It Is Only A TV Show For Gawd's Sake

And IMHO not a very good show but if will become a vehicle for all sides to express themselves. I live and work with Muslims and I haven't seen any of them portrayed on this show.

CBC is overlooking uncomfortable facts

Laughing at those who are fearful of terrorism is really not that funny
Alan Ferguson
The Province
Tuesday, January 16, 2007

Why is it that a mediocre TV sitcom, hyped out of all proportion to its merits, should have attracted such attention?

The answer, of course, lies in its provocative title. The launch last week of CBC's Little Mosque on the Prairie drew media crews from Britain, the U.S. and around the world.

The storyline hinges on the attempts of a community of Muslims to establish themselves in the fictional Prairie town of Mercy, Sask.

Apart from the Muslims, the characters are mostly of the cardboard-cutout variety -- village idiot, redneck radio shock jock, etc. -- prone to uttering tired one-liners.

Early in Episode 1, a middle-aged white woman, overhearing a foreign-looking traveller's suspicious conversation, fears he may be a terrorist.

She goes off to summon the police, and the officer who arrives is, you've guessed it, an unimaginative clod, brimming with small-town prejudice.

Sure, it's only a comedy. But not a few viewers have taken objection to the portrayal of "average" white Canadians as bigoted bumpkins, harbouring irrational suspicions.

The CBC is pursuing a laudable goal, I suppose. The intention is to cut through racial stereotypes so that Canadians of all stripes can be revealed to one another for what they mostly are -- peaceful people desiring only to live in communal harmony.

In its sympathetic portrayal of the Muslims of Mercy, however, the CBC is overlooking uncomfortable facts.

Around the world, Muslim extremists are engaged in a fervent campaign aimed at destabilizing any society that does not share their fanatical vision.

As Britain's prime minister Tony Blair has written: "Deluding ourselves that this terrorism is a series of individual, isolated incidents rather than a global movement would be profoundly and fundamentally wrong."

Writing in Foreign Affairs magazine, Blair laments that many in the West still do not grasp the totalitarian nature of the terrorists' goals. It is "madness" to blame the United States, and not the terrorists, for the disorder in today's world, he says.

If the war on terror fails, then we can say goodbye to free, secular, democratic nations and hello to what Blair calls "a semi-feudal religious oligarchy."

Canada isn't immune to these trends. We are in Afghanistan to rebuild a nation that would otherwise revert to being a training camp for global terror.

It's several years now since Ahmed Rassam busied himself in a Burnaby motel room building a bomb intended to level Los Angeles airport.

No one in Canada picked up on his activities; it took a sharp-eyed U.S. border guard to prevent a catastrophe.

But you can be sure that Little Mosque on the Prairie won't be delving into such events.

After all, we should be able to laugh at that fear-stricken white woman who leaps to the conclusion she has spotted a dangerous terrorist. Shouldn't we?