‘America at a Crossroads’ is a CPB (Corporation for Public Broadcasting) funded series of eleven documentaries that begins airing on your local PBS affiliate starting next week. Looking over the Los Angeles Times staff writer Matea Gold’s review in today’s Calendar section, I’m finding a few mixed messages, but lots of liberal bias, not to mention that I’m not finding something that should be the REAL STORY concerning this series — the missing film, “Islam vs. Islamism: Voices From The Muslim Center” by Martyn Burke, Frank Gaffney and Alex Alexiev of ABG Films, Inc.

I first heard about this series and the film, “Islam vs. Islamism: Voices From The Muslim Center”, on Hugh Hewitt’s show April 4th. Frank Gaffney, who with his associates at the Center For Security Policy had made the film, was explaining to Hugh how politicized the process was at CPB, PBS and WETA and how the film, all paid for and ready to air, will not see the light of day — at least not on PBS.

Here’s a short segment with Gaffney confronting PBS’s Robin MacNeil on the Diane Rehm show.

DR: Frank Gaffney, you’re on the air.

FG: Good morning, Diane, and good morning, Robin. We are among a small team of filmmakers who had a film selected for the Crossroads series, and unfortunately, apparently, those who have been responsible for making the final decisions on it found our treatment of moderate Muslims, anti-Islamist Muslims, in the face of the efforts by Islamist Muslims to suppress them, in America, in Canada, and in Europe, to be too hot to handle, and insisted on dramatic changes that would have really gut the film and its content and its message. The film has been suppressed, in short, by PBS at the moment.

DR: Suppressed, Robin?

RM: Which film is that?

FG: This is a film called Islam Vs. Islamist.

RM: Yes, I’m very familiar with it, and I can answer the charge. It is not been suppressed. It has been, it was rejected for the twelve because it was considered highly one-sided in its approach to, and alarmist in its approach to exactly what the woman in Texas was just saying.

Not only was it not selected — actually it was going to be scheduled and after being deep-sixed by the PBS cognoscenti another film was hurriedly commissioned to take its place — a film that would show the radical Muslims in America in a much better light. More on that in a minute. Back to Hugh’s show and more Gaffney reaction:

HH: Well, Frank Gaffney, alarmist and one-sided about the war against the Islamist jihadists. I guess that’s a charge to which you’ll cop?

FG: Well, actually, I won’t.

HH: I know. Go ahead, it’s a set up.

FG: No, we went to great lengths, under enormous pressure from PBS, to dumb down this film to keep it from being hyperbolic, let alone alarmist. The thing that comes across, though, Hugh, if Americans can actually see this film as opposed to having it be censored by PBS, is that it is alarming what these anti-Islamist Muslims are telling us. They’re alarmed. They’re frightened, not only for their own lives, which are in many cases literally at risk, but for what they see happening to Western societies where these Islamists are insinuating themselves and creating what they call parallel societies. And perhaps your audience is aware of this unbelievable ruling by a German judge, one of the countries under assault from the Islamists just a weekend or two ago, in which she found that a Muslim woman could not divorce her Muslim husband because he was beating her, on the grounds that the Koran permits him to beat her, a prime example of the parallel society that we’re chronicling in this film, and that we think the American people are entitled…they paid for it, they’re entitled to see it.

Can’t let the free Western world get a true understanding of what the Dhimmis and the multi-culteralists are up to, can’t make any dispersions against radical Islam — that’s taking a side against a religion, which is only allowed to happen against Jews and Christians, not against Muslims. Maybe it was that “Voices From The Muslim Center” part of the title that got these guys in hot water at CPB? Maybe!

HH: Voices from the Muslim center.

FG: And it is ready to go. It is a powerful film, not because, again, of hot, you know, narration or music, but because of the power of the stories told by these anti-Islamist Muslims themselves.

HH: Now Martin Burke, whom you partnered with in producing this, and I want again make clear, even though you’re with the Center For Security Policy, it is not a Center For Security Policy film, and you are not working on it as in your capacity of Center For Security Policy. But Martin Burke is an experienced filmmaker?

FG: He is quite accomplished. He has done a number of feature films, documentaries and others, and has been keenly following this story, actually going back to twenty years ago when he made a documentary about the Wahabis and the Islamists and the Soviets and the evolving story in Afghanistan.

Sounds like some real bonifides there for making a film of this nature. But, just wait until you read the rest of this to see just how far the CPB, PBS and WETA went to gut it, before just tossing it aside.

HH: All right, www.securefreedom.org, also producer, along with Martin Burke, of a new film, Islam Vs. Islamist: Voices From The Muslim Center, originally funded by, well, funded completely by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, meaning your money, pursuant to a competition to bring new voices about crucial issues to the screen. And Frank, how did that actually happen?

FG: Well, it was a very exciting idea. About two, two and a half years ago, the CPB, as it calls itself, put out requests for proposals from 440 filmmakers, came up with ideas. We, working with Martin Burke, my other colleague, Alex Alexiev, helped put together the proposal. It was 35 out of 440 that was deemed meritorious enough to get a research and development grant. It was then down selected further, to be just one of twenty films that received a very substantial grant to actually make the movie. And at every step along the way, there was a rigorous competition, there was an opportunity for, you know, other films to go head to head with ours. And in each of these instances, with the help of a very distinguished board of advisors that CPB commissioned, ours was selected, because the story of these anti-Islamist Muslims, these endangered species, was recognized to be so compelling and so powerful, and the filmmaking of Martin Burke so, well, high quality, that we were given the go ahead. And in fact, the CPB at one point said we were going to be one of eight films. It’s now turned out to be one of eleven films that were going to be rolled out on the 15th of April, coming up very shortly. In fact, Robin MacNeil was on the Diane Rehm show, you played that tape earlier, for the purpose of promoting this series of films. Unfortunately, ours is not going to be one of them, as he said, in his own words, because it is alarmist, and extremely one-sided. And I just plead with Pat Harrison, a wonderful woman who runs the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and who has been very helpful to us to this point, to help allow us to have the opportunity to show this film on another network, since PBS is not going to do it, as soon as possible, because frankly, it’s very timely.

American people need to know about it, and I think frankly, they need to know about it more than they need to know about Robin MacNeil’s vision of Muslims in America, which it turns out, according to his website, he, by the way, got a film as part of this series when he became the moderator, that was not selected as part of the competition. It wasn’t even submitted as part of the competition. It was one of a number of examples, Hugh, of instances in which it appears that the people at PBS were so determined to keep our film from being shown, that they actually commissioned another film outside of the competition to cover some of the same subject matter. But interestingly enough, according to Robin MacNeil, the Muslims in America are the Muslims of the Muslim Student Association, a very well known Wahabi front organization, credited with recruiting terrorists on American college campuses. And that’s the subject of his film, his vision of American Muslims, as opposed to the anti-Islamist Muslims that are featured in ours. And that’s the man who’s deciding, it appears, at least in league with others, deciding as to which of the films is one-sided, or alarmist. And I’m afraid…

Did you get that? Burke and Gaffney’s film just didn’t suit the preconceived notions of the PBS liberal elite — thy would rather that you hear what the radical Muslim groups in America are saying, not the anti-Islamist Muslims. That makes no sense to me at all. Of course the mind of modern Leftists makes no sense to me at all, either.

HH: Now Frank Gaffney, I want to make sure everyone understands, this was not some out of left field, or right field whack-job propaganda piece. This went through the whole PBS process, and at the very last minute, they said nah, we’re not going to show it, because we don’t like the message. I must say, that is extraordinarily offensive to any 1st Amendment-minded…it might be technically acceptable under PBS guidelines, but it just offends the idea of those of us who deal in the world of ideas every day.

FG: Well, I’m hoping that the larger story will come out here, Hugh, because if you are as minded as I know you are, and I’m sure most of your audience are, there will be much to find offense with here, not least of which was, if you can believe it, after those advisors who helped vet these films in a very high quality way from CPB’s point of view, PBS became responsible, with WETA, their flagship station in Washington, for the film. And at that point, our problems grew enormously. And importantly, they hired as advisors five people, one of whom was a publicly acknowledged, in fact, avowed admirer of Louis Farrakhan of the Nation of Islam. And it happens that one of the features of our film is an insight into how the Wahabis started buying the Nation of Islam with $1 million dollars to build black Wahabi mosques in America. This woman not only was completely inappropriate for advising on a film, had an obvious conflict of interest, but much worse, she took our film in the rough cut form, and showed it to the Nation of Islam. And the WETA people, and the PBS people, found nothing wrong with that at all.

I’m, I’m at a loss for words about that last graph, at least at a loss of words that I allow on this blog. Your tax dollars support the CPB and PBS. This is what you get for your money.

Now — finally — bringing the title of this post into the story. The LA Times’ Matea Gold writes about the remaining eleven films, from a standpoint that the CPB has finally found its way back from the brink of radical Conservatism — which had been foisted upon it by the Bush administration.

“America at a Crossroads” did not get off to an auspicious start. From the beginning, the ambitious $20-million effort to examine the complexities of the post-Sept. 11 world through a series of documentaries — an initiative of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the private nonprofit that distributes federal funds to public television and radio — was greeted with skepticism.

Independent producers and local station programmers, alarmed that CPB officials at the time were agitating for more conservatives on the air, feared the venture was driven by a political agenda. Tensions flared publicly at a March 2004 forum in Manhattan, where hostile audience members exchanged angry accusations with a panel assembled to discuss the project.

“This whole thing stinks,” declared an employee of the National Black Programming Consortium.

Since then, tempers have cooled substantially.

The 11-part “Crossroads” series that will air in prime time next week on PBS has received largely positive reviews in the public broadcasting community, including from many station executives initially wary of it.

God forbid that the American public actually have a dialog about what has happened to us and the rest of the world since 9/11. Especially in light of the emergence of radical Islam as a world-wide threat — might make universal health care and global warming seem insignificant — and good little Leftists can’t have anything like that.

“I would not have said this was my first choice for where we should have put our efforts,” said Ron Pisaneschi, director of broadcasting at Idaho Public Television. “We have limited amounts of funds at our disposal and we have a lot of different things we could spend it on. But at the end of the day, I think we have 11 documentaries that are pretty darn strong.”

Three years in the making, “Crossroads” serves as a measure of how much public broadcasting has succeeded in moving past the political tumult that recently gripped it.

“I think the system is working together very strongly now,” said Greg Diefenbach, CPB’s new senior vice president of television programming. “This series evidences that public broadcasting is alive and well.”

Evidence that the Left is firmly back in control of Public Broadcasting!

Since then, public broadcasting officials have worked to rid “Crossroads” of any political taint. Washington public television station WETA took over production last year and brought in veteran PBS journalist Robert MacNeil to host it.

“I was intrigued by it,” MacNeil said. “What better can public broadcasters do than steer the dialogue and ask some serious questions?”

Uh, go back up and read Gaffney’s remarks again. I don’t think that WETA’s involvement and MacNeil’s hosting, not to mention his own non-contest film being part of the eleven, does anything to “rid” the series “of any political taint.” In fact, it has done the exact opposite.

PBS officials said the 11 documentaries being shown next week — culled from more than 400 proposals — would expose the work of filmmakers new to PBS and would showcase perspectives not often given a broad platform.

Just not the views of America’s anti-Islamist Muslims — the platform wasn’t broad enough for that!

So, there you have it, folks. Once again the LA Times misses, or ignores because of left-leaning bias, the real story behind a story. If the Times really wanted to report about “America at a Crossroads”, what they should have done was tell us about the “one that got away”. Funny, that wasn’t even mentioned today — and we all paid for it!

Don’t ya just love paying for something and not getting it? I didn’t think so . . .

This entry was posted on Monday, April 9th, 2007 at 1:20 pm and is filed under A Post 9/11 World, Dhimmitude, Radical Islam. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.  |   Print This Post  |   Email This Post

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