IBD: PBS' Homage To Islamism

Tue, Apr 24, 2007 at 9:02:39 am PDT

Investor’s Business Daily is one of the very few mainstream media outlets that doesn’t shy away from honest discussion of the Islamist threat, and here’s another example in an editorial about PBS’ ridiculously whitewashed documentaries on Islam in America: PBS’ Homage To Islamism.

PBS just aired a “documentary” intended to chronicle “the diversity of Muslim life in America.” So why does it give so much face time to anti-American Islamists?

Secular Muslims who want to reform Islam are nowhere to be found in producer Robert MacNeil’s film, “The Muslim Americans,” part of a PBS series called “America at a Crossroads.” Instead, extremists masquerading as moderates are lionized.

Take Sheik Hamza Yusuf, who has a starring role. According to MacNeil, the California imam preaches “tolerance” and “peace,” and even hiply incorporates the “Super Bowl” into his sermons. This, we are told, is the progressive face of Islam in America.

To prove Yusuf’s bona fides as a moderate and a patriot, MacNeil notes that he was one of the Muslim clerics invited to the White House after 9/11. But he leaves out the fact that just two days before the attacks, the same imam suggested in a speech to Muslims that America deserved severe punishment.

“This country is facing a terrible fate,” Yusuf said in California on Sept. 9, 2001. “The reason for that is that this country stands condemned like Europe stood condemned because of what it did. And lest people forget that Europe suffered two world wars after conquering the Muslim lands, Europe’s countries were devastated, they were completely destroyed. Their young people killed.”

(Hat tip: LGF readers.)