Posted on 04/22/2007 7:38:53 AM PDT by nuconvert
The Mainstream Media: Islamist Facilitators
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
April 19, 2007
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.
PONG
PBS, almost by definition hate this administration, this war, and this nation. They want to remake it in their own image: Socialism, PC, pantheistic.
That we are forced to give taxpayer dollars to these people is a crime.
Terror And The Press — Dan Hill
The press has described me as an unconventional warfare specialist, guerilla fighter, and counter-terrorism expert… among other things. If I worked for your enemy, you’d call me a terrorist.
In The Art of War, one of the fundamental treatises of warfare, Sun Tzu defines victory in psychological terms. Your enemy is defeated when his will is defeated.
Terror is a method of warfare, a psychological method designed to defeat the will of your enemy.
Terrorists very consciously use the media as conduits, as force-multipliers, to strike their real target – the will of their enemy.
Think of it – terrorist acts – killing people by tens and dozens, even hundreds – bringing down a building or derailing a train – these acts have no real military significance – they in themselves do not defeat nations.
Terrorism is theater. When a terrorist sets off a bomb, he’s staging a production, making a video… booms, bangs, smoke, fire, body parts, grief and anger – ready-made dramas for the mass market. These are the terrorists’ real bombs, their weapons of mass destruction….And the press delivers them. The press carry the big guns in a terrorist war – but the terrorists pull the trigger.
bookmark for later
Moderate whatever isn’t sexy enough.
MSM goes for the sensational, radical and out-of-the-ordinary meaning: not boring. Plus who signs off on MSM payroll & cheque books at the end of the day? I bet whoever does isn’t ‘moderate’.
Bolstering Moderate Muslims
DanielPipes.org ^ | 4/17/07 | Daniel Pipes
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1819926/posts
Posted on 04/19/2007 7:43:29 AM CDT by Valin
When I suggest that radical Muslims are the problem and that moderate Muslims are the solution, the nearly inevitable retort from most people is: “What moderate Muslims?”
“Where are the anti-Islamists’ demonstrations against terror?” they ask me. “What are they doing to combat Islamists? What have they done to reassess Islamic law?”
My response: Moderate Muslims do exist. But, of course, they constitute a very small movement when compared to the Islamist onslaught. This means that the American government and other powerful institutions should give priority to locating, meeting with, funding, forwarding, empowering, and celebrating those brave Muslims who, at personal risk, stand up and confront the totalitarians.
A just-published study from the RAND Corporation, Building Moderate Muslim Networks, methodically takes up and thinks through this concept. Angel Rabasa, Cheryl Benard, Lowell Schwartz, and Peter Sickle grapple intelligently with the innovative issue of helping moderate Muslims to grow and prosper.
(snip)
_________________________________________
Road Map for Moderate Network Building in the Muslim World (long read)
RAND Corp. ^ | Angel Rabasa, Cheryl Benard, Lowell H. Schwartz, Peter Sickle
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1818382/posts
Posted on 04/16/2007 6:09:23 PM CDT by Valin
Identifying Key Partners and Audiences
A critical part of U.S. network-building efforts, as well as in its broader public diplomacy and strategic communications policy, is identifying key partners and audiences. Difficulties in distinguishing potential allies from adversaries present a major problem to Western governments and organizations attempting to organize support for moderate Muslims. Work done by the RAND Corporation—in Cheryl Benard’s Civil Democratic Islam and Angel Rabasa et al., The Muslim World After 9/11—has begun to lay the framework for identifying ideological tendencies in the Muslim world,1 which is necessary in order to identify the sectors with which the United States and its allies can be most e.ective in promoting democracy and stability to counter the in.uence of extremist and violent groups.
Around the world Muslims differ substantially not only in their religious views, but also in their political and social orientation, including their conceptions of government; their views on the primacy of shari’a (Islamic law) versus other sources of law; their views on human rights, especially the rights of women and religious minorities; and whether they support, justify, or tolerate violence perpetrated in advancement of a political or religious agenda. We refer to these as “marker issues,” and the position of groups or individuals on them allows for a more precise classifcation of these groups in terms of their a.nity for democracy and pluralism.
(snip)
The media like the head choppers because
1. the left thinks that they are all poor and “have nots”
2. the left and the head choppers share a common goal: bring down Western Civilization (Christianity)
There are far too many examples to choose from but the Gun Control debate on the PBS Newshour was the best of all. The anti gun guy laid out endless lies like 80% of all gun deaths worldwide happen in the US????? The pro gun guy only had one sentence that he repeated 4 times “I agree with you totally but gun control will never pass, what a shame!”
When the media is spewing their cowardice & lies without any exceptions why have they not been labeled as Terrorists Organizations?
I am truly sickened at the shameless evil the is in control of our media. I have known of the liberal bias in the MSM for years, I just never realized how total & absolute it has become.
Censorship by the msm of events going on Iran, is prolonging the life of the Iranian regime.
If the networks and CNN and FOX spent 1 minute evey night reporting anti-regime news stories, like the ongoing protests, and human rights abuses, and reported on the Iranian peoples’ desire to be free, they would build support worldwide for the demise of the regime.
But since getting rid of the regime and having a U.S. ally again in Iran would help end the war in Iraq and help our efforts in Afghanistan, and indeed help in the WOT worldwide would be a major accomplishment for Pres. Bush, they will never do it. They’d rather our guys and Iraqi and Afghani civilians (and others) are blown up by the thousands with help from Iran.
That is incredibly SICK!
The MSM and the Democrats want our military to fail, because most of the military are registered Republicans.
When I first visited Jordan I admit that I saw many Muslim fundamentalists. Naturally, I judged them based on looks. But, after talking to people there I understood that I was wrong. It was just people from the countryside!
We should remember that the silent majority in almost all, no probably all, countries are normal law abiding conservatives ;-)
Better to get your news here on FR.
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