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Entertainment Hits and Misses
By Ali Asadullah 11/12/2001
The Hit
The Practice, ABC, Sunday, 10 p.m.: For the past three months, Muslims have suffered through any number of special episodes of popular television programs that have chosen to draw upon the current crisis for themes and plotlines. Shows such as
The West Wing, Alias and The Agency have all either directly or indirectly dealt with terrorism, Islam, Muslims or all three at once. Unfortunately, these shows have, for the most part, not given the most accurate portrayal of Islam and Muslims.
Therefore kudos to ABC's The Practice, for tackling the delicate subject of the continuing dragnet of federal arrests and detention of individuals suspected of having even the most remote connection to the attacks of 9/11.
In the show's most recent episode, a woman approaches the spotlight law firm of Donnell, Young, Dole, & Frutt in the hopes that one of their attorneys can help her get some information on her husband who has been detained by federal authorities for weeks without contact with the outside world.
What ensues graphically exemplifies the futility of the efforts of many real-life lawyers in their attempts to represent Muslim, Arab and South Asian clients that the government has held without charges, in undisclosed locations, virtually
incommunicado.
The episode makes a strong statement against the paring back of civil rights and civil liberties, comments on what it means to be American and even hints at the possibility of the use of torture by federal and local authorities in the questioning of detainees. If only there could be more television like this.
The Miss
The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA): On Monday, news hit the wires that the NEA had decided to withhold a $60,000 grant from Pulitzer Prize winning playwright Tony Kushner that was to be used towards his latest production
Homebody/Kabul, which is scheduled for release in April 2002.
According to several news reports, Kushner, who won the Pulitzer and a Tony Award for Angels in America (about the AIDS crisis), has had a long-standing interest in Afghanistan that pre-dates by more than a decade the events of 9/11. Both fascinated by the culture and shocked by the ravages of war and poverty there, Kushner took to writing a one-act play back in 1997, which eventually formed the basis for Homebody/Kabul.
In the full-length performance, Kushner, a philosophically left-leaning socialist, comments on the history of Afghanistan and the more recent road that led to the current crisis. Additionally, he is no fan of the Taliban, and according to the Associated Press AP he "was horrified by their fundamentalism, their misogyny, their brutality."
Therefore it is puzzling that the NEA would yank funding from the production. If he takes an anti-Taliban/anti-fundamentalism position and uses his play to champion things like women's rights in Afghanistan, one might assume that the NEA would be all too happy to help the play succeed.
A representative of the Berkeley Repertory Theater - the theater that would be the beneficiary of the grant - told the
Contra Costa Times Monday that she suspects that NEA had not actually read the play, but rather made its initial decision based on earlier summaries of the work.
This news is troubling because it suggests that the NEA is possibly screening for what the government might deem objectionable material. And in the current climate of fear, paranoia and apprehension towards Islam and Muslims, the NEA's decision could be symptomatic of a larger effort to silence voices that might be critical of government policy related to the war on terror.
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