Don’t take it personal, Tom, it just made for a good title.
But this article I found quite entertaining. A film about moderate Muslims was given the kabash(sp?) by PBS. Their reasons vary depending on who’s doing the explaining. They do admit, however, to showing a portion of the film to people from The Nation of Islam, who then threatened legal action if it aired. The result: it won’t air.
I, for one, have complained how moderate Islam has been much to silent and invisible. Many on these boards have assured me that the voices are much more numerous than I perceive. This film appears to be a point of view that we would both welcome. But the Nation of Islam has decreed it shall not be seen. And the PC folks at PBS fall in line.
So, who is the real asshat here: the Nation of Islam for silencing a voice of moderation (and putting to rest once and for all the question of thier position on the continuum? Or PBS, for both abandoning journalistic ethics and kowtowing to The Nation of Islam?
If this is what it looks like, its utter nonsense. The Nation of Islam is Farrakhan’s outfit, formerly the Black Muslims, and hasn’t the slightest resemblance to any genuine Islamic faith.
“Kibosh”. [In preview: um, as Contrapuntal said.] And strictly speaking, you don’t “give” something the kibosh, you “put the kibosh on” something.
That’s not necessarily “the result” of NOI involvement. As you yourself noted, the article lists a number of varying explanations for the PBS affiliate’s decision to drop Burke’s documentary from the Crossroads series.
And I join elucidator [in preview: and pretty much every other poster so far] in puzzlement about why on earth Burke chose to include the African-American organization Nation of Islam in a documentary about moderate vs. radical Muslims. AFAICT, Muslims generally regard Nation of Islam pretty much the way Jews generally regard Jews for Jesus: as a political movement deliberately co-opting their religious tradition for propaganda purposes (including in NOI’s case advocacy of racial separatism in America, which has jack-diddly to do with actual Muslim theology).
Is there a debate hidden in the OP, somewhere? I suspect that this belongs in Cafe Society or IMHO, but I’ll ponder a bit before I move it. (I should simply close it: the OP tries to use kibosh without even bothering to find out how to spell it and then confuses the NoI with Islam, so the thread has started off with two strikes against it–or maybe a safety (swiching sport metaphors) given that they are self-inflicted.)
Well, to be fair, it is hard to look up the spelling of a word if you don’t already know how to spell it. And the confusion between NoI and Islam seems to have originated with the makers of the documentary themselves.
Actually, the linked story presents three separate claims regarding whether the show was unready or suppressed, giving totally different reasons for the purported suppression that do not have even tangential relationships. Trying to score some political point by pretending that there is even enough information about the conflict to make a good guess what went wrong, and then linking it to a totally separate claim that is not supported by any of the three scenarios in the story is beyond silly.
Well, there’s the journalistic ethics debate. For one, should PBS have shared the one frame (and then the segment) with another group—the group that was the subject of the documentary. This action seems highly unprofessional to me.
Next, to what degree is Islam divorced from the NoI? Evidently, the document addresses this issue as the document is about moderate voices and addresses the NoI.
Assuming Islam and the NoI have jack-shit to do with each other, why did a representative of PBS conflate the two? Is it one person confused? One person with some agenda? Is either answer indicative of the opinions of PBS?
We probably don’t have enough info to debate the thrid point, but the other two seem ripe. Now you can—against the intent of the OP—move this and quash any debate that might be there, but the fairer thing to do would be to send it to the NoI and PBS first.
What political point do you think I am trying to make? Please be specific.
I don’t know what specific point you were trying to make, but by specifying “liberal media” in your title, it sure sounded like you were trying to make some sort of a political point.
Um, it’s evident not only from your own link but from the excerpt that you quoted from your own link in your own OP that it wasn’t a PBS representative who conflated Islam with NoI.
It was the documentary makers themselves who did that, by choosing to include NoI in a documentary allegedly about Muslims.
Thanks, Dio, you had me puzzled there for a minute!
By the way, I did a little research into the Islam/NoI business in the Burke documentary, since the OP apparently couldn’t be arsed to find out what was actually going on in the work he chose to debate about. Here’s what co-producer Frank Gaffney had to say about it in an interview:
So the claim is not that NoI are orthodox Muslims (so I withdraw the “conflating” comment), but that the radical-extremist Muslim Wahhabi sect is trying to lure the NoI into radical-extremist Islam by providing them with funding.
True, but I was referring to the PBS representative’s decision to show it to the NoI. If the point of the film was the NoI, then no conflation on her part. But since it wasn’t (as far as we can tell) it seems that she, at least, made the same mistake. Now, even if she was concerned about just that one portion of the film, why show it to NoI anyway? Granted, if this were the case she might not have conflated anything, but the ethics question stands.
Fine. Then think about what you really believe is an ethics question, get your facts straight, and present a new thread that lays out an actual discussion rather than throwing enough stuff at a wall and hoping that your audience will define an actual debate for you.
