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For the first time in the US major TV media, an excellent report about Islam and the Muslims was aired Friday night, on the popular ABC News program 20/20!!.

Wow...I couldn't believe my eyes (and ears) how balanced that report was. Well done ABC!!!!!!

You can watch the entire report at this link. It has been broken into 6 segments, I guess for digital space limitations:

http://abcnews.go.com/2020

Watched the first three parts so far. Impressive, balanced and factual.

The second part tackles the issue of violence - and is very well done - but sort of ends abruptly. Pam Geller and Hirsi Ali make an appearance in part 3 about women - so the critics get a full airing.

Cheers,
Shafique

shafique wrote:The second part tackles the issue of violence - and is very well done - but sort of ends abruptly.

Thats what I thought too, was left hanging there, could be misleading as to there is really is no actual answer so lets just leave it at that.

A good show spoiled by leaving the main subject matter hanging out in the air.

It felt like they just cut it there - I expected to hear more on the subject.. as you say it is a pretty important subject to explore..

Cheers,
Shafique

Did she say there are 2 to 3 million American Muslims? According to Obama that is 7 million. Who is terribly wrong?

Enc. Brittanica had the number at over 4m in 2004 - so who knows? Perhaps ABC was just going with the lower range of the estimates available?

But I'm curious - why pick on this line in the piece when it hardly seems relevant to the message that the Islamophobic portrayal of Islam is just plain misinformation? The message applies even if there were only 100,000 American Muslims - doesn't it?

Cheers,
Shafique

Somebody needs a reason, any reason to pick an argument. for farksake even if it was just 1 !

Sweet Jesus! One would think that in a thread called US Media and Islam an arguable statement about the Muslim population in the US by the media would be a valid discussion point and wouldn't invoke some defensive remarks and some farking abusive language.

I'm sorry, I didn't see what was so 'excellent' about the report.

Despite the comments otherwise, no one was consulted to offer a different explanation for whether Islam condones violence.

In fact, it was just a regurgitation of the fluff pieces concerning Islam that have been parroted by the PC brigade for the past nine years.

Needless to say, people such as Robert Spencer have addressed and refuted these prior points over the years, but Spencer or anyone who could dare hold a contrary opinion other than the pre-approved script was unsurprisingly not consulted through the entirety of the clip.

Some errors I personally found in the clip, in Part 2 (the part I watched), vs 9:29 is quoted but the 'expert' provides his explanation for vs 9:5 by allegedly claiming the passage is quoted out of context (you can read a thread I posted a while ago debunking the standard 'taking out of context' line of defense Muslims and their apologists use, here: philosophy-dubai/you-quoted-out-context-debunked-t40700.html ).

Another gross oversight on the program's part was the presenter's failure to define what a so-called 'moderate' Muslim actually is, what they believe in and support. Is a moderate Muslim one who supports implementing Islamic law? Because al-Qaeda supports the establishment of an Islamic state. In fact, that's their end goal.

Is a moderate Muslim one who supports curbing Western freedom of speech as a preemptive measure to prevent Westerners from using their freedoms to satirize Islam? If the answer is yes, and I suspect the vast, vast majority of Muslims do indeed support legislation that I would consider 'Islamo-fascist', then in good conscience, I and most other Westerners could hardly believe that most Muslims are moderates or that Muslims deserve to be labeled as moderates when there is no such evidence for that claim.

The program was, unsurprisingly, another propaganda piece that only the naive will lap up. Hopefully the poster in the OP will take these questions into consideration the next time before he wants to win 'brownie points' from the Islamo-fascists on this forum.

As an aside, to prove my point, becoming a Muslim moderate is so easy in the mainstream media, all a Muslim need to do is not fully support the 9/11 attacks. And voila, you're instantly a moderate even if you mostly justify the attacks. No, I'm not making this up:

http://elderofziyon.blogspot.com/2008/0 ... slims.html

I've already had a number of posts on the book "Who Speaks for Islam?" as I (and others) have shows the duplicity of the authors as they try to downplay the number of radical Muslims in the world.

The authors defined the 7% of Muslims who considered the 9/11 attacks "completely justified" to be "politically radicalized" and they used the term "moderate" for the other 93%.

In a new article by Robert Satloff, he blows a few more holes into the book - but he also gets a hold of the all-important data: how many Muslims mostly or partially justified 9/11?

The answers are not quite as comforting as the authors implied. In addition to the 6.5% who felt that 9/11 was "mostly" justified, we find out:

The cover-up is even worse. The full data from the 9/11 question show that, in addition to the 13.5 percent, there is another 23.1 percent of respondents -- 300 million Muslims -- who told pollsters the attacks were in some way justified. Esposito and Mogahed don't utter a word about the vast sea of intolerance in which the radicals operate.

And then there is the more fundamental fraud of using the 9/11 question as the measure of "who is a radical." Amazing as it sounds, according to Esposito and Mogahed, the proper term for a Muslim who hates America, wants to impose Sharia law, supports suicide bombing, and opposes equal rights for women but does not "completely" justify 9/11 is . . . "moderate."

So over one out of every three Muslims worldwide, 36.6%, can find some justification for 9/11; and about 80% of those were defined as "moderate" in this book.

Which means that there are nearly a half-billion Muslims worldwide who would be considered supporters of terror by any reasonable definition, not "only" the 91 million that the authors claim.

This is consistent with other polls over the same time period, notably the Pew Global Attitudes Project which has found declining but still significant support for suicide bombings among Muslims in various countries - 70% in Palestinian Arab territories, 31% in Lebanon, "only" 8% in Egypt.

The entire thrust of the book - that Muslims are just like everyone else - is shown to not only be inaccurate but to be a deliberate lie on the part of the authors.

No surprise that eh's loon blogger friend disagrees - just another example of guys who admit to not actually having read the whole Quran passing themselves off as experts.

You can lead a horse to water..

Cheers,
Shafique

Change subject.

Never read Koran.

Loon blogger friend.

Crusades.

Timothy McVeigh.

blah blah blah blah blah.

Wow, you almost wrote a complete sentence there.

You don't really expect people to take elder of zyion's blog posts seriously do you? Next you'll be telling us you believe Fox News is reliable... oh, wait - you do believe that don't you!

Cheers,
Shafique

event horizon wrote:I'm sorry, I didn't see what was so 'excellent' about the report.

I thought the report was excellent in the sense that it was balanced (a rarity in the US major media).

I thought that they had presented both sides pretty well!!!!

I was going to actually going to read what Eh wrote for a change to see what fault he could find with 20/20 but right there in the third sentence I read the magic word Spencer. Instant indication that the rest is just going to be crap and time to move along.

Word of advice : If you ever want to be taken seriously, a few things you need to get rid of, Spencer, geller, Fox, Beck and Palin & Co. No ones ever going to listen to you unless you form your own opinions instead of recycling clown opinion.