This is for all those who 1) think that there is no anti-Christian bias in media; or 2) think Christians have a long-deserved comeuppance due anyway:
Tales from the no dissent zone
Former “Daily Kos” contributor Eric Allen Bell was a filmmaker who had a POV entirely in keeping with that of typical west-coast progressives. In 2010, after leaving Hollywood for a quieter life in Murfreesbo,Tennessee, he saw American-flag-waving Evangelicals in his new hometown protesting against the proposed construction of a mega mosque, and decided to make a feature-length documentary about the controversy: “I saw this as something of a David vs. Goliath story – with fanatical Evangelicals bullying a peaceful Muslims population, which had been in the community for over 30 years without their being trouble.”
He returned to California to show a short version of the documentary to his backers and received the go-ahead. “It was decided”, he writes, “that the focus would be on ‘the enemy at home’, that being what we were calling ‘Apocalyptic Christianity'”, and America’s “religious lunatic fringe.” But “something kept nagging at me on a gut level.” He saw the Arab Spring “degenerate into the Islamist Winter”, and read about women in Pakistan facing execution for being raped, and Indonesians being arrested for atheism; he met a cab driver, a Coptic Christian, who expressed concern about his relatives in Egypt, and then “saw that cab driver’s worst fears come true as Coptic Christians were attacked by Islamist mobs.”
Now more informed, he told his backers that the documentary they were making wasn’t entirely honest, and suggested a more balanced view:
“I wanted to show what happens to countries when they gain a Muslim majority, how women are treated, that homosexuals were executed, that free speech did not exist, that the forced Islamic Law was not consistent with Democratic Values – anything and everything I could think of that ought to strike a chord with the Liberal mindset. And the response I received was, ‘Eric you are starting to sound like an Islamophobe.…‘”
The accusation was more than a warning shot: he was banned from Daily Kos, and personally denounced in articles published there; his photo was disseminated online with the appellation “Loon at Large”, and even his progressive friends and acquaintances vilified him a hatemonger and an Islamophobe. Read about Bell’s unpleasant experience with dogmatic forces of the Left in The High Price of Telling the Truth About Islam. Highly recommended.