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Day: February 3, 2006

PBS Station Cave In

Wimps.

Following last-minute cries of protest from Muslim leaders last week, a Public Broadcasting Service affiliate in Dallas canceled the premiere of a documentary on the roots of Islamic terrorism.

“The Roots of War: The Road to Peace” was scheduled to air on KERA-TV on Sunday, January 29, but the premiere was postponed by the station’s managers after a local Muslim group alleged that the program contains inaccuracies and anti-Muslim bias. The documentary’s producers, Niki and Dennis McCuistion, have defended their work; they have refused to make changes.

Think this has something to do with the Muhammad cartoon caper? Of course it does.

American Jewish community leaders drew a connection between the two controversies, even though Muslim leaders in Texas voiced their protests in terms that were described as respectful by the Dallas station and by the producers.

“There’s a real danger in this,” American Jewish Congress general counsel Marc Stern said in an interview with the Forward. “Whatever the legalities, you take all this together, and you have the Muslim world saying, ‘You can’t criticize us.’ It’s one thing for them to say, ‘You can’t come to Saudi Arabia and criticize us,’ but to say, ‘You can’t criticize us in Denmark, and you can’t criticize us in the United States’ — even the excess and extremism in some parts of the Muslim world — that’s a rather glum and ominous state of affairs.”

The general idea of political correctness drives me insane, but the hypersensitive reaction in America by the MSM, and even the US State Department, is just too much.

What do we have to fear? Someone getting their feelings hurt? War? We’re already at war with radical militant islamists with absolutely no attitude of tolerance whatsoever. Why this sudden recoil?

The reason is fear, and so far, it’s inexplicable.

The Tragedy of Al Salam Boccaccio 98

Of 1,300 people aboard, 180 escape on lifeboats, and so far, only 203 survivors. In 2006, it seems unfathomable that a disaster of this magnitude could occur.

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An Egyptian ferry carrying about 1,300 people sank in the Red Sea early Friday during bad weather, and rescue ships and helicopters pulled dozens of survivors and bodies from the water. Some 180 escaped on lifeboats, an official said.

Most of the passengers were Egyptian workers returning from their jobs in Saudi Arabia. At least four Saudi and four Egyptian ships were involved in the search effort, arriving about 10 hours after the 35- year-old ferry was believed to have sank.

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The boat disappeared from radar screens around 5 PM EST on Thursday. Some are blaming weather conditions, while others speculate that some kind of emergency occurred on board, perhaps a fire, and that it incapacitated the ship before there was time to evacuate its passengers.