Special Report on Islamophobia
November 2006: Islamophobia Infiltrates Mainstream American Media
November, 2006 seemed to signal a decisive and deeply troubling turning point in the infiltration of the most corrosive Islamophobic ideas into the mainstream American news media. For the first time, two major cable news channels, FoxNews and CNN Prime, adopted some of the worst excesses of this hate propaganda and presented it, without challenge, as their own output. The FoxNews channel ran an hour-long special called "Obsession" which was simply a re-cut version of the film of the same name that was made by the quasi-official Israel propaganda organization honestreporting.com. CNN Headline News' Glen Beck program countered with its own extended special "Exposed: the Extremist Agenda" which drew on many of the same clips and interviewed the many of the same "experts" as Obsession does. Beck's version did include a short interview with Asslam Abdullah at the end of his version, and did note that Beck is not a journalist and that his program did not present a balanced view of Islam. However, these qualifiers aside, the overall effect was undiluted. It has been reported that "Exposed: the Extremist Agenda," when first broadcast on November 15, 2006, was "rated the #1 show on all cable news in the 25-54 demographic."
These broadcasts, aired repeatedly in November, constitute the most dangerous development in anti-Muslim defamation in the past five years, painting as they do an amazingly misleading image of Arab and Muslim discourse and public opinion. These videos do a masterful job of knitting together some of the worst excesses over the past decade that have been aired on (usually obscure) Arab-language and Iranian television stations and the most extreme speeches of various fringe-element Muslims and radical clerics. Combined with horrifying testimonies by "experts" whose political motivations go totally unmentioned, and assurances that these clips represent the mainstream of Arab media, the unmistakable message to average Americans that all Muslims see it as their duty, as a matter of immutable creed, to wage violent "Jihad" against non-Muslims. The effect of these videos is to foment fear of Muslims among ordinary Americans, and to encourage the view that all or most Muslims are bombarded with indoctrination to the project of killing Americans, and that this has found widespread favor with them. It is asking a great deal of an American who knows little else about Muslims, Islam or the American Muslim community not to conclude from these videos that fear and suspicion are the appropriate attitudes towards Muslims, since "they all hate us."
In neither instance was any serious effort made to challenge the content of these blatant pieces of propaganda, to interview anyone with a professional or neutral expertise in the area of Arab media, or to recognize the political agenda of the organizations - MEMRI, honestreporting.com and Palestine Media Watch - from which the footage was culled. All three are Israeli operations, one with close ties to Israeli intelligence, one to the Israeli Foreign Ministry and the last with the Israeli settler movement.
