...plot keywords: terrorism...

Juliana Margulies. Dylan McDermott. Jemma Redgrave.

Big names. They'll sell. What are they selling? As we understand it, hate .

At a theater screening in New York to watch the second Spiderman film, he was stunned to see a trailer for an upcoming TNT program called "The Grid", which is being marketed as a fictional account of counter-terrorism against "Islamic terrorism" in New York.

He describes that the ad is longer than a typical movie preview and begins with interviews with the show’s actors, executive producer, and technical advisor (himself incidentally a former Bush administration policy advisor who admiringly refers to Donald Rumsfeld during the trailer.)

Straddling the line between fiction and reality, the trailer juxtaposes the actors’ recollections of 9/11 with clips from the show depicting “Arab” individuals (mostly played by non-Arab actors, of course.)

Among the most offensive scenes are:

(1) A collage of images, including ones of Muslim individuals, as the
voice-over states: “they taught us to fear, now it is their turn to be afraid” and, most shockingly, “human life means nothing to these people.”

(2) images of Muslim men praying and Muslim women in Hijab as the background voices discuss an Islamic terrorist cell operating in NYC.

(3) an image of a man who appears to have been physically tortured while Julianna Margulies says: “You speak to me truthfully, and I’ll get you out of here” (a shocking image in light of the Abu Ghraib incident).

(You can watch a much shorter, and admittedly far-less-offensive version of the trailer at: www.tnt.tv.)

The trailer in its current form is intrinsically and carries the potential for consequences arising from the misrepresentation of Muslims as terrorists; consequences such as increasing attacks against those believed to be Muslim. The Center for American-Islamic Relations reports that last year, about 1000 incidents of hate crime occured in the United States.

For this reason, I am echoing his request that we take action, by urging you to contact the TNT studios and asking them to stop running the trailer in its current form. You may wonder why we are asking them to stop running the trailer in its current form and not protesting the film itself - well, I asked myself this as well, and the answer is that we have not yet seen the program (it is set to air on July 19) and thus cannot rationally argue against something we have yet to see. I assume however that if the show plays out like it appears to, that I will be urging you at a later date to write TNT to protest the program as well. For now, the very least that we can do is to protest the blatant racism put forth in the trailer.

You can contact TNT at:

tnt@turner.com
1010 Techwood Dr. NW
Atlanta GA 30318
TNT programming: 404-885-4538

I passed on the email I received about this trailer to many of my friends, and already they are responding to me that "oh, it is not so big a deal". Think about that if you will - in what way is racism not a big deal? In what way is creating an association between Islam (a religion of peace) and terrorism not a big deal? It furthers the kind of racial stereotypes and generalization that breed resentment and anger among populations, and create division. Hate breeds hate, we all have heard this phrase. By protesting misrepresentations such as those depicted in the trailers for this film, you help to stop the cycle.