Muslims crying "Islamophobia on TV shows" - but they have to go back 19 years to find a supposed example ~ Elder Of Ziyon

Sunday, September 07, 2025

Muslims crying "Islamophobia on TV shows" - but they have to go back 19 years to find a supposed example

Back in the 1980s, the TV comedy Barney Miller had an episode where Hasidic Jews rioted and trashed a police station to protest not enough protection.

It was based on a real incident from 1978 when Jews in Boro Park rioted at a police station there.

The episode was hardly complimentary to the Jews. But it was a real situation and I didn't think of it as antisemitic at all. As far as I know, no Jewish groups protested the episode.

Muslims don't seem so charitable. They are convinced that every TV show that doesn't show Muslims in a positive light is creating hate.

A Muslim organization called the Institute for Social Policy ad Understanding (ISPU) mounts surveys and research that is meant to advocate for equal rights for Muslims, but for special rights. They recently issued a report on media bias:

The objective of the current study is to understand the impact of positive and negative portrayals of Muslims in entertainment television. Specifically, we examined the effects of exposure to depictions of Muslims in television shows on people’s support for policies that are broadly undemocratic or specifically anti Muslim, attitudes toward Muslims, and perceptions of Muslims.

The research team ran an experiment in which participants were randomly assigned to watch either a positive or negative depiction of Muslims in entertainment media to assess effects on support for various policies, intergroup attitudes toward, and perceptions of Muslims.

An episode of 9-1-1: Lone Star (season 1, episode 3) was selected for the positive depiction of Muslims. The episode featured a Muslim woman firefighter who helps save a man trapped in a grain silo and interacts with colleagues and community members to whom she describes her connection to faith and reasoning for wearing hijab. An episode of Criminal Minds (season 2, episode 10) was selected for the negative depiction of Muslims. The episode featured FBI profilers discussing Islam as violent and focuses on a Muslim suspect who is portrayed as being resistant to the FBI profilers and trying to radicalize other prisoners toward militant jihad.

It is unsurprising that people who are exposed to positive messaging end up being more sympathetic in an immediate interview and those who are exposed to negative messaging do the opposite.

What is interesting is that in order to find an appropriate "anti-Muslim" TV episode, they had to go back to 2006, when the "Criminal Minds" episode was aired.

Keep in mind that this was only five years after 9/11.

Discussing jihadists on a TV crime show is hardly inappropriate in that (or any other) time - it is a real problem. And from what I can tell, the episode did not generalize the jihadists to all Muslims, and the main investigator told the terrorist " You have perverted your faith to justify killing millions of people."

Should TV reflect the truth, or should it bend over backwards to not offend? The Barney Miller episode was respectful but truthful, and the Criminal Minds episode seems to have been the same way (with the stakes much higher.)

Nevertheless, the fact that the ISPU study couldn't find a more contemporary example of negative portrayal of Muslims on mainstream American TV shows that there is no problem at all. Not that they would admit that - they don't. The entire study implies that negative portrayals of Muslims are prevalent on TV and needs to be fixed.