"Islam vs. Islamists" controversy

Have you heard about the flap over PBS spiking the documentary "Islam vs. Islamists," which sympathetically profiled pious Muslims who are fighting to protect their faith and their faith communities from Islamists? I screened a copy of the documentary last night, and I wish I could say I was shocked by what PBS did, but I'm not. Every American who has ever wondered, "Why won't the moderate Muslims speak up?" should see this documentary. It shows several incredibly brave Muslim leaders in the US, Canada and Europe who are speaking up, at great personal risk, to expose the double-talking Islamist imams and lay leaders among us for what they are. It gave me such hope to know that these men exist. How infuriating, then, that PBS is effectively protecting Islamist wolves in sheep's clothing by suppressing this excellent and important film. PBS reportedly had significant problems with alleged bias and alarmism in the film, but after having seen it, it's plain to me that the only people who could possibly make such a claim are the Islamists who are the film's targets -- and those carrying water for them.

One of the men profiled in the film, Dr. Zuhdi Jasser, an Arizona physician, writes a column about the issue here. Excerpt:

It is time for the MSM to stop protecting Muslims from one another and to stop stifling the debate many anti-Islamist Muslims would like to wage against leading Islamists. If Muslims are going to form a public expression of Islam which is reconciled with western democracies which separate religion and government, this debate against Islamism needs yet to begin, let alone blossom into cultural change for Muslims.

Islamists fear nothing more than credible and genuine debate against the core political ideology of Islamism from pious anti-Islamist Muslims. With an ideological counter from anti-Islamist Muslims- the Islamist emperor “has no clothes”. At every level, they are using America’s naïveté about Islam in order to continue their theft of Islam for the political agenda of Islamism. The Islamists know that anti-Islamist Muslims rob them of their minority trump card of Islamophobia and force them to come to terms with the anti-freedom, and anti-liberty and anti-pluralistic ideology of Islamism. Anti-Islamist, pro-Islamic Muslims expose the real motives of Islamists—which is the exploitation of the spiritual path of Islam for political and governmental power and coercion.

The MSM would prefer to facilitate the current Islamist organizations and Islamist imams. Why? It could be a fear of litigation, minority victim politics, or simple ignorance regarding the goals of Islamism. As in the case with PBS, it could also be the internal influence and infiltration of Islamists within the media and government who will go to great lengths to suffocate the opinions of anti-Islamists, especially anti-Islamist Muslims.

The PBS/CPB censorship of Islam vs. Islamists exemplifies the dire need to begin to educate many in the MSM of the ideological realities of the Islamists. They may protect Islamists blindly out of ignorance, fear, infiltration, or minority politics. But, at the end of the day, if the MSM editors understood the type of society the protected Islamists would create if they became a majority, their support would vanish.

It's hard for me to express how true and how important Dr. Jasser's words are. The US media, by and large, gives the leadership of the Muslim community in America largely uncritical treatment, and accepts their duplicitous words at face value. In "Islam vs. Islamists," we meet a French Muslim filmmaker living under government protection after having not once but twice gone undercover to document Islamist radicalism in Europe, including the "double discourse" of Islamists saying one thing to a non-Muslim audience, and quite another when talking to Muslims. I've seen a related phenomenon in person on several occasions, in which Islamist leaders mouth soothing banalities about peace, love and tolerance, but get angry when you point out contradictions between their self-serving rhetoric and the reality of what they believe and advocate. Watching the film last night, I gasped at the grainy clip of several women being stoned to death -- aired after an Islamist imam in Canada said that adulterers should be stoned to death. I've heard the very same thing come out of the mouth of a Dallas lay Islamic leader, twice. He's a smart and accomplished man, and very smooth -- yet to his credit, I guess, he's not ashamed of the barbarity of what he believes. At least he's honest about it. Anyway, as Dr. Jasser points out, the American news media is so intimidated by CAIR and other Islamist and shadow-Islamist organizations that they serve as the Islamists' useful dupes -- making it that much more difficult for voices like Dr. Jasser's to be heard.

To be perfectly honest, the film does not give any indication of how widespread the more liberal interpretation of Islam put forth by Dr. Jasser, Sufi Sheikh Hisham Kabbani and others is. One of them interviewed, can't remember who now, said that the great majority of US Muslims just want to get on with their lives, and reject the violence espoused by a radical fringe. But -- and this is important -- he said that their political views are based on an Islamist perspective, which blames America and the West for everything wrong in the worldwide Muslim community, and which wallows in conspiracy theories. And of course we learn about how Saudi oil money is behind so many of these American mosques and Islamic organizations, which are Wahhabi-izing American Muslim thinking.

The public is perfectly right to be suspicious of statements in the press by US Muslim leaders proclaiming their peaceableness and opposition to terrorism. Maybe they mean it. But more likely they're Islamist spinmeisters telling the media what they want to hear, knowing that if they're questioned closely, they can scream "Islamophobia!" and shut down the inquiry. I'd bet my paycheck that's exactly what's happened here, behind the scenes, with "Islam vs. Islamists."

Why would PBS want to marginalize progressive Muslim voices? What are we risking when the mainstream media ignores both progressive Muslims and the warning they bring us from within the American Muslim community? Dr. Jasser:

Borrowing on the old cliché of a tree falling in a forest, if Muslims speak out against Islamists but remain unheard (in the PBS forest), did they speak out at all? Without regular opportunities in the media and government for anti-Islamist Muslims to speak out, America will never know that they ever did. Without being heard the moderate voices will be as if they never existed. Without hearing the moderate voice, it is so much the easier for Islamists to continue toward their goal of political domination and demagoguery of the Muslim community and, ultimately, of America itself.

UPDATE: Larry Auster went to a public screening of the film in NYC last night, and came away troubled -- picking up on the same thing that left me unsatisfied about the otherwise excellent film. We are not given in the film any sense of how representative the moderate/progressive Muslims are of Islam as it is actually lived and practiced in the West and elsewhere. It's easy to be sympathetic to the Muslims featured in the film (I certainly am), but it seems to me also easy to fall for believing what we want to believe. Here's Auster:

More than ever it was evident that there are only two views of Islam that monopolize mainstream discourse. On one hand, there is the leftist, anti-Western view, institutionalized at PBS, which sees Muslims as culturally enriching victims of Western meanness whom we must embrace. And there is the "right," "pro-Western" (actually pro-modern secularism) view, which does criticize Islam--but the Islam it criticizes is this supposedly tiny and unrepresentative group of "Islamo-fascists," while it imagines that Islam itself is a nice, good thing that we must embrace. The left says Islam is good, period; the right says that apart from the tiny group of the "Islamists," who are dangerous but who are not real Muslims, Islam is good, period. This latter view of Islam so informs the minds of "conservatives" than even when they make a movie explicitly showing that the real power within Islam is jihadist and pro-sharia, they will interpret that movie as saying that moderate Muslims are the true Muslims.