The much-ballyhooed new TV show is just another exercise in whitewashing and obfuscation. "Network TV show portraying this as 'all-American' ...: 'Danger is in the deception and obfuscation of the truth,'": by Michael Carl for WorldNetDaily, November 10:
According to The Learning Channel, its coming new "All-American Muslim" program is 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."...The program launches on Sunday on the TLC Cable Channel.
The producers went to Dearborn, Mich., the U.S. city that has the highest concentration of Muslims in the United States, and a producer who declined to be named told WND the stories focus on people.
"Ultimately, our shows are about telling the stories of the families featured in them. So, to some extent, the history of American Muslims settling in Dearborn may be touched upon, but ultimately, this is about the families' stories and what's going on in their lives today, not the past, per se," the producer said....
"Like many of our programs, it offers viewers a glimpse into a world they may not otherwise experience, introducing them to real-life families who are going through everyday experiences that really resonate with our audience – from getting married, to having a baby to rooting for your favorite football team," the producer said.
"We're excited about that because we think this group of families really will give our audience a taste of what life is like in Dearborn, Mich., for a variety of American Muslims – some quite traditional, and some not."
But Islam analyst Pamela Geller says that perspective on the show is also its danger.
"Clearly this program is designed to counter the fictional threat of '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, and a host of other issues," Geller said.
"It 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," Geller said.
The producer of the program says that for the most part, program makers purposefully avoided getting too deeply into some of the deeper issues surrounding Islam.
"This show is not about politics. Viewers will gain insight into Islam, definitely, but more from the perspective of cultural traditions, how modern American Muslims in Dearborn live, family matters and so on," the producer said.
"But we think there are interesting insights that will be offered by the show, so we hope people will tune in, just knowing that this is not an academic-type documentary about Islam, it's really about day-to-day life in Dearborn, as seen through the eyes of the families featured in the show, who are pretty diverse," the producer said.
He said the program tried to avoid the issue that some Islamic clerics want to bring Islamic law – Shariah – into America.
"As I say, viewers will get an insight into Islam and Muslim traditions as practiced by the families featured in the show who have varying practices when it comes to their faith. The show focuses on how each of these families balances their beliefs and traditions in their day-to-day lives," the producer said.
Jerry Newcombe, Truth in Action Ministries' senior producer and analyst, says the major problem with the program is that it's not going to show the reality of "pure Islam.""It's a free country. Muslims are free to practice their religion here (thanks to Christianity, ultimately). What is sad, though, is that the truth about the goals of radical Islam are hidden from many Americans through programs like the one on TLC. Islam wants to take over the world. If they have to use force, they'll do that. But otherwise, they'll do it by what Robert Spencer calls 'stealth jihad,'" Newcombe said.
A line from one of the first two episodes illustrates what both Geller and Newcombe are describing, when one of Muslim women says in a panel discussion, "We live our lives just like anyone else."
That perception is one of the reasons why Jihad Watch publisher and Executive Director Robert Spencer shares the concerns expressed by Geller and Newcombe....
"The show apparently is trying to show that Muslims go to clubs, like to have fun, etc. But this doesn't really establish anything," Spencer said.
"The problem people have with Islam is its teachings of violence against and the subjugation of unbelievers. The problem is not with every Muslim person. It is with the supremacist ideology and the fervent believers in those noxious doctrines of warfare and subjugation," Spencer also said.
Geller agrees.
"It is trying to show nominal Muslims as the norm, as if their existence takes away the threat from devout Muslims," Geller said.
"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," Geller said.Geller is making reference to the major issue in the program's first episode.
One of the program's main subjects former Roman Catholic Jeff McDermott. McDermott converts to Islam so that he can marry Shadia Amen, the daughter of one of the five families featured in the program.
While the program honestly portrays one of the Muslim men saying that anyone who marries a Muslim must be a Muslim, the subtle nature of the prevailing attitude can be missed by the average viewer.
In an interview sequence, Jeff sits with Shadia in front of the camera and says, "They (referring to her family) made me feel comfortable."
Shadia replies, "We (including herself with her family) wanted you to feel comfortable."
Spencer believes the result might have been different if the couple had chosen the other possible path, which was for her to become a Catholic.
"What if he and his bride to be decide to get married in the Roman Catholic Church, or leave Islam at some later date? In that case he may find her Muslim relatives somewhat less solicitous of their desire to put their happiness above all other things," Spencer said.
When asked if the program is actually showing a more subtle version of strict Islam by subtly forcing the young Catholic man to convert to Islam to marry the young woman, Spencer said, "Precisely."...
Spencer adds that the program also gives subtle clues to the realities of Islam's beliefs.
"Another way the program is carefully presenting strict Islam is the 'traditional' Muslim man says that women should not be opening up clubs. There are lots of small clues here and there," Spencer said.
Spencer was referring to a scene in episode two in which one of the young women wants to open a night club and her father objects saying, "Muslim women don't do that."Spencer and Geller agree that the focus of the program plays down the major emphases of Islam.
Geller adds that the ultimate danger posed by a program presenting the "normal" side of life for American Muslims is that it isn't accurate.
"The danger is, 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," Geller said.
Geller points to two instances that reveal the consequences of Islam growing in any country where it gains the upper hand.
"Who speaks for Jessica Mokdad who lived not far from where this show is taping? Mokdad was honor murdered by her stepfather, Rahim Alfetlawi, for 'not following Islam'. That happened in the same city that refuses to run my freedom bus ads. The ads were designed to help girls like Jessica. Despite our free speech victories in the Detroit court, Mokdad was honor murdered the week my ads were supposed to run," Geller said.
"The danger is in the deception and obfuscation of the truth which results in the intellectual disarming of the American people," Geller also said....
And this mind-melding, cultural relativism is why I pay for cable TV?
Ahmed, "But our books, our holy books. More and more infidels are starting to read them, and some of those passages are, you know, pretty strong against the infidel. Maybe the idea of handing out free korans wasn't such a good idea."
Mustaffa, "Just say the passage is taken out of context. That'll hold them."
A, "Sometimes, but some infidels are asking, "What is the context for passages like Kill the Infidel, or "If you leave Islam the penalty for apostasy is death." I don't know how to respond."
M, "Well, we have to keep the truth about Islam under wraps until we have sufficient numbers. Just don't respond, or if you do, just claim they're racists. It's always worked so far."
A, "Maybe so, but more and more of these people are reading our holy books and demanding solid answers, not excuses. I too am well aware that Muslim spokesmen never address the substance of the observations of the infidels. They instantly go into an Islamophobia and racism mode. But I've been noticing that more and more that these charges are just being tossed aside and the infidels come back for real answers, not our attempts at diversion."
M, "Relax, we've got the media on our side, and a friend in the White House, wink, wink, if you know what I mean. The media will continue to carry our water. Besides, who are these infidels gonna believe, us or their lyin' eyes. LOL!"
Of course, the series will carry that well known disclaimer:
All Muslim characters appearing in this work are fictions. Any resemblance to real Muslims following the Qur'an's mandate to fight until 'all religion is for Allah', living or dead, is purely coincidental. :)
War is deceit!
I really hate Islam and will fight to prevent it from being established in my country with every fiber of my being until the day I die and you know why? Because Islam says I must be subject to Allah, subject to the men of the religion and that I must be put in a box and have my brain and my will removed. On the other hand there is my Catholic faith. I know, I know, some people will say I'm so oppressed by it, but it simply isn't true. God gave me a free will to follow Him or reject Him as I please. And with my free will intact, I choose to follow Him.
I'd like to see this pro-Muslim show tackle the subject of free will................................................
(I'm picturing thirty minutes of a test pattern.) They can't do it and they know it because the whole premise of Islam is subjection to the will of Allah. Even the name Islam means submission. Allah must be a very insecure little "god" if he has to threaten, force and kill people to get them to be Muslims. But as we who gather here know, that is exactly what it is all about.
I wonder how many Americans who value their freedom and their God given right to free will would be on board with this show if Islam didn't allow it's followers to lie and cheat in order to convince all of us that it's just like us? Anyone walking down the street past a be-hijjabed Muslima pushing a stroller or watching some CAIR executive on TV whine for the umpteenth time knows they are not the same as us and that is not our fault. That is because of their actions. There is no, "Hi, how are you" as you pass and honestly, can anyone ever remember anyone from CAIR offering a helping hand or even a smile to anyone who isn't Muslim? Heck, they cheat and defraud their own fellow Muslims (as in that lawsuit that was brought against CAIR by Muslims seeking legal advice.) These people demand that we except them but they give nothing of any value in return. If they actually did what this show will try and imply they do, i.e., just living their lives and being left alone, I would support that wholeheartedly and peacefully coexist. But since they demand that I change my beliefs, my culture, my way of doing everything, we will be at perpetual war. So be it.
It's a free country. Muslims are free to practice their religion here.
And therein lies the problem. Looking at various federal criminal statutes - from the 1798 Sedition Act to the 1969 Federal Hate Crimes Act to RICO to provisions in the U.S. Constitution provisions proscribing the destruction of freedom - it is evident that all Moslems here are criminals and enemies of the state.
So, enforce the laws. Equal justice before the law is what I say. We are a nation of laws, supposedly, at least, so let's give the Moslems a taste of what that means.
Drag them into court where they either foreswear Mohammed and Allah or are deported to the hell-hole from which they came.
*** 33:36 ***
It is not fitting for a Moslem, man or woman, when a matter has been decided by Allah and Mohammed to have any option about their decision: if any one disobeys Allah and Mohammed, he is indeed on a clearly wrong Path.
Also, it should be made a federal crime to be found in possession of a copy of the Ko-Ran, the Hah-Deaths, Ishaq, Tabari, or any of the Sharia codes. This prohibition will also apply Infidel college professors, especially them.
What I want to know is who is writing the scripts for this show. They have this stuff sketched out somewhat before they ever do a shot.
Dearborn, I seem to remember that name from somewhere. Oh, ya, wasn't that the town where the Muslims were dancing in the streets on 9/11?
"Islamophobia: A License to Kill"
(by Daniel Greenfield)
http://frontpagemag.com/2011/11/11/islamophobia-a-license-to-kill/
Yeah, all Moslems are just regular everyday folks. And "Islam," as Bill Clinton said, "is as American as apple pie." Americans who have eaten apple pie should have no problem with Islam. Those who haven't should gorge themselves, watch this show, and indiscriminately accept all Moslems as one of their own.
The lower left corner is in Dearbornistan.
http://imageshack.us/f/863/frontcoverprintready.jpg/
Fictitious Comedy.......
Should we be surprised?
http://wikiislam.net/wiki/Lying_for_Islam_(taqiyya)
http://www.islam-watch.org/Warner/Taqiyya-Islamic-Principle-Lying-for-Allah.htm
The media seems to take a perverse delight in the gradual, persistent picking off of Christians of all denominations from their former beliefs. In favor of what, they don't examine, but celebrate. They consider it progress in and of itself.
For that matter, imagine if this show were doing the exact same thing for the sake of a Christian group. No one would buy it. What people in the media don't trust farther than they can throw for Christianity, they take, indeed, on faith here.
You know, I really don't see this show lasting too long. We know there is no fun in islam, so this show will probably suck big time. Think about it. muslime entertainment in America. Since there is no fun, and they can't get violent on TV lest they perpetuate the stereotype, the women will be covered up (mercifully), daughters too (not so mercifully), no action. This will be a major yawner.
Of course no mention will be made of sharia law, female genital mutilation, pedophilia, child brides, forced marriage, wife beating, honor murders, rape gangs , beheadings, the murder of homosexuals, the need for muslim women to produce 4 MALE witnesses to prove rape, stoning, acid attacks etc., etc.
The non-muslim has to convert... Does that mean that Grover Norquist, who is married to a muslim woman, converted to islam?
From the very end of the article:
"The danger is in the deception and obfuscation of the truth which results in the intellectual disarming of the American people," Geller also said...."
______________________________________
Sorry, Ms. Geller, but I'm afraid the bulk of the American people "intellectually disarmed" themselves quite awhile back, most notably on November 2nd, 2008.
And if we don't kick Soetoro and Holder out, soon we may be LITERALLY disarmed.
“Reality” shows are the dumbest, most deceitful programs to ever be produced for TV. It’s one thing to produce a show portraying the travails of a “real,” but dysfunctional, non-Muslim family. There were a few of those on TV years ago. The question for any intelligent person back then would be: Why should I care about these people? The deceitful thing about them was that they were shot with full camera crews wandering around a household, looking for material to splice together. Of course, the family members hammed it up. Then came the “survivor” and “Big Brother” programs. Same deceit, same hamming it up for the cameras. The hammier the behavior and language, the better the ratings – until viewers got bored with the whole idea. Any one of these shows was about as phony and “real” as a WWF bout with costumed wrestlers tossing each other around to the cheers of a crowd of morons who want to believe it’s all “real.”
The difference between those shows and “All-American Muslims,” as Geller and Spencer point out, is that ”All-American Muslims” professes to portray Muslims as just “ordinary people, living their lives,” but without stating that those lives are led in conformance with a primitive, barbaric religion that is also an ideology of conquest. Of course such a shows isn’t going to delve into those “deeper” aspects of the religion/ideology; that would be letting the jihadist out of the bag, that would mean examining the horrific but Koran-sanctioned crimes committed not only against non-Muslims (murder, rape, robbery, discrimination, etc.) but on other Muslims. It would entail scrutinizing Islam itself, and discovering, not a bunch of boring, “average” people whose lives are bland, but a leprous ideology that stunts, maims, and kills.
I imagine that in Nazi Germany there were special newsreels in theaters that portrayed the “average” German family as good Nazis, just “ordinary people living their lives,” struggling with “everyday” problems, with the father working in a munitions factory, the mother cooking up some great sauerkraut and expecting her sixth baby (“for the race and the Fuehrer, you know), and their kids getting stars on their foreheads for memorizing Hitler’s speeches and being exemplary leaders of their youth groups.
Anyone who chances to watch “All-American Muslim” should remember this: there is a script, and while the script focuses on concretes, it is conformance with the ideology that governs what banal concretes are depicted and what is said and shown. Don’t buy it. The program is just smooth agitprop.
Re the episode about someone converting--Well, I, for one, do not approve of my son marrying outside the Christian faith. If religious endogamy were the only problem with Islam, I would at least understand, even if I think that Islam is fundamentally false.
Then again, I don't watch much TV either, except for news, documentaries, and the occasional movie. Sometimes I watch something in one of my other languages in order to keep up.
But, it seems to me that the episode mentioned above reflects the fundamental stupidity of American liberalism. Back when I was a kid, most people in my parents' and older sibs' generations (I am the youngest of five) took it for granted that when someone married a Roman Catholic, the other person would either convert to Rome or agree to raise the children as RC. They all remembered the pre-Vatican II days, when the Council of Trent still guided Rome. And these were people who identified themselves as either Jewish, Protestant, or "other". It never occurred to them that people converted out of the RC Church--even to it being something of a shock when they learned that the Presbyterian minister who baptized my younger son was raised RC.
Now, Islam is somehow the hard-nosed religion that always gets a pass from the media and powers-that-be. But the worst of it all is that being utterly ignorant of theology of any stripe, the media producers, politicos, and socially graceful refuse to accept that Islam is the traditional religion where you can't call a mass murdered a hypocrite.
Under the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights, Muslims have every right to believe in Islam, but they do not have the right to enforce Sharia law on anyone (yet). Obama has no right to favor Islam with his tax-payer outreach to the Muslim world by giving them missile technology from NASA, illegally (without Congressional approval) sending troops to Libya and other countries to establish Islamic democracies (Islamic constitution equals Sharia law), or to fund global jihad through financial aid to countries like Pakistan. Obama and his appointees have no right to turn U.S. Governmental agencies Sharia-compliant socialistic entities which favor Muslims and redistribute the wealth of non-Muslims. All of these actions need to be reversed and our Constitution shored up. We need laws making the enforcement of Sharia law, officially or unofficially, a crime of sedition. And, we need to hold President Obama and his appointees accountable for their illegal activity in subverting the Constitution.
From the Jihadwatch archives.
'Fitzgerald: Muslims and America".
http://www.jihadwatch.org/2008/08/fitzgerald-muslims-and-america.html
Introduction:
"We have a message: Muslim Americans are as American as apple pie” – from this article in The Guardian about Muslims at the Democratic National Convention in Denver.
'If Muslims are "as American as apple pie," are they as American as pumpkin pie, the pumpkin pie traditionally served at Thanksgiving, which like Independence Day, Memorial Day, and other national holidays, are not to be observed by observant Muslims, for only Muslim holidays, Muslim history, Muslim everything, counts?
'And one more question. If Muslims have no trouble at all being "as American as apple pie" then surely they have no trouble viewing the defining document of the American polity, the Constitution of the United States, as worthy of their complete loyalty.
' And that includes, of course, the guarantees of individual rights in the Bill of Rights.
'And since the Bill of Rights is so very close, in so many of its key provisions -- freedom of speech, freedom of conscience (which naturally includes the right to apostatize) -- to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, can we conclude that American-as-apple-pie American Muslims find it puzzling that all of the Muslim countries (save for the Shah's Iran, and most temporarily and temporizingly) have failed to subscribe to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and instead have concocted a Muslim version, the so-called Cairo Declaration, which in every essential respect, involving individual rights, fatally vitiates the original, Universal Declaration?...".
Read the rest, everyone who joined this forum later than the posting of that article by Hugh on 29 August 2008.
It's well worth reading, and it is the perfect riposte to the program "All-American Muslim".
Also of interest.
"Ten Questions For The Muslim Next Door".
http://revuse.wetpaint.com/page/Ten+Questions+for+the+Muslim+Next+Door?t=anon
I am an American Muslim and I celebrate 4th of July, thanksgiving, memorial day ect...when was the last time you saw an american muslim killed for converting to another religion? or when was the last time you herd of an american muslim getting his hands cut off for stealing...you just are focus on the old negetive laws that are not even being practice anymore especially here in America..I personally think that other religions are threaten by Islam because they know that most of the things they do, what they call FUN..it is also forbidden in there religion...one example almost all religions forbid drinking, so why claim a religion if your not going to follow it...we muslim are one of the oldest religions that are still trying to follow as much as our religion as possible but we are also human and we are not perfect...My grandmother is a catholic and she is 90 yrs old and she dresses modest long skirt..scarf over her head..even she tells me, what is the big deal of how you dress, thats the way we use to dress in my days, long skirt, long sleeve shirts and a scarf..but then the mini skirt came and it all went down from there, woman have been degraded since. so don't judge just because you want to continue your currupted ways...