Sunday evening, The Learning Channel premiered its new “All-American Muslim” program, which it described as a “powerful series” taking viewers “inside the rarely seen world of American Muslims.” And it uncovers a “unique community struggling to balance faith and nationality.” Balancing faith and nationality? Why is that a struggle? Because they conflict.
The premise behind the creation of the show is the fictional construct “Islamophobia.” “All-American Muslim” is designed to counter “Islamophobia” by showing Muslims who aren’t terrorist monsters, but ordinary people living ordinary lives, balancing tradition and modern life, dealing with their families, their jobs, etc.
Yet based on the most recent FBI statistics, hate crimes against Muslims are at record lows – the lowest since 9/11. Contrast that to the record highs in anti-Semitic attacks against the Jewish people; so where’s TLC’s Jewish family series?
Left-wing sites are shamelessly pushing, promoting and propagandizing the new “All-American Muslim” show. The dhimmi Jew Alyssa Rosenberg urged viewers to watch the show, writing at Think Progress: “Normally, I would never tell you to watch something just because it would make someone mad. But noted Islamophobe Pamela Geller is apparently vexed that TLC’s ‘All-American Muslim,’ a new reality show about a group of Muslim families in Dearborn, Mich., doesn’t achieve what she thinks of as balance, by which she means including story lines where Muslims commit crimes based on their faith.”
Rosenberg complains that “so much of the conversation about Islam in America in the aftermath of September 11 has been dominated and misdirected by conspiracy theorists like Geller rather than rational attempts at dialogue and understanding.” Devout Muslims attacked this country and killed 3,000 Americans in the name of Islam; how does that make me a conspiracy theorist?
Rosenberg’s bootlicking is embarrassing. She derides me for calling for balance and truth. She also says that you should watch “All-American Muslim” “because it’s a very good show: warm, funny, with great characters, high-stakes story lines, and the some of the most thoughtful discussions of faith I’ve ever seen on mainstream television, or in mainstream popular culture at all. … In an era of increasingly vile reality television characters, and in a fall television season that’s stumbled in part by relying heavily on abrasive main and supporting characters, it’s a nice to have people to get invested in and to root for.”
But Rosenberg neglects to address the racist remarks that one character made against “white people” or the deriding of Catholics for consuming vast quantities of alcohol. I found those statements to be particularly offensive. Once again, the left shows itself to be indifferent to racism when it is committed by one of their own, and to the denigration of any religion other than Islam.
The main danger of “All-American Muslim” is that it’s misleading. The Muslims portrayed in the show are free to choose their path. That is the beauty of living in a free society. But so many aren’t – not only in Muslim countries, but here in America. Who speaks for Jessica Mokdad, who lived not far from where this show is taping, in Dearborn, Mich.? Mokdad was honor murdered by her stepfather, Rahim Alfetlawi, for “not following Islam” in the same city that refuses to run my freedom bus ads that offer help for those who wish to leave Islam but are threatened by their families. The ads were designed to help girls like Jessica. Despite our free-speech victories in the Detroit court, which ordered the ads to run, Detroit’s SMART Transit refused to run them – and Mokdad was honor murdered the week my ads were supposed to run.
The danger is in the deception and obfuscation of the truth, which results in the intellectual disarming of the American people. “All-American Muslim” is trying to show nominal Muslims as the norm, as if their existence takes away the threat from devout Muslims. It is mentioned once but never explained: The man has to convert to Islam because a Muslim woman cannot marry a non-Muslim man. This is a supremacist measure designed to make the Muslim community always expand at the expense of the non-Muslim one. But there is no hint of that in this show.
Clearly this program is an attempt to manipulate Americans into ignoring the threat of jihad and to bully them into thinking that being concerned about the jihad threat would somehow victimize these nice people in this show.
The problem is not people, it’s ideology. The show doesn’t address that.