Free Republic

PBS vs. "Islam vs. Islamist"By Bill SteigerwaldFrontPageMagazine.com | April 17, 2007 Canadian novelist and veteran documentary filmmaker Martyn Burke is not someone you'd expect to get into an ugly ideological spitting match with the folks who run PBS. Burke, who lives and works in the heart of the Hollywood creative community, considers himself neither conservative nor liberal. But "Islam vs. Islamist," the documentary he made about how moderate Muslims are being silenced and intimidated by Islamist extremists, will not be part of "America at a Crossroads," PBS's new 11-part, six-night series about post-9/11 America that begins Sunday night at 9....

Apparently, a church dance in Greeley, Colo., led to 9/11. In 1948 Sayyid Qutb, an Egyptian writer who became the father of the radical Islamist movement, was sent to the United States to temper his contempt for the West. What he saw over two years — postwar consumerism, suburban lawns, men and women dancing “breast to breast” — only further inflamed his conviction that the West was the enemy of Islam and doomed. Mr. Qutb went on to work up a pseudospiritual justification of Islamic terrorism that inspired and emboldened many, including Osama bin Laden and his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahri....

There's only one thing to do with the spiked PBS documentary, "Islam vs. Islamist: Voices from the Muslim Center." Air it. If the Public Broadcasting Service won't reconsider, this window on the struggle for the soul of Islam in the West -- controversial and hard-hitting -- will be picked up by some other network. It's inevitable. We watched "Islam vs. Islamists," and several things stand out. The stories of embattled moderate Muslims in the contemporary United States, Canada, France and Denmark are gripping and too important to relegate to the dustbin. (snip) The stories speak for themselves when allowed to,...

Why is PBS using our money to make a film that we're not allowed to see??? HH: Sit down, you’re going to have smoke coming out of your ears. Do you care about the Islamist threat to the United States? Do you wonder where terrorists are and what the West is doing about them? Well, there’s a new movie that’s been made by none other than Frank Gaffney and his friends at the Center For Security Policy, www.securefreedom.org, and you could see it, except for the fact that PBS will not let you see it. The scandal broke today. I’m...