The TV drama 24 has come under fire from groups who claim that its repeated association of acts of terrorism with Islam gives terrorists a bad name. “The impression given is that all terrorists are Islamic,” said a spokesman. “In reality, some are not.”
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“After watching that show, I was afraid to go to the grocery store because I wasn’t sure the person next to me would be able to differentiate between fiction and reality,” said Sireen Sawaf from the Los Angeles-based Muslim Public Affairs Council.
Well I wonder how many groups she has offended by sugesting they are too stupid to understand television may not be real.
It is America.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/wtccrash/story/0,,553171,00.html
I watched the show, and the concerns were actually addressed in some what of a sub plot to some extent.
Jack Bauer killing someone by biting out their jugular vein will probably get more complaints though…
How many seasons had primarily Islamic terrorists? I just skimmed the plot lines (I’ve not seen all of any season, as I typically can’t get interested enough to watch each week), and the only one that is clearly in that category is season 4, although season 2 seems to have at least a couple (but from the description, the season seems to be more about “European and American businessmen” trying to trick the US into attacking Middle-Eastern countries unjustly).
Season 1 appears to have Serbian villains.
Season 3 had an English ex-MI6 agent as the ultimate villain (although there were some evil Mexicans, too).
Season 5 has Russian terrorists.
Now, those are merely nationalities, and it’s certainly possible that they were all Muslim by religion, but I have my doubts that people would claim that the evil MI6 guy is giving Muslims a bad name.
Clearly, one cannot watch every season of 24 and come away with the impression that all terrorists are Muslim without doing some heavy cherry picking. These people, of course, seem to be making their statements based on watching a few episodes of this season (all of which concern the same day; what, are all the terrorist groups the world over supposed to unite and appear on a single day/season?), which means they seem to be the ones engaging in gross generalization, not the writers of 24.
But, hey, what do I know?
If you take the whole of the US film/TV industry then a high proportion of ‘baddies’ are British (Dance, Rickman etc.) nobody goes on whimping about it. I wish they (the Muslums that complain about this of thing) would just grow up and get that chip off the shoulder. For fucks sake.
I did hear that Brits play a lot of baddie roles because Americans think that it may damage their image.