Opinion: What’s in a name?
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Media guru Shelly Palmer offered a provocative post this morning about a video channel on magnify.net (a service provider that helps interest groups create their own versions of YouTube) called ‘Islam Will Dominate.’ Although he acknowledged that he hadn’t seen anything on the channel that was ‘particularly offensive or dangerous sounding,’ Palmer tried to build a case for companies like magnify.net to deny service to groups that menace us:
Our constitution prohibits our government from preventing anyone from saying almost anything (other than crying out ‘fire’ in a crowded theater) in public spaces. But this idea of freedom of expression does not apply to private spaces, homes, workplaces or the purview of private enterprise. Should magnify.net give a voice to Islam? Will it dominate? What does that mean? How about evangelical Christians? Don’t they have to be stopped as well? What about Mormons or Jews? Should we limit the flow of their messages? To me the answer is very simple – as long as you don’t advocate killing me, you can say anything you like. But, when you are actively recruiting people who will be brainwashed to end my life, you don’t get to use my tools to do it.
He also asked whether general sites such as YouTube should try to filter out content from groups advocating terror. These are interesting questions, but the magnify.net channel Palmer singled out may not be the right example. His complaint mainly was with the name, which has since changed -- it’s now called Muslim TV, probably in response to the conversation Palmer had with magnify.net’s founder. Based on the time I spent with Muslim TV this morning, the channel’s content struck me as broader and more reflective than the earlier name suggested. The first video I clicked on featured an Islamic scholar, Dr. Bilal Philips, discussing tolerance and forgiveness (bottom line: the religion is rich in those qualities, even if some practitioners haven’t been). It’s hard to tease out any one theme on the site; for instance, although the featured video was ‘Last two Afghan Jews fighting each other,’ a video of a verbal spat between two elderly men who happen to be Jewish, the home page also offered this clip about a Muslim intervening to help four Jews being attacked on a New York City subway train.
That’s not to say the site is neutral or reliable. It’s an offshoot of Muslims for Freedom, a self-described ‘movement for change’ which declares, verbatim: ‘Islam is the words most misunderstood religion, not by accident it is by design, primarily by individuals and corporations who have a vast fanatical interest in stopping the spread of Islam.’
To quote further from Muslims for Freedom’s home page:
Many individuals who profit financially from such things as alcohol, interest, pork, pornography, and gambling are also in positions of influence over media outlets. They use this position to insure that Islam is portrayed as a barbaric evil religion that oppresses women and condones such actions as suicide bombings as well as the killing of non Muslims. Our plan is to wage a counter media campaign in order to spread the truth of Islam by having a fully staffed marketing department that will work towards promoting the truth of Islam by purchasing commercial air time, space in print media as well as utilizing direct mail.
A few clicks around the site take you to nuttier conspiracy theories, such as this one asserting that the 9/11 bombings weren’t done by Al Qaeda. Still, Muslim TV is monetized in a decidedly non-revolutionary way. Each video is accompanied by advertisements, such as a link to Amazon products (including this Hannah Montana video game) and Google-powered contextual ads. Islam may dominate some day, but at Muslim TV, Amazon and Google pay the bills.
UPDATE: I finally heard back from magnify.net, which informed me that the name of the channel has always been Muslim TV. But if you look at magnify’s channel rankings, where channels are represented by screen grabs instead of their names, the image for Muslim TV is a shot of someone holding a poster that says, ‘Islam will dominate!’ It was the only channel whose name wasn’t shown in the screen grab or the channel description, so Palmer’s confusion on this point was understandable.