Friday, April 20, 2007

How the Dinosaur media stifles moderate Muslim voices



Some of you may recall that I did a piece on how PBS silences moderate Muslims and canceled a documentary on Islamic extremism for political reasons.

One of the moderate and patriotic Muslim highlighted in that canceled documentary was Dr. Zuhdi Jasser of Phoenix, a navy veteran, a devout Muslim and founder of the American Islamic Forum for Democracy (AIFD), a non-profit organization of Muslim Americans who advocate patriotism, constitutional democracy and a separation of church and state and calls for Muslims to take an active role in combating Islamism and terrorism.

Today, Dr. Jasser has a piece that focuses on how the moderate voices of Islam are being deliberately stifled by political correctness and by Islamist influence within the dinosaur media and government. With courageous Muslim voices like his that refused to be silenced an dgive the lie to the notion that this is a `war against Islam', there's indeed hope for light at the end of the tunnel.

Here's a sample:

"As one of the subjects of the documentary, I was able to experience first-hand the professionalism and in-depth journalistic standards of veteran filmmaker, Martyn Burke, and his first-class team of consummate professionals. It was refreshing to have a documentary set out objectively to look into the deep-seated internal struggles of anti-Islamist Muslims like myself. Our work at the American Islamic Forum for Democracy (AIFD) here in Phoenix has been riddled with continual blowback and resistance in many forms from the power structure of the activist Muslim community in the Phoenix Valley. The Valley Council of Imams, the local Muslim Voice newspaper, and organizations like CAIR-AZ have provided a laboratory of typical Islamist responses to an American organization of Muslims, like AIFD, who are trying to rescue spiritual Islam from the death grip of Islamists--Islam vs. Islamists. I do this out of love for my faith and its spiritual path to the God of Abraham in order to free it from the corruption of the political imam which has become so ubiquitous.

I have previously discussed the harm of our government's enabling of Islamists (like CAIR, MPAC, MAS, MSA, or ISNA) in the United States and how the governmental endorsement of Islamists publicly empowers them and allows them to dodge their responsibility of countering Islamism as an ideology. This order of magnitude is greater in impact when it concerns the media's inability to wage the debate of the "struggle for the soul of Islam". Stories about Islam and Muslims have been more and more ubiquitous since 9-11 and now are actually commonplace. Yet, the actual debate within the Muslim community has barely begun. Where's the disconnect? Look no further than the Islamist enablers in the media.

When so many ask across the nation, "where are the moderate voices of Islam?", one cannot help lately but exclaim that they are being suffocated by misguided political correctness and by Islamist influence within mainstream media and government. The PBS censorship of the documentary, Islam vs. Islamists, highlights one of the best examples to date of the symbiosis of both government complicity and media complicity with the Islamist ideology."


Read it all here:

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