CAIR Gets Muslim TV Show Killed Over Ethnic, Religious Stereotyping

The terrorist front organization Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) has repeatedly proven that it wields tremendous power in the Obama administration and now the group is flexing its bulging muscles in Hollywood, successfully killing a new show on a major television network over negative stereotypes of Muslims.

This is the same nonprofit that got the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) to purge anti-terrorism training material determined to be “offensive” to Muslims. Judicial Watch uncovered that scandal last summer and obtained hundreds of pages of FBI documents revealing that a group of “Subject Matter Experts” determined certain anti-terrorism training curricula contained material that was offensive to Muslims. The excised files included references linking the Muslim Brotherhood to terrorism, tying al Qaeda to the 1993 World Trade Center and Khobar Towers bombings, and suggesting that “young male immigrants of Middle Eastern appearance … may fit the terrorist profile best.”

CAIR also got several police departments in President Obama’s home state of Illinois to cancel essential counterterrorism courses over accusations that the instructor was anti-Muslim. The course was called “Islamic Awareness as a Counter-Terrorist Strategy” and departments in Lombard, Elmhurst and Highland Park caved into CAIR’s demands. The group responded with a statement commending officials for their “swift action in addressing the Muslim community’s concerns.”

Founded in 1994 by three Middle Eastern extremists (Omar Ahmad, Nihad Awad and Rafeeq Jaber) who ran the American propaganda wing of Hamas, CAIR has also wielded power in a number of other cases during the Obama administration. It has impeded an FBI probe involving the radicalization of young Somali men in the U.S., pressured the U.S. government to file discrimination lawsuits against employers who don’t accommodate Muslims and forced American taxpayers to fund “Islamically permissible” meals for Muslim prison inmates.

Last fall an Obama-appointed federal judge ruled that a Muslim woman’s civil rights were violated by an American clothing retailer that didn’t allow her to wear a head scarf as required by her religion. CAIR represented the woman, 19-year-old Umme-Hani Khan, who got fired for wearing a hijab at the store which has a policy against head covers of any kind for its employees. The federal agency that enforces the nation’s workplace discrimination law, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), used CAIR’s language in its lawsuit, alleging religious discrimination, a violation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Clearly, the Muslim “civil rights” group is on a major power trip so why not hit the entertainment industry, which undeniably influences public opinion. CAIR got ABC Family to cancel a teen drama called “Alice in Arabia” by playing the race card, according to a Hollywood trade newspaper. The script was written by a former U.S. Army translator named Brooke Eikmeier and the storyline focuses on an American teenaged girl kidnapped by her royal Saudi Arabian family. The series may lead to stereotyping that can result in bullying of Muslim students, according to the director of CAIR’s southern California headquarters, Hussam Ayloush.

“As the nation’s largest Muslim civil rights and advocacy organization, we are concerned about the negative impact this program could have on the lives of ordinary Arab-American and American Muslims,” Ayloush writes in a letter to the TV network’s president. Ayloush goes on to “urge” the network to meet with representatives of the Muslim and Arab-American communities to “discuss this important issue.” In other words, get rid of the show.

Though it may seem inconsequential, it’s a telling cultural battle fought and won by CAIR. President Obama is the group’s lapdog in the name of political correctness and diplomacy, but a private entertainment conglomerate has no reason to cave into its demands. Here is the explanation offered by ABC: “The current conversation surrounding our pilot was not what we had envisioned and is certainly not conducive to the creative process, so we’ve decided not to move forward with this project.” CAIR pounded its chest after coercing a major TV network to cancel a “program that had the potential to promote ethnic and religious stereotyping.”