Beautiful Maidens

The Middle East Broadcasting Center (MBC), which owns five television channels (including Al Arabiya) as well as a radio station, is helping shatter America's misperception that Arabic TV is more biased than CNN.
Jeremiah Stoddard wrote an article yesterday about a new TV show on MBC, which takes extremist Islamists to task. By quoting the Quran and discrediting extremist religious foundations, it weakens the base from which extremists can draw from. The director for the show even admits its targeted to those who have yet to make up their minds about terrorism, and show them how un-Islamic violence really is.

Of course, extremists across the Middle East are angry. Even some of the moderates are angry, or at least angry at the title: Al-Hour Al-Ayn, or Beautiful Maidens. Most of the terrorists and extremists are sexually repressed young men, waiting for their seventy two virgins when they martyr themselves. One of the attackers in the 2003 bombing of a residential center in Saudi spoke his last words over his radio: "One second to the beautiful maidens."

It must be very upsetting for young men to discover the Quran doesn't say anything about seventy-two virgins. The Hadith does specifically mention seventy-two virgins, but only in the context of a reward for virtuous men. Killing young children is apparently not a prerequisite the poking them in the afterlife.

The American equivalent would be a popular morning evangelist saying that discriminating against gays will prevent you from coming into Heaven. Or maybe the Catholic Church saying that the Bible isn't accurate on certain points, but that's another story entirely.

Either way, it's making news. Extremists are mad, and the common folk are talking about it, and this is all good news to me. My favorite part? Airing the show during Ramadan, when the righteous have little else to do but watch TV until the sun goes down.

Labels: media, terrorism

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