Posted on 04/12/2007 2:41:11 PM PDT by noname247
Clear your TV-viewing calendar next week.
PBS has brought together "America at a Crossroads," a six-night television package that aims to explore challenges confronting the United States in a post-9-11 world.
Topics to be tackled include the war on terrorism; conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan; the experience of American troops serving abroad; the struggle for balance within the Muslim world; and global perspectives on America's
The series, airing Sunday through Friday from 9 to 11 p.m. EDT (check local listings), consists of 11 documentaries from a variety of producers, probing urgent issues in a variety of voices. The Corporation for Public Broadcasting developed the initial concept, issuing an open call for film projects. Veteran journalist (and former co-anchor of PBS' "NewsHour") Robert MacNeil serves as series host.
Here is the lineup:
-Sunday, 9 p.m.: "Jihad: The Men and Ideas Behind Al Qaeda" provides an in-depth look at radical Islamic groups, as well as the ideas and beliefs that inspire them. It focuses on Al-Qaida leaders Osama bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri and Abu Musab Al Zarqawi, who was killed last June.
-Monday, 9 p.m.: "Warriors" profiles Army soldiers - five men and one woman - as they serve in Baghdad in 2005, coping with its dangers and difficulties.
-Monday, 10 p.m.: "Operation Homecoming: Writing the Wartime Experience" is built upon a project created by the National Endowment for the Arts to gather the writing of servicemen and women who have participated in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. With dramatic readings, it covers a full literary spectrum - poetry, fiction, memoir, letters, journals and essays - in expressing the wartime experience.
-Tuesday, 9 p.m.: "Gangs of Iraq" examines the failure of an extensive and costly four-year training effort by the U.S. to "stand up" Iraq's new army and police forces, and how these coalition-trained forces have themselves been infiltrated by violent sectarian militias. This film was co-produced by "Frontline."
-Tuesday, 10 p.m.: "The Case for War: In Defense of Freedom" follows former Assistant Secretary of Defense Richard Perle as he travels the globe articulating and debating the neoconservative case for the war in Iraq and an assertive American foreign policy.
-Wednesday, 9 p.m.: "Europe's 9-11" explores homegrown terrorism through the lens of the March 2004 train bombings in Madrid, Spain. It draws connections between those bombers and Al-Qaida cell activities in Milan, Italy, as well as the murder of filmmaker Theo Van Gogh in the Netherlands in November 2004.
-Wednesday, 10 p.m.: "The Muslim Americans" chronicles the diversity of Muslims in America, while contrasting life for them after 9-11 in the United States as compared to Muslims in Britain and Europe. This film was produced in conjunction with "The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer."
-Thursday, 9 p.m.: "Faith Without Fear" joins Irshad Manji (bestselling author of "The Trouble with Islam Today: A Muslim's Call for Reform in her Faith") on a quest to reconcile her faith in Allah with her love of freedom. One of many people she meets: Osama bin Laden's former bodyguard, who explains why he's willing to turn his young son into a martyr.
-Thursday, 10 p.m.: "Struggle for the Soul of Islam: Inside Indonesia" travels to a nation where the practice of Islam reflects a centuries-old tradition of tolerance, compassion and inclusiveness. Even so, in recent years Indonesia has become both a target and a breeding ground for Islamic militants - and the arrival of democracy in 1998 has proved to be a factor in that rise of violence.
-Friday, 9 p.m.: "Security Versus Liberty: The Other War" tells three stories arising from new government policies after 9/11 that, in the name of preventing future terrorist attacks, may have damaged individual liberties.
-Friday, 10 p.m.: "The Brotherhood" investigates a secretive, international movement dedicated to the spread of a fundamental version of Islam throughout the world. This movement may also be offering support and encouragement to terrorists.
PBS?
I’ll sum it up and save you all the time....
Bush’s fault.
This will probably be about as useful as CBC’s “Little Mosque on the Prairie.”
Isn’t this the series that was Censored by the political correctness of PBS?
They won’t show you the Islam v. Islamists film they commissioned with our money, because it puts Islamists in a bad light.
Producer: PBS dropped ‘Islam vs. Islamists’ on political grounds
Dennis Wagner
The Arizona Republic
Apr. 10, 2007 12:00 AM
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.
Mary Stewart, vice president of external affairs at WETA, said Burke’s documentary was not completed on time to be among 11 documentaries that will be aired beginning Sunday. Stewart said the picture may be broadcast by PBS at a later date.
“The film is a strong film,” Stewart said. “I’m still hoping to see this in the Crossroads initiative.”
Jeff Bieber, WETA’s executive producer for Crossroads, gave a substantially different explanation. He said Burke’s film had “serious structural problems (and) . . . was irresponsible because the writing was alarmist, and it wasn’t fair.”
“They’re crying foul, and there was no foul ball,” Bieber added. “The problem is in their film.”
Federally funded films
The controversy involves a collection of documentaries financed with $20 million in federal grants from the corporation, which conceived Crossroads in 2004 to enhance public understanding of terrorism, homeland security and other crucial issues in the post-9/11 era. Independent filmmakers submitted 430 proposals. Full production grants were given to 21 of those, including Islam vs. Islamists, which received $700,000.
Subtitled Voices From the Muslim Center, Burke says his film “attempts to answer the question: ‘Where are the moderate Muslims?’ The answer is, ‘Wherever they are, they are reviled and sometimes attacked’ “ by extremists.
Michael Levy, a spokesman for CPB, said the corporation set up the Crossroads project and provided funding, but turned over management and content control to PBS and WETA 13 months ago.
After that, Burke says in his Feb. 23 complaint letter, he “consistently encountered actions by the PBS series producers that violate the basic tenets of journalism in America.”
PBS officials turned down interview requests.
Debate about bias
The dispute adds to a running debate about political bias in the nation’s publicly funded television business. In 2004, filmmakers complained that CPB was pushing a right-wing agenda for the Crossroads series. A year later, CPB President Kenneth Tomlinson sought to eliminate what he saw as a liberal bias at PBS. He was forced to resign after an inspector general’s report found that he violated federal rules and ethics standards in the process.
Burke’s credits include Pirates of Silicon Valley, a movie about the founders of Microsoft, and The Hollywood Ten, a documentary about blacklisted leftists in the motion picture industry during the 1950s.
In the making of Islam vs. Islamists, Burke’s co-producers were Frank Gaffney, president of the Center for Security Policy, and Alex Alexiev, the non-profit organization’s vice president. Both men are neo-conservatives who have written on the threat of “Islamofascism” to the free world.
Before filming began last year, Burke says, Bieber asked him, “Don’t you check into the politics of the people you work with?”
Bieber said PBS was concerned that the Center for Security Policy is an advocacy group, so its leaders could not produce an objective picture. Because of that, he suggested that Gaffney be demoted to adviser.
Burke, who did not honor the recommendation, says that funding was delayed and WETA began to interfere with his film until it was “expelled” from Crossroads.
Among Burke’s examples of tampering:
• A WETA manager pressed to eliminate a key perspective of the film: The claim that Muslim radicals are pushing to establish “parallel societies” in America and Europe governed by Shariah law rather than sectarian courts.
• After grants were issued, Crossroads managers commissioned a new film that overlapped with Islam vs. Islamists and competed for the same interview subjects.
• WETA appointed an advisory board that includes Aminah Beverly McCloud, director of World Islamic Studies at DePaul University. In an “unparalleled breach of ethics,” Burke says, McCloud took rough-cut segments of the film and showed them to Nation of Islam officials, who are a subject of the documentary. They threatened to sue.
“This utterly undermines any journalistic independence,” Burke wrote in an e-mail to WETA officials.
In an interview, McCloud said she showed a single video frame to a Muslim journalist who was not a Nation of Islam representative.
However, in a January e-mail, McCloud told Crossroads producers that she had spoken with Nation of Islam representatives and “invited them over to view this section.” She also wrote that they were outraged “and will promptly pursue litigation.”
Stewart, the WETA executive, said McCloud was admonished for “inappropriate” conduct.
Otherwise, however, Stewart said Crossroads producers have dealt with Islam vs. Islamists in a fair and professional manner.
Call your local PBS station and ask why they Censored “Islam versus Islamists”!
Well, you can understand PBS not wanting to upset "Islamists".....after all, they behead folks they are upset with.
Dhimini principle at work here......
I heard Glenn Beck talking to a producer about a segment of this film that PBS is not airing. Supposedly it dealt with Islamic extremism...and they won’t air it because of that.
PBS...your tax dollars at work!!!
I’ll sum it up and save you all the time....
Bush’s fault.
You left out: Islam is misunderstood.
What is an “Islamist”? They are nothing BUT Islamic Supremacists.
And I find all sorts of things about this documentary “funny”. Like that we can see footage of bloody bodies at the African ebassy bombings but not from the 9-11 attacks. That we are told that Bin Laden lived in caves like Mohammed did WHEN Allah spoke to him (not “like Mohammed did when Allah is supposed to have spoken to him”). Jews invading Palestine in the 1940s. Other things too. It sells the Islamic Supremacist worldview but does little to denounce it (maybe just the tactics they use).
Where is the condemnation of “Islamists” total supression of religious freedoms? “Americans, Christians, and Jews are forbidden from the Saudi penninsula.” BY WHAT WORLD VIEW??? Islamic supremacists.
We cannot coexist with them any more than we could’ve co-existed with a Nazi State. This is not to say we cannot co-exist with muslims, it is to say that we cannot exist with Islamic supremacists.
There is also a repeated anti-American war sentiment “this (drawn out wars) is what Bin Laden wants!!!!”
BS pure and simple. Bin Laden called America a paper tiger, he has repeatedly said that when we see our war dead we turn our tails and pull out (as in Somalia).
Doesn’t sound like the words of someone who wants PR from constant war. He wants to proclaim victory, like the rooster crowing and the sun rising.
The “documentary” also repeatedly makes the point that this war is because of US presence in the Middle East. If the muslims are left to their “holy land” (which was the holy land of OTHER faiths before the warlord known as Mohammed came to power), there will be world peace.
Except it denies the actions of Islamic supremacists (and Islamic governments) in Malaysia, Spain, etc.
This is a territorial war for expanding the Islamic empire (as they did hundreds of years ago). It is foolish to believe that this is just over the muddled East.
It served to tell us how the settlers were expected to go Church twice a day during the week and twice on Sundays (so basically twice a day, every day???) and talked of harsh punishment if you didn’t.
Lovely “equivalence”.
PBS is lousy liberal propaganda.
Please FReepmail me if you want on or off my ‘miscellaneous’ ping list.
What was this “9/11” thing? Does it have any effect on whether Sanjaya will win?
Very Good Clem... And kudos to RUN FRED RUN!
jihad bump
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