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Lott on BET and Muhammad on PBS
12/17/2002

Catching up on my Corner reading this evening (scroll down from the link), an interesting parallel came to mind. Cast in among the many lamentations at Trent Lott's continued quest to prove that he hasn't an ounce of the integrity required of a leader, Rod Dreher linked to an article by Daniel Pipes about a PBS special essentially proselytizing for Islam.

The PBS special reminded me of a controversy that I took up in a column last January. In that case, the issue was Californian public schools, and their textbooks, handing their students the recruiter's version of Islam. Two details that are common to that controversy and this one are that reference to Muhammad's interaction with the divine is treated in the same manner as historical fact and that the contrast with treatment of Christianity — to wit: the deprogrammer's version — is stark.

The connection to Lott comes in a column that Mr. Dreher wrote last February:

If the Islamic chapters seem like they could have been written by a Muslim activist group, that's no accident. The California-based Council on Islamic Education, founded in 1988 to fight what the group believes is anti-Muslim bias in the classroom, works closely with textbook publishers to review and develop teaching material. The CIE, which didn't return a message left on its answering machine, participated in the writing and editing of Across the Centuries.

Thanks to Lott's pliability when faced with the cudgel of "making amends for egregious wrongs," it seems a pattern may be emerging: to combat a perceived negative bias, a special-interest group takes up the task of offering "suggestions," which — followed through an urge either to flaunt multicultural sensibilities or to evade the label of bigotry — serve to advance its intentions far beyond parity.

Posted by Justin Katz @ 07:10 PM EST