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The Hits
Adama Ndiaye: Every March, the college basketball national championship tournament produces any number of exciting plays and fantastic finishes. But beyond the games themselves are the players; and every March, viewers are introduced to wonderful, neat personal interest tidbits about the players.
For Muslim basketball enthusiasts, the player of the tournament this year just might be Adama Ndiaye. The six-foot nine-inch forward for the Gauchos of the University of California Santa Barbara is truly a standout – on the basketball court and, more importantly off the court.
As an athlete, Ndiaye is known for his powerful inside play. Weighing in at 235 pounds, it is easy to see how he could have an influence over his competitors. Additionally, he has become a much feared shot-blocker and produces well offensively.
However, outside of basketball, Ndiaye is just the kind of person Muslims look for in athletic role models. A native of Dakar, Senegal, Ndiaye speaks four languages: Wolof, French, Spanish and English. Add to that list Arabic, which he writes, and you have quite the linguist.
Ndiaye graduated from high school as a member of the National Honors Society with an overall grade point average of 3.75. At Santa Barbara he has continued his academic excellence completing a tough 60 units of work in his junior year alone. At his current pace he should have quite a bright future ahead of him. Keep an eye on this one.
MTV’s “Wasted”: Despite all the garbage MTV lets loose on the public, the network has to be recognized for some of the good it does. For instance, shortly after 9/11, MTV began running anti-racism/anti-hate crime public service announcements in an effort to raise awareness of the negative impact 9/11 backlash had on Muslims. That campaign, which continues on the network, gets a solid two-thumbs-up.
Most recently though, MTV aired a shockingly realistic portrayal of the personal devastation of heroine use. The drama, entitled Wasted, tells the story of three high school students whose curiosity with the drug leads to a full-blown addiction that leaves one student dead and the two others with tragically altered lives.
The inspiration for the drama came from the true-life tragedy that hit the youth population in Plano, TX in the mid to late 1990s. During that period, heroine became the drug of choice amongst teens in Plano, resulting in a rash of overdose deaths that left many communities there devastated.
Wasted takes a no-holds-barred approach to examining the horrors of drug addiction and effectively strips away the facade of glamour that so-called “heroine chic” brought to the drug in the early 1990s via the rock and fashion industries. Additionally, the film shows how otherwise normal, upright kids can ruin their lives with one foolish, impulsive experiment. The show will be rebroadcast; however Muslims are warned that it is quite strong material and often times somewhat offensive by Muslim standards.
The Miss
The American Embassy, Fox 9 p.m. Mondays: Watching this show, one gets the impression that working at a U.S. embassy is just one non-stop thrill ride, complete with bomb threats, intrigue, office politics, steamy romances, flings with the locals and lots and lots of partying on the town. The truth of the matter is that embassy work is, like so many other professions, full of mundane, mind-numbing busy work that makes lawyering look exciting. But then again, this is the Fox network, where even the life of a school teacher can be high drama.
The American Embassy follows the trials and travails of Emma Brody, a newcomer to the U.S. Embassy in London. Feeling like a stranger in a strange land, Brody spends many an evening writing home to her sister, and it is from these letters that she narrates the show.
In the first episode, which aired last week, the embassy was struck by a terrorist attack in the form of a car bomb. Guess who the suspects are? Muslims, of course. Considering that is how the show was introduced to the public, it is probably a safe bet that Islam and Muslims will play a major role in the show’s storylines in the future.
This week, the show was an hour-long whodunit, in which embassy staff members come to the conclusion that the Algerian GIA was responsible for the bomb. The revelation comes from a genius CIA agent working in the embassy who fingers what the show calls a “splinter group” saying, “GIA, part of the same cell that bombed the embassy in Nairobi.”
From there, viewers see an on-edge embassy staff on the look-out for the culprits. That’s when a hapless Algerian man enters the embassy asking for a student visa to the United States. Brody later confesses, “From the minute I lay eyes on him the only thing I saw was a terrorist.”
Based on that profiling, the man, Ahmed Rallah, has his passport pulled for greater scrutinizing by the onsite CIA staff. Although they can find nothing amiss with his credentials, they tell Brody to reject his request for a visa.
In the ensuing exchange with Brody, Rallah is portrayed in exactly the manner we don’t need to be portrayed at this sensitive time: As an irrational, irate, agitated man.
“I filled out the forms. I have the I-20 from NYU,” argues Rallah. “I have paid tuition, I have paid plane.”
Despite his best efforts at shouting and pounding on the glass barriers between him and Brody, he is nonetheless denied his visa.
Ironically – and very predictably – Rallah’s papers later turn out to be just fine. Of course it’s too late for him, as he needed to be on plane the day before. Brody is rather torn up by the whole incident, but the damage is done.
All in all, it was a horribly portrayal of Islam and Muslims. Next week bodes for more of the same, as investigators harass a local Muslim community over the bombing.
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