The idea was to get an ordinary Joe and have him live for 30 days with a Muslim family in Detroit. The average Joe turned out to be a boyhood friend of Spurlock's. Apparently he knew nothing of Islam and was only too eager to learn. Soon, though, he was a self-proclaimed expert on the topic.
When I met David Stacy, about halfway through his 30-day experience, I was amazed at how uninformed he was. This new "expert" on Islam never heard of Wahhabism--the extremist Sunni strain of Islam that dominates Saudi Arabia and informs the terrorist-breeding madrassa schools throughout Arab and other Muslim lands. He was unfamiliar with groups like Hamas and Hezbollah. He did not believe me when I told him that Hezbollah had murdered hundreds of U.S. Marines and civilians in Beirut and elsewhere. He seemed mystified to learn that President Bush shut down American Islamic charities, like the Holy Land Foundation and Global Relief Foundation, for funding Hamas and al Qaeda.
In Mr. Stacy, it is clear, Mr. Spurlock had found the perfect tabula rasa. He had also found the perfect "experts" and "key members" of Detroit's Islamic community to educate him. One such was Muqtedar Khan, a professor at Adrian College whose occasional columns in the Detroit News and elsewhere have urged us to understand how devout Muslims can be driven to commit terrorism because of the West's economic alliances.
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When I told Mr. Spurlock's executive producer that I felt David Stacy was, well, a moron, she replied that Imam Husham Al-Husainy, a prominent Dearborn Shia cleric, "said the same thing" and refused to continue teaching him about Islam for the show. The biggest morons, though, will be not Mr. Stacy but the critics and viewers who fall for this supersized phony "documentary."
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