 24’s
introduction of Muslim terrorist characters was yet another in a long line
of Jewish conspiracies.
It is frequently a
bit of knee-jerk paranoia on the part of the defenders of Islamic jihad:
that anyone who opposes them must be Jewish. This paranoia about the Jews
is nourished by the Qur’an’s portrayal of them as crafty,
untrustworthy — and accursed. And of course today jihadists would have
us believe that the trouble between Muslims and non-Muslims is all because
of
Israel
.
Although I am not
in fact Jewish, I have been frequently labeled as such by Muslim spokesmen
who evidently can’t conceive of a non-Jewish opponent of jihad ideology.
So have Victor Davis Hanson and Paul Marshall: both have told me that they
too have been labeled Jewish by Muslims after writing about Islamic jihad.
One day perhaps such Muslim writers will awaken to the fact that the jihad
ideology and the depredations of dhimmitude have won them a considerably
larger spectrum of opponents than they care to imagine.
But the shadowy
“Jewish groups and lobbyists” evidently dropped Fox’s puppet
strings, because even before network execs met with CAIR, the producers of
24 removed from the show some material that they were afraid might
stereotype Muslims. Fox would not let me see the deleted material or
describe it to me. Nor would anyone there speak on the record to me about
their meetings with CAIR and the changes to 24;
however, I was able to locate an informed source who told me that later in
the season, 24 is planning to
feature an American Muslim character that CAIR would find more to their
liking. Fox also agreed to distribute CAIR’s Public Service Announcement
about American Muslims to their affiliates, although the affiliates are
not bound to run it during the broadcast of 24
or at any other time.
But why was Fox
playing ball with CAIR in the first place? Were the execs who met with
CAIR representatives aware that three of its officials have been arrested
for various terrorist-related activities? Yes, said the source, that is a
matter of public record. Are they aware that CAIR founder Nihad Awad
helped establish CAIR after working at the Islamic Association for
Palestine (IAP), where he was public relations director — and that
former FBI counterterrorism official Oliver Revell has called the IAP “a
front organization for Hamas that engages in propaganda for Islamic
militants”? Did they know that Awad himself has declared: “I am in
support of the Hamas movement”? Well, yes, said the source, they were
aware of allegations that CAIR had some links, however tenuous, with Hamas,
but they judged the organization’s complaints on their merits. That’s
what Fox always does, he said: it considers not the source of a complaint,
but the worthiness of the complaint itself.
So if the Nazi
Party called with a complaint, that complaint would be judged not on its
source, but its merits? Only Fox’s panicky executives can answer that.
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