PB$ -- “For Prophet” Network

Anyone this week viewing the PBS "documentary" titled "Muhammad: Legacy of a Prophet" might think so. The program combined an entirely positive history of the founder of Islam, whose 1.2 billion adherents comprise one-fifth of humankind, with enthusiastic testimonials by many smiling, warm-hearted Muslim-Americans, including converts from Jewish and Christian families.

It was, in short, an Infomercial for Islam, an entirely one-sided piece of propaganda crafted to sell a product and a particular religion. PBS still operates in large measure using taxpayer money. Is the ACLU too busy burning city hall nativity displays in rural towns at this time of year to raise its voice against this other violation of the separation of church and state?

When Saudi Arabia recently began buying 30-second TV spots on commercial stations to promote its "friendship" with the United States, several stations and some cable networks refused to air them for love or money. Why did PBS provide two hours and more for this Infomercial promoting a faith whose political and lucrative center of pilgrimage is Saudi Arabia?

One apparent PBS motive is money. At the show’s top and tail, PBS credited a long list of funders, most with links to Saudi Arabia, and then notified viewers that its list of other bankrollers of the program – too numerous to list on air – is available upon request.

PBS in recent years has begun to look more and more like a ‘For Profit" network, putting on spots for the corporations subsidizing its shows that appear almost indistinguishable from TV commercials.

Despite the old truism that "He who pays the piper calls the tune," PBS used to claim that it never allowed a funder to control or even influence the content of its programs.

How, then, do we explain that "Muhammad: Legacy of a Prophet" obeyed the Islamic proscription against showing the Prophet’s image, said not a single negative word about the Muslim faith or its founder, and discussed narratives in the Koran such as Muhammad’s "Night Journey" to Jerusalem and from there to heaven as indisputable historic events?

"When," asks Wall Street Journal Assistant Features Editor Collin Levey, "did PBS become a for-prophet network?"

This "documentary" obviously took care to say nothing that could offend Muslim sensibilities, and to present as positive an image of Islam as it could.

PBS, fearful of funding restrictions from a conservative Congress, should issue a simple press release totaling up how many millions of dollars they received to produce this program.

As America’s network of Political Correctness, PBS might have been motivated by a desire not to offend the religious sensitivities of its audience. But as scholar Daniel Pipes notes, no such fastidiousness restrained PBS in its 1998 documentary "From Jesus to Christ" from including skeptical scholars such as John Dominic Crossan and others who used taxpayer money via PBS to tell viewers that the Christian Gospels are full of lies and deceptions.

The charter of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the political body that controls PBS and National Public Radio, requires its programming to give a fair, balanced, even-handed view of issues. By airing documentaries that attacked Christianity and praised Islam, PBS violated this charter and mandate – as it has on almost all other social and political matters.

This government television network has from its birth justified itself as a vehicle of education, Sesame Street, Big Bird, and documentaries. It has failed here, too….presenting left-over helpings of BBC costume soap operas given legimacy only because they are based on the words of name authors of past centuries.

But if PBS is supposed to be educational, writes Pipes, then it "has betrayed its viewers by presenting an airbrushed and uncritical documentary" that "ignores an ongoing scholarly reassessment of Muhammad’s life that disputes every detail…."

By failing to carve up Islam with critical scholarship as it did Christianity, PBS produced what Pipes calls "an Islamic Sunday school class" version of this world faith designed only to win converts and reinforce Muslim true believers. It is a picture of Islam painted only with happy colors, no blacks or grays or shadows. This is not education, unless we define propaganda as education.

During the four years when I worked as a reporter and commentator for the West Coast Production Center of PBS, we were not even permitted to mention the name of any commercial product on air – unless we were reporting some evil in it. PBS sold things back then, of course, but what it marketed were ideas and ideologies.

A residue of the anti-American, anti-Western ideology always prevalent at PBS might have helped them rationalize this documentary. Islam might restrict human rights in general, the rights of women in particular, and even worse might promote the idea that there is a God. But much the same could be said for the pseudo-religion of Marxism.

What matters more to PBS Leftists is that Islam is a rival power to American and the West. And as the documentary emphasizes, among the biggest values Muhammad taught were to help the poor and redistribute the wealth (as today’s oil sheiks and sultans have done so faithfully).

Unspoken in all this is that the PBS "Muhammad" documentary is a victory for Osama bin Laden, an Islamist who wants the entire world converted to his Muslim faith. Would this documentary exist, especially in the one-sided pro-Islamic form it has taken, if bin Laden’s Al-Qaeda terrorists had not flown airliners into the Pentagon and World Trade Center towers? Almost certainly it would not.

Terrorists kill people and blow up things largely to grab the eyes of the world – to in the surrealist aphorism "grasp the eye by the monocle," our network television cameras. When they succeed, this reward encourages yet more terrorism.

PBS might have aired its "Muhammad" documentary to gain millions of Saudi dollars, for mercenary as well as ideological motives. It might have decided to air this and the whole series "Islam: Empire of Faith" between Channukah and Christmas as a way of sticking a thumb in the eye of devout Christian and Jewish taxpayers.

But what PBS has done is to reward Osama bin Laden for acts of terrorism and mass murder, giving to his religion an infomercial worth many millions of dollars. Will this help win American converts with blue eyes and blond hair, a few of whom decades hence will take up the scimitar against America and the West? Time will tell.

If PBS has become just another commercial network, up for sale program by program to the highest bidder, perhaps we taxpayers should reduce the national debt by privatizing it and selling off its multi-billion dollar broadcast frequencies in markets such as New York City. Why should it remain the playground of Leftist ideologues like Bill Moyers, who has made tens of millions of taxpayer dollars by using his insider PBS connections while promulgating his own extremist ideas?

Let’s sell PBS before its value to the U.S. Treasury is further diminished in the dawning world of 500 cable channels. Let’s privatize PBS so that Saudi Arabia, Fidel Castro and Bill Moyers can no longer use it as a vehicle for their own true believer ideologies.