“I’m waiting for a Muslim ‘All in the Family.’ Muslims are never going to feel like a part of the American family until people start to make fun of them on TV. That’s how minds have always been changed in this country.” Really? Can he give us a single other example of a group that started “to feel like a part of the American family” when people started “to make fun of them on TV”?
This is just another spurious claim of Muslim victimhood from someone who has made a tidy living in the Muslims-Are-Victims industry, Reza Aslan. And it is more muddled thinking from a spectacularly muddled thinker. Which marginalized group began to “feel like a part of the American family” because they were made fun of “All in the Family”? Right-wing racist bigots? Polish hippies who were dubbed “Meathead” by their fathers-in-law? Aslan here probably means not “All in the Family,” but something like “The Cosby Show,” which has been invoked before in the same way: Katie Couric said a few years ago that we need a Muslim “Cosby Show,” i.e., a TV show that shows Muslims as just ordinary folks, and this will supposedly melt away the alleged prejudice that Americans have toward them.
The fallacy of that reasoning lies in the fact that when “The Cosby Show” aired, there were no international black terror groups mounting terror attacks in the U.S. and around the world, and boasting of their imminent conquest of the U.S. The suspicion that Americans have of Islam comes from jihad terror and Islamic supremacism, not from racism and bigotry, and Americans know this distinction, despite the best efforts of people like Reza Aslan to obscure it and make people feel guilty for opposing jihad terror. Some slick TV show depicting funny, warm, attractive, cuddly Muslims would not end jihad terror, or blunt concern about it — it would only serve to further the idea that resisting jihad violence was somehow “bigoted.”
This is not the first time Aslan has revealed his abject intellectual vacuity. He regularly makes howling errors of fact, including his ridiculous claim that the idea of resurrection “simply doesn’t exist in Judaism,” despite numerous passages to the contrary in the Hebrew Scriptures. He has also referred to “the reincarnation, which Christianity talks about” — although he later claimed that one was a “typo.” In yet another howler he later insisted was a “typo,” he claimed that the Biblical story of Noah was barely four verses long — which he then corrected to forty, but that was wrong again, as it is 89 verses long. Aslan claimed that the “founding philosophy of the Jesuits” was “the preferential option for the poor,” when in reality, that phrase wasn’t even coined until 1968. He called Turkey the second most populous Muslim country, when it is actually the eighth most populous Muslim country. He thinks Pope Pius XI, who issued the anti-fascist encyclical Mit Brennender Sorge, was a fascist. He thinks Marx and Freud “gave birth to the Enlightenment,” when it ended in the late 18th century, before either of them were born. He claims that “the very first thing that Muhammad did was outlaw slavery,” when in fact Muhammad bought slaves, took female captives as sex slaves, and owned slaves until his death. He thinks Ethiopia and Eritrea are in Central Africa.
A “renowned religious scholar” such as Reza Aslan should not make such elementary mistakes. But this is, of course, the man who writes “than” for “then”; apparently thinks the Latin word “et” is an abbreviation; and writes “clown’s” for “clowns.” Aslan is less a “religious scholar” than he is a marginally literate, unevenly educated charlatan with a talent for telling the mainstream media what it wants to hear. He would be great to play Meathead on the new Muslim “All in the Family.”
“‘Rough Draft’s’ Reza Aslan wants to see a Muslim ‘All in the Family,'” by Libby Hill, Los Angeles Times, January 6, 2016:
Reza Aslan is like family.
That’s what legendary television writer and producer Norman Lear (“All in the Family,” “The Jeffersons”) assures the room at the Television Critics Assn. winter media tour Tuesday in Pasadena: “Spend three minutes with him and you’ll love him.”
Oh yes, Reza Aslan is an absolute sweetheart.
Lear is the first guest on Aslan’s new Ovation talk show “Rough Draft With Reza Aslan,” which features the author and religious scholar hosting writers of every stripe — film, television, music or literature, as well as an accompanying musical guest, an audience in the round, and a dash of alcohol, in the hopes of loosening tongues….
“This started because producer David Andreone and I are huge fans of ‘Inside the Actor’s Studio’ but wanted to do that with writers and a live band and everyone’s drunk,” Aslan says of the impetus for the series, going on to clarify that the show originally took place in Silver Lake but interest grew so high that he was determined to begin taping it to reach a broader audience….
“Television is where I learned what America was,” Aslan, an Iranian immigrant, says. “I learned English from ‘CHiPS,’ from ‘Sesame Street.’ I watched so much ‘CHiPS’ that I thought cars flipped over on ramps on the freeway every day.”…
As for family, Aslan is most anxious for Muslims to finally break through the ultimate television glass ceiling.
“I’m waiting for a Muslim ‘All in the Family.’ Muslims are never going to feel like a part of the American family until people start to make fun of them on TV. That’s how minds have always been changed in this country.”
Invite me on your show, Reza, and I will make fun of you all you want.