Posted on 04/11/2007 4:18:02 AM PDT by Sergeant Tim
After he spoke out against CAIR and the 6 flying imams naming 'John Doe' passengers as defendants in a lawsuit because they reported suspicious behaviors, Dr. M. Zuhdi Jasser has been pulled from a PBS series. The producer says PBS pulled the segment entitled Islam vs. Islamists for political reasons. Syndicated talk-radio host Mark Levin interviewed Dr. Jasser and asked him what happened:
The producers had seen my work and followed our travails with the moderates here, with what we're doing against the fundamentalists locally. They came and spent the week with me and looked at all of our activities, the interfaith community, and spent time interviewing some of the imams locally [Arizona] and others... It is sort of a microcosm of what happened. People say, "Where are the moderates, why aren't they speaking up?"The movie looks at some of the response and how I've been demonized. I've been labeled as a false Muslim. I've been told that even though I'm proud to raise my kids Muslim and I pray and I fast that really I'm imposing a secular separation of religion and politics in our faith and for me to try to get the imams to stop talking politics in their sermons is to impose something false into our faith…
All I've tried to do is open the debate. The important thing this documentary did was to begin the debate and to say that certainly the fundamentalists are able to express what they want in our free speech but they shouldn't suppress what I have to say. They should allow us to bring this debate into the Muslim community.
For this to get pulled really shows that our government and the mainstream media feel they’re basically tools of the Islamists. They're going to respond to them and not push the issue and you wonder where the voice of the moderates is. The voice is in the wilderness because nobody [in the media] wants to hear it and nobody is going to give time (Click here for more background and to listen to the entire interview).
The segment’s producer says it was pulled on political grounds:
The producer of a tax-financed documentary on Islamic extremism claims his film has been dropped for political reasons from a television series that airs next week on more than 300 PBS stations nationwide. Key portions of the documentary focus on Dr. M. Zuhdi Jasser of Phoenix and his American Islamic Forum for Democracy, a non-profit organization of Muslim Americans who advocate patriotism, constitutional democracy and a separation of church and state.Martyn Burke says that the Public Broadcasting Service and project managers at station WETA in Washington, D.C., excluded his documentary, Islam vs. Islamists, from the series America at a Crossroads after he refused to fire two co-producers affiliated with a conservative think tank. "I was ordered to fire my two partners (who brought me into this project) on political grounds," Burke said in a complaint letter to PBS and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which supplied funds for the films.
Burke wrote that his documentary depicts the plight of moderate Muslims who are silenced by Islamic extremists, adding, "Now it appears to be PBS and CPB who are silencing them." A Jan. 30 news release by the corporation listed Islam vs. Islamists as one of eight films to be presented in the opening series.
Related articles and commentary:
PBS shelves film on moderate Muslims
Ping!
Proves what I’m saying all along. The DSM has a vested interest in making all Muslims looklike terrorists.
When was the lasttime you hear about grateful Iraqis, Kuwaitis, and Afghanis?
I’d like to put a muzzle on the taxpayer funding of PBS.
Shocking. The MSM is supporting the extremists position and muzzling the moderate voices that speak out against terrorism. Who would have thought the MSM supports terrorism?
Thanks for the ping ST.
Heard Mark Levin on this yesterday.
Glad you got a thread up on this.
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