While there’s no doubt that, in the months to come, scores of writers will devote scores of articles and blog posts to commemorating the 10-year anniversary of 9/11, I’d like to observe a far less-remembered 10-year anniversary: the campaign waged by prominent U.S. Arab-American organizations to whitewash Muslim terror in the months preceding 9/11.
Obviously, this is not an anniversary that U.S. Arab and Muslim groups are eager to recall. But, as organizations like the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) have become more prominent (and vocal) in the years following 9/11, it might be instructive to examine how, in the months leading up to the worst attack on U.S. soil in the history of this nation, organizations like CAIR were doing their part to keep us less safe, and less informed.
I should start by noting that, in its official report, the nonpartisan 9/11 Commission took the U.S. media to task for downplaying the threat posed by Muslim terror in the years prior to 9/11. In the commission’s view, the whitewashing and soft-peddling of the reality of Muslim terror directly helped put this country at risk.
Call it calculation or call it coincidence, the fact is that two of the largest Arab/Muslim organizations in the United States, CAIR and the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (AAADC), together with a man who is arguably this nation’s most prominent Arab-American media critic and activist, Jack Shaheen (then-Professor Emeritus of Mass Communications at Southern Illinois University, and CBS News consultant for Middle East affairs), chose the months leading up to 9/11 to launch a full-scale assault against “negative media portrayals” of Muslims and Arabs as terrorists (as I’ve written about previously, Muslim organizations launched a similar, but smaller-scale, campaign in 1993, in the months leading up to the first World Trade Center attack).
Spring/summer of 2001 saw three separate but related events:
• CAIR began agitating for a complete boycott of CBS (both its news and its entertainment divisions), in retaliation for CBS programs that highlighted Islamic terrorism.
• To great media fanfare, Jack Shaheen launched his book “Reel Bad Arabs,” a 575-page magnum opus that lambasted Hollywood and the media for daring to portray Arabs and Muslims in a negative light.
• The AAADC debuted an 83-page report on “negative media images and discrimination” against Arabs and Muslims. The report targeted the U.S. government, law enforcement, and the media.
Muslim and Arab-American organizations like to trumpet their “patriotism” and commitment to American values. But, and this is a terrible irony, it cannot be denied that during the very same months that the 9/11 hijackers were taking flying lessons and conducting dry-runs on U.S. commercial flights, U.S. Muslim and Arab-American organizations were doing everything they could to stop the media from educating the public, either through entertainment programs or news reports, about the threat posed by groups like al-Qaeda. This is not meant to suggest any direct collusion between the 9/11 terrorists and U.S. Arab and Muslim advocacy groups. Rather, my intent is to point out that U.S. Arab and Muslim organizations pushed a damaging agenda in the months prior to 9/11 – one that complimented the terrorists’ agenda, even if unintentionally.
Let’s take a closer look at the actions of CAIR, the AAADC, and Jack Shaheen in the pre-9/11 months.
The CAIR CBS Boycott
Spearheaded by CAIR-NY, arguably the most extremist CAIR branch (these are the folks who, after 9/11, argued that Muslims had been framed as the perpetrators of the crime), the CAIR petition was a full-frontal assault on CBS. Launched on June 1st, 2001, the boycott, which CAIR claimed to be initiating “on behalf of seven million Muslim-Americans and three million Arab-Americans,” went after CBS on several fronts:
A boycott of all CBS TV and radio stations; A boycott of all CBS TV and radio advertisers; A pledge “to prevent all CBS productions from entering the 54 member countries of the Organization of Islamic Conference, including the 22 member countries of the League of Arab States, comprising 1.3 billion Muslim consumers of (CBS) productions.”CAIR’s complaint was that CBS had produced shows that explored Islamic terrorism. Although some of the programs targeted in the boycott petition were frivolous in nature, the petition also called for an end to serious examinations and dramatizations of Islamic terror, citing “The Path to Paradise” (CBS’ unflinching dramatization of the first World Trade Center attack), “Terrorist on Trial: The United States vs. Salim Ajami” (the critically-praised dramatization of the trial of a high-level terrorist), and the highly-acclaimed “Not Without My Daughter” (which CBS didn’t even produce – it merely broadcast the film).
CAIR demanded that these types of movies and TV shows must cease.
After 9/11, the boycott petition was scrubbed from the CAIR website. But, unfortunately for CAIR, one of the hazards of using a third-party site (like petitiononline.com) to help garner signatures is that their archives remain accessible. So you can see the 2001 boycott petitionhere. It ended up receiving 864 signatures. Just for fun, check out the first page of signatories. Guess who the 6th person to sign was…
…Feisal Rauf, of the “Ground Zero Mosque!” So, apparently, a man who feels that Americans should have no say in where he can build a mosque has no problem bullying Americans about what types of movies and TV shows they can produce.
Dr. Jack Shaheen
At the exact same time that CAIR was using boycott tactics to pressure the media to whitewash “negative” Arab and Muslim images, Dr. Shaheen was pursuing the same ends, through different means. In the summer of 2001, Shaheen was promoting his book, “Reel Bad Arabs,” to an unsurprisingly sympathetic assortment of mainstream media book reviewers and media critics. Just as with the CAIR boycott, Shaheen’s goal was to pressure the media to downplay “negative” Arab and Muslim characterizations (i.e., characterizations that link Arabs and Muslims to terrorism).
“Caring Americans wring their hands over stereotypes in the U.S. that haunt blacks, Latinos, Asians, Italians, Native Americans, Catholics, Jews, and gays. Just as nasty, though, is the stigma that usually goes unmentioned,” wrote Howard Rosenberg in the L.A. Times, July 30, 2001. “‘There’s an unending barrage of the same hate-filled images portraying Arabs as less than human,’ said scholar Jack G. Shaheen, whose excellent new book, ‘Reel Bad Arabs,’ is a valuable, detailed, fast-reading compendium of theatrical movies that follows his incisive earlier work, ‘The TV Arab.’ ‘Not only are they bashed and vilified on a constant basis,’ Shaheen added from his home in South Carolina, ‘the religion [Islam] is thrown in too.’”
Rosenberg took special aim (as did the CAIR petition) at the CBS series “The Agency,” for daring to show the CIA on the trail of Arab terrorists plotting a major terror attack:
“Typical is the pilot for a new CBS fall series, ‘The Agency.’ It opens with a CIA agent giving a briefing on terrorists ‘sworn to wage holy war’ against the U.S. and its friends. The rest of the story has the CIA scrambling to block a bombing planned by these foreign Arabs.”
The AAADC Report
If the summer of 2001 can be called the “summer of the terrorism whitewash,” there was no larger brush than the AAADC’s report on Arab and Muslim “discrimination and negative images.” This was an 83-page manifesto aimed at stopping airplane passenger “profiling” of Muslims, ending the detention and/or deportation of Muslims who have overstayed their visas, and forcing the media to downplay or ignore Muslim terror in news and entertainment programs.
And remember, this was at the exact same time that the 9/11 plotters were taking advantage of the lack of passenger “profiling,” lax visa laws, lax enforcement of visa laws, and a lack of awareness among the general public of the threat of Muslim terror.
The report targeted everything from PBS’ decision to run Steven Emerson’s excellent documentary “Jihad in America,” to a California TV station’s decision to identify Osama bin Laden as “the sworn enemy” of the U.S. (the AAADC claimed that the station was wrong to do so). And whereas the CAIR boycott and the Shaheen media blitz mainly targeted entertainment programs, the AAADC report specifically targeted news reporting, attacking U.S. news organization for not being “skeptical” about Muslim terrorism. The report went so far as to argue that news organizations should stop using the word “terrorism,” because the term itself is an “ethnic pejorative” against Arabs and Muslims.
In summation, in the months leading up to 9/11, these U.S. Arab and Muslim organizations were doing everything in their power to downplay the reality and threat of Islamic terror, and to keep the people of the United States uninformed and unprotected.
Did the 2001 Whitewash Succeed?
Yes, at least to some extent. We know this because entertainment industry executives have admitted it (CBS, for example, told the L.A. Times in July 2001 that it was removing all Muslim references from an upcoming TV movie about an Islamic terror plot). But the truth is, we’ll never truly know just how effective the 2001 whitewash campaign was. What we can be certain of, however, is the intent of the Arab and Muslim groups behind it.
One final, grim endnote about the 2001 whitewash campaign. In his autobiography “Against All Odds,” Chuck Norris recounted having dinner with Senator Kay Bailey Hutchinson in early 2001. In the course of the conversation, he mentioned that CBS wanted to develop an action film that dealt, in some way, with a major threat to the United States. The senator told Norris that the greatest threat currently facing the country was the very real possibility that Osama bin Laden was about to carry out a major terrorist operation on U.S. soil. Hutchinson urged Norris to develop a movie that could raise awareness of that threat (keep in mind, this was at the exact same time that U.S. Arab and Muslim organizations were attempting to diminish awareness of just such a threat).
Norris agreed, and he produced a TV movie in which he played a secret service agent battling a bin Laden-type villain. He called the film “The President’s Man: Holy War.”
In response to the 2001 whitewash campaign, CBS agreed to change the title. To appease U.S. Muslim groups, CBS removed the “Holy War” part (which, according to CAIR, Shaheen, and the AAADC, was “offensive” to Muslims).
Five days before 9/11, CBS renamed the film.
The new title?
“The President’s Man: Ground Zero.”
That title would soon be changed as well.