Kerry Spot    [ jim geraghty reporting ]
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I’m no fan of the recent decision to run public-service announcements from the Council on American-Islamic Relations with Fox’s hit action show, ‘24.’

But there are a couple of choices by the writers that are odd, if not objectionable.

As a guy who recently acquired a sudden and serious interest in Turkey, I’m scratching my head at the decision to make this year’s villains Turkish.

I suppose it’s not impossible for a Turkish terrorist cell to operate in Los Angeles, but it seems like there are a couple of other countries that seem a little more likely to be the country of origin for a terrorist sleeper cell. The Saudis? The Iranians? Mohammed Atta and Ayman al-Zawahiri are Egyptian, Abu Zarqawi is Jordanian, and some of the 9/11 hijackers came from the United Arab Emirates and Lebanon. Making this terrorist cell Turkish seems kind of arbitrary.

In one of the early episodes this year, a hacker played by Lukas Haas notices that a virus set to hit the Internet has some script that looks “Middle Eastern, either Turkish or Arabic.” Folks, take it from a guy who is struggling to learn Turkish – Turkish and Arabic look nothing alike. For starters, Turkish has Roman letters. Sure, they have a lot of little marks that look odd to American or English eyes – their ‘c’s have little Jeff Bagwell goatees when they make the sound “ch”, and their ‘o’s and ‘u’s like to have two little dots over them. But Arabic, as any of us know from watching the news, appears as a long fluid script. The badguys also have a banner in the background written in Arabic.

Then there was a reference to terrorist ‘chatter’ coming out of Ankara (ARGH! Pardon that momentary scream of panic…) Again, I’ll know more when I get there, but Ankara is the political and military capital of Turkey, a secular state that while occasionally disagreeing with the United States, is probably as dedicated to fighting terror as any in the region. Maybe terrorists could ‘chat’ there, but there are probably about a hundred other cities in the Middle East that are more likely to be terrorist hangouts.

I’m not joining the CAIR bandwagon, but I am noting that it looks like the writers of 24 picked Turkey as just another Middle Eastern country that could produce terrorists – a description that doesn’t quite fit.

UPDATE: A friendly reader writes in, “It’s a TV show for crying out loud. They are not real people, they are actors. It’s not really happening, it’s a script.”

Sure. But just as southerners get irritated when they’re portrayed as cross-burning, trigger-happy hicks by Hollywood, Christians get annoyed when they’re portrayed as wide-eyed abortion clinic bombers, conservatives objected to the CBS Reagan biopic putting hateful words in his mouth… images in entertainment matter. No one is calling for censorship, but television shows and movies have enormous power to shape the public’s understanding and view of the world.

The writers of ‘24’ are free to create whatever villains they wish, but in this case, they’ve taken a specific country – Turkey – and portrayed it… well, like a generic Arabic-speaking Middle Eastern terrorist hangout. It’s sloppy and inaccurate. It wouldn’t be all that different than a television show that mixed up Americans and Canadians.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Another reader speculates that the writers wanted to avoid the accusation of being biased against Arabs, so they picked Turks — Islamic, but not Arabic. I hadn't thought of that...

[Posted 01/18 11:47 AM]