New York Times review of Little Mosque on the Prairie

[Update: a good source of information about Muslim terrorism is Jihad Watch.]

Original post:

From the (‘Little Mosque’ Defuses Hate With Humor by Christopher Mason, January 16, 2007):

When it comes to producing a funny television show or movie in Canada, producers here have a reliable stable of topics: French-English relations, urban-rural dynamics and anything that involves a bumbling politician or the United States.

But Islam — something of a third rail of comedy throughout the Western world — did not make the list, which is one reason the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s new situation comedy, “Little Mosque on the Prairie,” is attracting such attention here. “It is a risk doing a sitcom about what can be considered a very touchy subject,” said Kirstine Layfield, executive director of network programming at CBC.

[Hyphenated Canadian: Risk? What risk? A politically correct show about how Muslim immigrants are just plain folks isn't a risk. A risk would be a show about Canadian-born Muslims plotting to behead the prime minister or about Somali-Canadian jihadists returning to the homeland to impose sharia law. A show about cousin marriage, honour killings and female genital mutilation. Now that would be a risk! Oh, wait a second. My mistake. The CBC already has a show like that. It's called the news.]

But last Tuesday’s series premiere attracted 2.09 million viewers, impressive in a country where an audience of one million is a runaway hit. The CBC had not had a show draw that size audience in a decade, according to the network.

[. . .]

The show has been criticized for treating too lightly the threat posed by radical Islam and the imams who preach it. The newly hired imam in “Little Mosque on the Prairie,” Amaar Rashid, is clean-shaven, wears tight jeans and has the “ravishing looks of a soap-opera star,” as the columnist Margaret Wente wrote in the Toronto daily newspaper The Globe and Mail.

“If there’s an imam on Earth who resembles this one, I will convert to Islam, don the veil and catch the next plane to Mecca,” she added.

[. . .]

Read all of Christopher Mason's article.

See also:

Michael Coren reviews Little Mosque on the Prairie: "Some caricatures are more obnoxious than others."

Technorati tags: Little Mosque on the Prairie Canada Canadian culture media entertainment CBC multiculturalism cultural diversity Islam Muslims