Agent Jack Bauer will now battle “Muslim terrorists.” (Photo by Anthony Mandler)

By Adam Wild Aba, IOL Correspondent

WASHINGTON, January 10 (IslamOnline.net) – The Fox network premiered on Sunday, January 10, the first episode of the action drama “24”, which in its fourth season features “Muslim terrorists” plotting attacks inside the US.

It portrays a Walkman-toting, bubble-gum-chewing Muslim teenager fighting with his conservative father about dating an American girl and talking on the phone, in a disguised effort to conceal their true “terrorist” nature.

The young man is also seen helping his parents mastermind a plot to kill as many Americans by launching an attack on a commuter train.

On the breakfast table, the father tells his young son: “What we will accomplish today will change the world. We are fortunate that our family has been chosen to do this.”

“Yes, father,” the son replies.

The US secretary of state is also seen taken hostage by the “Muslim terrorists.”

The drama climaxes with the defense secretary shown on an Internet video tape like those coming out of US-occupied Iraq.

The series, which earned an Emmy nomination for outstanding drama in each of its first three seasons, is named 24 because the action on the show occurs in “real-time.”

Each season covers the events of one day in the life of agent Jack Bauer and his colleagues at the Counter Terrorist Unit in Los Angeles.

Every episode in a season covers the events of one hour in that day (hence 24 episodes per season).

The drama is produced by the Fox Broadcasting Company, a television network owned by Fox Entertainment Group, part of billionaire Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation.

News Corporation is one of the world's largest and most influential media corporations whose production of motion pictures and television programming are broadcast in 35 television networks in the US.

Murdoch is generally regarded as the most politically influential media proprietor in the world, and is regularly courted by politicians in the United States, Britain and Australia, according to the Wikipedia encyclopedia.

Muslim Anger

The Washington-based Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) had on December 30, hit out at the new drama.

“The way the episode depicts Muslims creates an atmosphere in which many
Americans look at all Muslims as suspects in the war on terror. It's very dangerous and very disturbing,” said CAIR spokeswoman Rabiah Ahmed.

“They are taking everyday American Muslim families and making them suspects;
they're making it seem like families are co-conspirators in this terrorist
plot,” she added.

A recent nation-wide poll, conducted by the Cornell University, showed that at least 44 percent of the Americans backs curbing Muslims’ civil rights and monitoring their places of worship.

A May 2004 report released by the US Senate Office Of Research concluded that Arab Americans and the Muslim community in the US have taken the brunt of the Patriot Act and other federal powers applied in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks.

Welcome

The drama was, however, hailed by Jewish groups and lobbyists as a bid to reveal Muslims' “true nature.”

Jewish writer Daniel Pipes wrote in the Israeli Jerusalem Post and the American New York Post hoping Fox would not bow to Muslim objections on the series.

Bypassing the Senate, US President George Bush appointed in 2003 Pipes to the board of the US Institute of Peace, a government-funded think-tank which concentrates on foreign policy.

As a frequent commentator, Pipes has warned that America's Muslims were the enemy within and called for unrestricted racial profiling and monitoring of Muslims in the military, wrote the Guardian.

He claimed Muslim American government employees in law enforcement, the military and the diplomatic corps “need to be watched for connections to terrorism.”

Pipes also alleged that “mosques require a scrutiny beyond that applied to churches and temples.”