The PBS Controversy and Charles Le Gai Eaton (Islam vs. Islamists)

When PBS refused to air a documentary about the rift between Islamic moderates and their radical, murderous counterparts, PBS based its decision on the judgment of an employee whose sources on this topic are themselves aligned with self-confessed radical Islamists. FSM Contributing Editor Stephen Schwartz’s shocking exposé will have you demanding answers!

Last week, in a reportage for FSM - the antidote to the “mainstream media” - Contributing Editor Alex Alexiev, one of the most authoritative Western experts on radical Islam, described the fate of a documentary video of which he was co-producer. Titled Islam vs. Islamists, the documentary deals with contentions between moderate and radical Muslims in the West.

Controversy over Islam vs. Islamists has wider and narrower aspects bearing on the topic it addresses. The documentary was financed, for a series titled “America at a Crossroads,” by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB). It was to be put on television by the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS). The presumption voiced by those who conceived “America at a Crossroads” – that the documentaries would introduce positive messages about the war on terror on the politically-correct PBS stations – may have been unrealistic, to say the least.

Whatever the bureaucratic backstory, Islam Vs. Islamists was rejected by PBS. Mr. Alexiev learned during the agony of dealing with PBS that one of the latter’s executive producers for the series, Leo Eaton, professed an expertise on Islam derived from his father, a British Muslim named Charles Le Gai Eaton, and known as Shaykh Hasan Le Gai Eaton.

I am reluctant to impeach the integrity of a son for the views of his father; however, PBS functionary Leo Eaton allegedly declared to Mr. Alexiev and his colleagues on the project that he had turned to Shaykh Hasan Le Gai Eaton for consultation about Islam. Yet Leo Eaton’s perceptions of the situation of the faith of Muhammad are questionable on their face. For example, Leo Eaton wrote, in a set of notes dated December 22, 2006, and released by Mr. Alexiev, that in Islam, “moderation & extremism clearly depend on where you’re standing.”

Well, of course the definitions of moderation and extremism in Islam, along with every other ideological or intellectual difference in history, depend on where you’re standing. If you stood with the Egyptian Pharaoh and opposed Moses in his quest for the freedom to worship the One God, you would define idolatry and Abrahamic religion differently than if you supported the liberation of the House of Israel. If you were a Nazi you would view the Second World War distinctly from the way you would if you were a British patriot living in London during the Blitz. Leo Eaton repeated a platitude without content, to better avoid the reality which is that moderate and extremist positions are universally recognized and well-understood among Muslims. Although in his notes, Mr. Eaton asserted his awareness of the conflict between moderate Muslims and extremists, to make the distinction a relative one is to nullify the authority of the moderates and to maintain, in the West, the perception of a uniform, radical Islam, which favors terrorism.

Leo Eaton also demanded that assessment of Saudi financial influence on Wahhabi Islam in America – an extension onto our national territory of the Saudi state cult that represents the most extreme and violent form of fundamentalist Islam – be made by “a State Department spokesperson or some other properly-credentialed analyst.” Here one can only laugh: everyone concerned with the situation of American Islam knows that State has exercised insufficient vigilance in monitoring Saudi religious colonialism in the U.S. In addition, the majority of “properly-credentialed analysts” – if the term refers, as it usually does, to academics affiliated with Saudi-financed programs at Western think-tanks and institutions of higher education – has acted consistently and overwhelmingly to suppress the truth about Wahhabism and its campaign for global control of Sunni Islam. State is afraid of Saudi-Wahhabi influence, while most of the “properly-credentialed analysts” are cautious to a fault, or bought off.

To emphasize, Leo Eaton averred that his father is the source of his own expertise on Islam. May we then examine the recent record of Shaykh Hasan Le Gai Eaton? Eaton père has been known for years in Europe as a journalist, diplomat, and spiritual Muslim, or Sufi. Then last year, the befuddled British authorities, eager to respond to the Islamist radicalism that blew up the London Underground and shut down Heathrow airport, but reluctant to confront it directly, announced one of the worst-conceived proposals in the recent history of Western policy-making.

This scheme involves a road-show around Britain conducted by Islamist acolytes, and titled with extraordinary clumsiness and bad taste, “The Radical Middle Way.” The bizarre intent is to substitute a rhetorically inflammatory but “peaceful” Islamist “radicalism” for violent “extremism,” although ordinary, mainstream Muslims argue that there is no difference between the two, and that they reject both. The real aim seems to be to obscure the Islamist threat in Britain. “The Radical Middle Way” is headed by author and academic Tariq Ramadan, who has been barred from entry to the U.S. It includes the infamous Hamza Yusuf Hanson, the formerly-strident radical Muslim preacher from Walla Walla, Wash., who has sought to reinvent himself as a Sufi advocate for religious reconciliation. Also along for the ride is Hanson’s current “master,” Shaykh Abdallah bin Bayyah, a Mauritanian who teaches at a religious university in Saudi Arabia. The “Radical Middle Way” exemplifies the deceptive tactics of Hanson and others in trying to reinvent themselves as “tame” Islamist ideologues.

Shaykh Hasan Le Gai Eaton was enlisted in the campaign by Ramadan, Hanson, and Bin Bayyah. Shaykh Hasan appears as a minor entrepreneur of spirituality, avid to gain publicity for his personal insights into mysticism. But yoking the legacy of Sufism, which is respectful of non-Islamic faiths and seeks pluralism within Islam, to the political ideology of Ramadan and the deceptions of Hamza Yusuf Hanson, another huckster of the divine, will not free British Muslims of domination by the extremists.

If the UK authorities made an egregious mistake in launching the “radical roadshow” of Ramadan, Hanson, and Co., PBS has made an even worse error in entrusting supervision of documentary productions about Islam to someone under the influence of “Islamist-political Sufism.” Shaykh Hasan Le Gai Eaton has written books distributed by Fons Vitae, a publisher with a tilt toward a little-known ideological trend called “Traditionalism.” The latter seeks to absorb the monotheistic faiths into a primordial and hierarchical religiosity, in which the cruel idolatry of Pharaoh and the monotheism of Moses are put on an equal level. But as I have written elsewhere, nobody can serve both Pharaoh and the One God, and modern theories legitimizing Egyptian paganism inevitably embody contempt for Jews. It should not be surprising that “Traditionalism” produced a notable and fierce pro-Nazi wing.

An extraordinary consequence of the chaos wrought in Western society by the atrocities of September 11, 2001, has been the revelation of a profound incapacity on the part of political and media elites in the democracies to distinguish their real friends and allies among Muslims and Islam experts from their adroit enemies. The presence of Leo Eaton, representing the attitudes of Shaykh Hasan Le Gai Eaton, in evaluating PBS documentaries on Islam, represents a conflict of interest. Journalists and documentary makers cannot properly investigate radical Islam if they are subject to editors and producers who sow confusion about so dangerous a phenomenon, at the same time as said editors and producers admit that their sources on these topics are aligned with self-confessed radicals.

The article stated — “Last week, in a reportage for FSM - the antidote to the “mainstream media” - Contributing Editor Alex Alexiev, one of the most authoritative Western experts on radical Islam, described the fate of a documentary video of which he was co-producer. Titled Islam vs. Islamists, the documentary deals with contentions between moderate and radical Muslims in the West.”

The following is the — “reportage” — link from the above paragraph!!

Exclusive: The Film PBS Does Not Want You to See
Alex Alexiev
Author: Alex Alexiev
Source: The Family Security Foundation, Inc.
Date: April 11, 2007

( - Has radical Islam found fertile soil within our national public broadcasting system? This urgent question is critically important for all Americans who are devoted to keeping our nation safe from enemies openly seeking our destruction. This stunning exposé by FSM Contributing Editor Alex Alexiev requires your immediate attention. Please pass this shocker on to everyone you know! - )

*** The Film PBS Does Not Want You to See ***

By Alex Alexiev

Beginning on Sunday, April 15 and for the next six days, PBS will air 11 prime-time documentaries on its 300 affiliates nationwide. The films are all part of a series called America at the Crossroads, designed and commissioned by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and aiming to present to the American viewing public a comprehensive look at the causes, circumstances and implications of the events of 9/11. Heavily promoted by PBS, the series was envisaged as a television event of the first order that was to help Americans come to terms with this traumatic chapter of their history, and, more importantly, the nature of the radical Islamist challenge facing the West.

Undoubtedly, at least some of the films to be shown will make a contribution to that end. One that will not be allowed to is a film called Islam vs. Islamists: Voices from the Muslim Center. Originally chosen by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) as one of the first eight finalists scheduled to be aired already in the Fall of 2006, Islam vs. Islamists ran afoul of PBS for reasons that had nothing to do with its merits and has now been dropped out of the series. The story of the spiking of this film by PBS, replete as it is with hard to believe tales of blacklisting, pandering to radical Islamists, blatant conflicts of interest, political correctness and bureaucratic arrogance, has a lot to tell us not only about PBS, but it also answers the much more important question: why has radical Islam found such fertile soil in the very society it seeks to destroy? This is the story of the film that PBS does not want you to see.

— The Making and Unmaking of “Islam vs. Islamists” —

In the spring of 2005, my colleague Frank Gaffney told me that he had been invited by CPB officials to submit a documentary proposal for their new “America at the Crossroads” competition and asked me for ideas for the proposal. At the time, we had been involved in a project called Muslims Speak Out that sought to provide a forum for the views of moderate Muslims in Washington D.C. and I suggested that we focus our proposal on the struggle within Islam between mainstream moderate believers and the extremists. Understanding the struggle within Islam is, in fact, a key to understanding the Islamofascist threat America and the West are facing today and it has been a major emphasis of our research on Islamism for several years.

The two of us then drafted a proposal to that effect and it became one of 430 proposals CPB received in the competition for the twenty Crossroads films they expected to fund.

Our proposal was then selected as one of only 35 submissions picked for a research and development grant to produce a trailer for the full grant competition. At this point, our team was joined by the accomplished Hollywood filmmaker and novelist Martyn Burke, with whom I had collaborated years ago on an award-winning documentary he directed on the Soviet war in Afghanistan. Shortly thereafter, our partnership was incorporated as ABG Films Inc. and we began work on the documentary in earnest.

Martyn produced an outstanding 35 min. short film on the R&D grant and by late 2005 we became one of 20 competitors to be selected for a full production grant of some $600,000. Moreover, a CPB press release at the time officially announced Islam vs Islamists as one of the first eight films scheduled to be aired in prime-time in the fall of 2006.

It was a high point in our efforts and also the beginning of our troubles. They began in early 2006 as the key CPB officials who’d run the competition with exemplary fairness were fired and the entire program was turned over to PBS and its flagship Washington D.C. station WETA, as represented by series executive producers Leo Eaton and Jeff Bieber. It is of more than passing interest here that Mr.Eaton is the son of Charles Le Gai Eaton, a.k.a. Hassan Abdul Hakeem, a prominent British convert to Islam with known Islamist sympathies. Especially because, as Mr. Eaton told us himself, he regularly consulted with his father regarding Islam.

Almost immediately, PBS officials and Messrs. Leo Eaton and Jeff Bieber tried to persuade CPB not to disburse the production grant to ABG. The ostensible reason given was that two of the executive producers (Frank Gaffney and myself) were associated with an “advocacy” organization as President and Vice-President respectively of the Center for Security Policy. This is a laughable pretext on the part of an organization that does very little that is not advocacy, albeit for leftist causes.

Indeed, as we wrote to CPB in response to these accusations, information provided on PBS’s website itself often gives detailed instructions and resources on how viewers can engage in advocacy as well as links to approved advocacy organizations, including, among others, the radical Islamist Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR).

The new team’s real agenda was in fact nothing short of blacklisting Gaffney and myself for the cardinal sin of being conservative and, as became clear later, for not being willing to pander to the extremists’ views. Indeed, at the very first meeting between Martyn Burke and Messrs. Eaton and Bieber, he was told to fire us as executive producers and asked point blank, “Don’t you check into the politics of the people you work with?”

CPB president Pat Harrison, to her credit, approved the considerably delayed grant disbursal, even as PBS continued to insist that it would not air our film if Gaffney and Alexiev were to stay on as executive producers.

Things proceeded to get worse. Unbeknownst to us until much later, PBS/WETA had hired prominent journalist Robin McNeil as the host and key decision maker on what Crossroads shows would be shown and, at the same time, commissioned him to do a documentary titled Muslims in America, on a subject nearly identical to ours. This was done well after the rigorous Crossroads competition had been completed. Surely a great deal if you can get it! Moreover, according to the PBS website, the film was to be produced by McNeil-Lehrer Productions, a commercial company in which Mr. McNeil has obvious financial interests. I don’t know what the PBS charter and ethics rules say about such shenanigans, but the average American taxpayer, who has paid for all of this after all, would probably consider this a conflict of interest, to put it mildly.

In retrospect, the PBS commissioning of a film outside of the Crossroads competition on a topic close to ours (and one guaranteed to be aired) should have been a dead giveaway to us that PBS, true to their word, never had an intention of giving our film a fair hearing. And that what it really bargained for and is very likely to get is yet another PBS puff piece on Islamism.

— Useful Idiots and More —

PBS/WETA then proceeded to hire as an outside “advisor” Prof. Aminah McCloud, a person known for her radical Islamist views and affiliations and support for the Nation of Islam’s leader and well-known anti-Semite Louis Farakhan. Barely two months after 9/11, Prof. McCloud opined to the Minnesota Pioneer Press newspaper that “we’re now becoming a police state like those nations we claim to abhor.”

Aware of the likely consequences of having our film judged by such a highly biased individual, we protested in writing to PBS and CPB to no avail. What we warned against did, in fact, happen when Ms. McCloud made a rough cut of our documentary available to the Nation of Islam, the subject of one our stories, in a complete breach of journalistic ethics and her confidentiality agreement with PBS. The Nation of Islam promptly threatened to sue us. Remarkably, even such a blatant abuse of journalistic integrity to the detriment of our film didn’t seem to register with either the series producers or the president of WETA, Sharon Percy Rockefeller, to whom we repeatedly appealed in this matter.

It may well be that hiring Ms. Aminah McCloud was not entirely coincidental. But it is a rank hypocrisy for an institution like PBS, which found Frank Gaffney and myself unqualified to be executive producers of a film on Islam on account of being conservative, to turn around and hire a known Islamist as an arbiter of a film on anti-Islamist Muslims.

Hypocrisy aside, a palpable PBS bias in favor of the Islamist worldview began showing in spades as we neared completion of the film in late 2006. Two detailed critiques of the film from Leo Eaton amounted, as we wrote to PBS/WETA boards of directors, “to a hatchet-job based on serious, perhaps willful, misinterpretation of both the message and the method of this film.”

It is worth noting here that our unhappiness with the way our film was being treated was expressed in writing on numerous occasions long before PBS officially rejected it. This is important, because now that this conflict has come out in the open, the predictable spin by PBS/WETA is that our unhappiness is just a case of sour grapes for not being selected for Crossroads airing.

— Nothing could be further from the truth as the articles below will verify. —

PBS/WETA bias against the moderate Muslims daring to speak out against the Islamists in our film are too numerous to list here, but a few representative cases should suffice to demonstrate it. For instance, Mr. Eaton dismisses the basic premise of our film that moderate Muslims around the world find themselves under attack by the Islamists, by claiming that ”moderation and extremism clearly depend on where you’re standing.”

This is tantamount to saying that there is no difference between perpetrators and victims, it is all a matter of opinion, and exactly the argument apologists for terrorism against innocent people and the terrorists themselves have been using for years.

In another instance, an episode in the storyline documenting the efforts of a radical imam to introduce sharia rules in the Muslim community in Denmark by imposing a “blood money” settlement is judged by Eaton a positive development since “it’s a way of stopping bloodshed, not encouraging it.” It is difficult to believe that a PBS producer could be completely unaware of the devastating effect on Muslim communities in the West the replacement of Western judicial systems by reactionary sharia rules would have. Yet, Mr. Eaton clearly is or pretends to be that, as, for example, when he demanded of us to provide “objective clarity” on why sharia cannot co-exist side by side with the democratic judicial system within Western societies. This would be truly a preposterous supposition, unless one realizes that it is a key objective on the agenda of radical Islamists throughout the West. And one that, wittingly or not, is echoed in the PBS criticism of our film.

Whatever the real motivation of PBS and its producers for spiking Islam vs. Islamists, its real victims for now are the moderate Muslims who are under withering assault from the Islamists for no other reason than the fact that they share our western democratic values. It is their voices, documented by us with $700,000 of taxpayer’s money, that have been denied a hearing by a publicly-funded institution that has willingly played the role of dupes and useful idiots to their Islamist oppressors. This, more than anything else, shows how serious the challenge of radical Islamofascist ideology has become within our own society.

For us, the story is far from ended. As makers of this film, Martyn Burke, Frank Gaffney and myself and our many supporters in the Muslim community and outside of it, will do everything possible for it to be seen by the American viewing public. And you can rest assured that, one way or another, it will be.

******

FSM Contributing Editor Alex Alexiev is co-executive producer of Islam vs. Islamists: Voices from the Muslim Center and a partner with Martyn Burke and Frank Gaffney in ABG Films Inc.

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From — http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/challenges.php?id=884588

And there is the more complete story, for those who are interested.

Regards,
Star Traveler

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