Marines Pull Film on Muslims, Terrorism

Use of a training film alleging that Muslims are the main terrorist threat to Americans has been suspended at El Toro Marine Corps Air Station after protests from the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee and a Muslim marine sergeant who works in the base’s press relations office.

“The film is being reviewed to determine if its content is accurate,” Capt. Betsy Sweatt, an El Toro spokeswoman, said Wednesday. “It will not be shown to training sessions until a conclusion has been reached and a report made.”

On Monday, Albert Mokhiber, national president of the American-Arab group, wrote in a letter to Gen. Carl E. Mundy Jr., U.S. Marine commandant, that the edited version of the film “American Expose: TARGET USA,” originally produced by columnist Jack Anderson, contained “numerous distortions and inaccuracies” that made it inappropriate for showing.

“The film should be removed immediately from the audiovisual material made available to military counter-terrorism or related classes throughout the country,” Mokhiber said. “We are certain that the film can be replaced with material which will be conducive to counter-terrorism training and not encourage blind hatred toward national and religious groups.”

The sergeant who first protested use of the film, Samir Gustavo Jerez, said in an interview Wednesday that he has been harassed since raising his questions and plans to file a formal complaint next week against the El Toro base commander, Maj. Gen. P. Drax Williams, on grounds that Williams has not adequately investigated anti-Muslim bias at the base.

“The training film was an act of oppression toward Muslims in the Marine Corps and the U.S.A. as a whole,” Jerez asserted.

Sweatt said El Toro was the only Marine base at which the film has been shown and that it was used there by the Naval Criminal Investigative Service, a military unit not under direct Marine control. Nonetheless, she said, the Marine review “will endeavor to ensure that material used is factual and unbiased, and that it portrays an accurate picture with regard to real world terrorism and current military concerns.”

Mokhiber had complained that while the film focuses “only on the Middle East, specifically on Arabs or Muslims,” a 1990 U.S. State Department report on terrorist patterns showed that only eight of 233 anti-U.S. incidents that year were attributed to residents of Middle Eastern countries.