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“Muslims” was a “Hit” for PBS this week |
The Hits :
PBS’s Frontline: Frontline rarely disappoints; and with it’s airing of “Muslims” this past week, the award-winning investigative series scored another win. The episode sought to paint a picture of Islam using the personal stories of Muslims from all over the Muslim world. From America to Southeast Asia, Muslims were shown as the people they are, not the mythical fanatics some reporting suggests.
One of the episode’s executive producers, Anisa Mehdi, worked tirelessly to bring this project to fruition; and “Muslims” caps more than two years of extensive travel and research. Frontline, unlike so many other news programs, is often willing to make this kind of longitudinal time commitment to the subject matter it tackles. Hats off once again to PBS.
HBO: Who says HBO is only good for bad movies and overly-explicit television series such as The Sopranos, Oz and Sex and the City? On May 12, HBO debuted Telling Nicholas, a wrenching documentary about loss in the wake of the attacks on the World Trade Center.
Filmmaker James Whitney shot the footage for Telling Nicholas in the 10 days following the 9/11 tragedy tracking the Lanza family and its preparation for telling 7-year-old Nicholas Lanza that his mother Michelle was killed in the WTC collapse.
While the Lanza’s are the main subjects of the documentary, Whitney also introduces viewers to the Ahmad family, which also suffered a 9/11 loss. Shabbir Ahmad worked as a waiter in the Windows on the World restaurant atop the WTC. He never had a chance for survival as only a handful of people above the impact zones made it out alive that day. His son, 16-year-old Thanbir, is left behind with the rest of the mourning family. Devout Muslims, the Ahmad family members provide a strong voice for Muslims and Thanbir is especially poignant in his perspectives on 9/11.
Whitney eventually has Thanbir and Nicholas meet; however, not before some very human emotions and reactions surface. Certain members of the Lanza family harbor some fairly harsh feelings towards Muslims, and these issues serve to create some tension in the film.
In all, Telling Nicholas is very real. It deals with real tragedy, real people and real outcomes. As such, it is a commendable effort in that it is one of the few works to reach a broad audience with the message that Muslims suffered on 9/11 as well.
The documentary will re-air on HBO throughout the coming week. Check local listings for times.
The Miss:
Bahrain Banning Jazeera: Not so much an entertainment “miss” as it is a media “miss”. Last Friday, the Gulf nation of Bahrain announced that Al-Jazeera satellite news would be banned from reporting in that country. The injunction came just as Bahrainis were going to the polls for the first time in three decades.
The reason for the ban? According to Nabil Al-Hamr, Bahrain’s information minister, as quoted by Al-Jazeera, “We believe [Al Jazeera] is suspect and represents the Zionist side in the region. We will not deal with this channel because we object to its coverage of current affairs. It is a channel penetrated by Zionists.”
I suppose in the news business you just can’t win. In America, Al-Jazeera is seen by many as being nothing more than a mouthpiece for terrorists and political Islam. So how Bahrain arrives at the conclusion that Al-Jazeera is some kind of operative of Zionist forces isn’t quite clear.
Maybe closer to the truth is a May 10 BBC report in which the news service cites sources that say Bahrain was angered at Al-Jazeera’s airing of anti-U.S. protests that sprung up in the wake of the recent Israeli aggression against the Palestinians.
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