Today American citizens opposed to escalating Islamophobia will be picketing various outlets of Lowe’s, the American hardware giant. Earlier this month, acting under miniscule pressure from a Krazy Kristian Konservative outfit in Florida that boasts “thousands of members” but may be just another one-man band—the US, incidentally, has a population of just over 307 million—Lowe’s pulled its advertising from the show All-American Muslim.
We laughed and shook our heads only a few weeks ago when Pam Geller and other fringe bigots declared war on Butterball® turkeys. Such antics both fascinate and amuse, like a carney sideshow—until they go mainstream.
And so they have.
All-American Muslim sounds pretty much like our own Little Mosque on the Prairie moved to an urban setting (Dearborn, MI). It’s about “ordinary Muslims,” and, for some, that makes the program—to borrow the Xian term—an abomination.
Here is that Florida group on the nub of the thing:
“The show profiles only Muslims that appear to be ordinary folks while excluding many Islamic believers whose agenda poses a clear and present danger to liberties and traditional values that the majority of Americans cherish.”
As a Huffington Post commentator noted, this is entirely similar to attacking Jersey Shore because it fails to include Italian mobsters.
Canada has not been immune to this sort of nuttiness, mind you. Here’s that endless self-promoter Tarek Fatah on Little Mosque on the Prairie as stealth jihad:
In early 2007, as the CBC was promoting Little Mosque on the Prairie with great fanfare, I expressed my misgivings about the project. Writing in a Toronto newspaper, I suggested the CBC sitcom reflected “an Islamist agenda” that was using comedy to lull mainstream Canadians into believing all-is-well in Canada’s Muslim communities, despite evidence of a rise in extremism among Muslim youth. For example, Little Mosque made no reference to “the hijacking of … Islam by politicized clerics affiliated with Saudi Arabia or Iran.”
Same Justin-Trudeauvian substance, different pile. But the difference is that advertisers here didn’t take this guff seriously. The US is a whole nother ball game.
It didn’t take long, however, for reasonable Americans to react to the Lowe’s move. Facing a backlash against the backlash, Lowe’s began squinking madly with superb bafflegab:
“As you know, the TLC program All-American Muslim has become a lightning rod for people to voice complaints from a variety of perspectives - political, social and otherwise. Following this development, dozens of companies removed their advertising from the program beginning in late November. Lowe’s made the decision to discontinue our advertising on Dec. 5. As we shared yesterday, we have a strong commitment to diversity and inclusion, and we’re proud of that longstanding commitment. If we have made anyone question that commitment, we apologize.”
This text is a classic of its kind. It should be carefully embalmed for use in the spin-schools of the nation. There is a maddening Platonic perfection to it, a glorious cake both devoured and preserved, ending with a pristine example of the non-apology apology.
As of this writing, the advertising remains pulled. Showing Muslims as flesh-and-blood human beings with very ordinary daily concerns is too much for the demonizers to swallow. Only caricatures will do, like the anti-Semitic stereotypes of the 1930s. We all know people who react like that, but up to now they’ve just been political circus freaks. When big business starts taking them seriously, has a tipping point been reached?
[H/t asj, b/c]
