May 12, 2009, - 2:02 pm
Innocent Muslims “Framed” . . . Again: Remind Me Again Why Conservatives Idolize This Show
By Debbie Schlussel
I haven’t watched the stale, sagging FOX show, “24,” in ages. It gets tiresome to watch so many Muslims as either terrorists who are ultimately puppets for the evil White man or completely innocent and framed.
And that’s why the show long ago hit the wall and jumped the shark. I believe it started with Kiefer Sutherland’s monkey-like performance of the apology to Muslims (extracted by CAIR and MPAC) before one “24” episode. This “repentance” act was the beginning of the end. I’ve been critical of this on “24” for a while, and have had sort of a running friendly debate with Rush Limbaugh about it, which he touched on when one of my readers/his listeners e-mailed him about it.
Again, though, I haven’t watched the show in like forever, for this very reason. I see enough propaganda when I review movies. A person can only take so much. I choose to opt out when it comes to this dying, now-irrelevant show. The show is so desperate to avoid Muslims as the real terrorists, it even made agent Jack Bauer’s dad and brother the terrorists and, this season, brought a Hispanic man back from the dead to be the TV Bin Laden of our day.
But, last night, as serendipity would have it, I accidentally landed on FOX. And guess what? More of the same. An innocent pair of Muslims–one of ’em was named “Jibran Alzarian”–were once again framed by an evil White (well, in this case it was a Hispanic) man. The were totally ignorant of the plot at hand and the bomb wasn’t theirs, but the evil tighty Whities knew it would make it easy to frame them as terrorists because the rest of us evil big, bad Whities would eagerly believe it. And, of course, in the end the liberal fashion-designer-head-butter drunk-driver Kiefer Sutherland is there to save the day and show us that these Muslims are just poor innocent people.
So, remind me again why you watch this G-d-awful show. Remind me again why most of the right keeps praising this piece of excrement, just ‘cuz a self-described conservative, Joel Surnow, is the executive producer. Why is this stuff worthy of our criticism when, say, Mark Cuban, or Brian DePalma, produces it, or when Jake Gyllenhaal and Reese Witherspoon star in it . . . but not when a “conservative” who hobnobs at Heritage Foundation events is making it?
Please explain it to me. ‘Cuz the only answer can be that perhaps these people are starstruck that a Hollywood producer actually claims he agrees with them . . . but does otherwise on TV to make his bread and butter, or perhaps he gives a good chunk of that bread and butter in donations to them.
I don’t know what the reason is. But Joel Surnow and others from “24” remain the toast of the town in the conservative half of Washington and movement politics, whether it’s at the Heritage Foundation (which gets a good deal of funding from Arab Muslim sources procured for it by friend and pan-Muslim Grover Norquist) or the David Horowitz Freedom Center/Center for the Study of Popular Culture, which regularly features Surnow on its anti-Hollywood Hollywood panels and forums.
Don’t believe the hype. If the “24” people can’t do the right thing on-screen, who gives a damn what they say or do off of it?
Certainly not me. I’m more interested in the latest recounting of why liberal Canadian Sutherland found it necessary to headbutt a gay fashion designer and how much more time he’ll do in jail for that.
For me, Jack Bauer died a long time ago. Rest In Peace.
From the little that i’ve heard, some conservatives aren’t too happy either
mindy1 on May 12, 2009 at 2:30 pm