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Bill Keller's Late-night TV show yanked from Channel 44 in Tampa, Fla. Photo: liveprayer.com |
Prayer Show Ends on
CBS-owned Station;
Host Blames Muslims
Various U.S. Islamic Groups Accused of Wide Range of Censorship Techniques, Including Changes in Movie Scripts & Murder of an
Oakland, Calif. Black Newspaper Editor
Monday, Aug. 27, 2007
TAMPA, FLA. - Live Prayer TV show host Bill Keller brought on condemnation from a national Muslim group after he told viewers Muhammad is a false prophet.
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Keller says managers at WTOG-TV Channel 44 in St. Petersburg, Fla., cancelled his late-night show, Live Prayer with Bill Keller, after receiving complaints from the Washington, D.C.-based Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR).
"They're just after censorship, pure and simple," Keller said Monday, Aug. 27, 2007, in an interview with www.bannedmagazine.com. "The crazy thing is all I did was tell the truth about Islam from the Biblical perspective. It’s a false religion and there was no prophet named Mohammed. He’s a false prophet...I’m just lost, don’t these people own remote controls? It’s past the point of being offended. They just want to silence people who take a hard Biblical view of the world."
Keller said station officials told him people at the station were afraid to work with Keller because of the complaints from CAIR. His show aired live each night from 1 a.m. to 2 a.m.
However, WTOG Station Manager Laura Caruso said Keller "can discuss anything he wants."
"It’s a commercial. He does not work for us. It’s a paid advertisement just like any other paid advertisement. It has nothing to do with anything that the media is making it out to be," Caruso said during a telephone interview Monday, Aug. 27, 2007.
In fact, Keller's show is still on the air and doesn't end until Friday, Aug. 31, 2007. The following Monday, he starts a morning show on WTTA-TV Channel 38 in Tampa.
However, CAIR officials claimed they got Keller's show banned, the St. Petersburg Times reported. The CAIR web site ran a story on the front page about the show's cancellation.
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"For each of them (Keller and CAIR) it’s great for their causes. And I’m stuck in the middle," Caruso said.
CAIR officials also taped clips of Keller's rants against Islam and excerpts were posted on YouTube, the video sharing web site (see clip here). Keller said he plans to sue CAIR for violating his First Amendment rights and for violating copyright laws for recording his late-night sermons.
In one brief clip, Keller says "Trust me when I say Allah and the God of the Bible are not the same people. They are not interchangeable, these are not the same people, they are totally different. One is the God who created the universe and the other is a false god dreamed up by a murdering pedophile named Muhammad who wrote a fantasy book called the Koran."
Calls to CAIR spokesman Ibrahim Hooper from www.bannedmagazine.com were not returned Monday, Aug. 27, 2007.
Whether Keller's case is truly censorship is debatable, but CAIR has been successful in the past with getting on-air personalities banned.
In August of 2005, WMAL-AM radio in Washington, D.C., fired conservative talk show host Michael Graham after he called Islam a terrorist organization, United Press International reported.
Other acts of censorship initiated by CAIR include:
● CAIR reportedly threatened to file a lawsuit against the Young America's Foundation after it invited Robert Spencer to speak at the National Conservative Student Conference held in Virginia Aug. 2, 2007. Spencer runs a web site called JihadWatch.org.
● CAIR also tried to prevent the FBI from inviting Spencer to speak to a group of agents and law enforcement officers at the Indiana Joint Terrorism Task Force in March, according to a UPI report.
● The Tallahassee Democrat newspaper yanked Doug Marlette's political cartoon "What would Mohammed Drive?" off the paper's web site in 2002 after CAIR complained. The newspaper did not run the cartoon in its print edition. The drawing showed a man in a turban driving a Ryder truck with an atomic bomb in the back.
● The script to the move "The Sum of All Fears" was changed to please members of CAIR. The 2002 movie was based on the 1991 Tom Clancy novel by the same name. CAIR officials complained, according to press reports, because in the book Islamic terrorists obtain a nuclear weapon and detonate it at the Superbowl. The movie, over Clancy's objections, changed the Islamic terrorists to neo-Nazis.
Other acts of Muslim censorship in the U.S.:
● The murder of Chauncey Bailey, editor of the Oakland Post newspaper. Bailey was gunned down while he was working on a story about a business called Your Black Muslim Bakery. Oakland police arrested a handyman at the backery, Devaughndre Broussard, 19, and charged him with Bailey's Aug. 2, 2007, murder. Broussard's defense attorney, LeRue Grim, claims the leader of the bakery, Yusuf Bey IV, told Broussard to confess to the slaying to save the bakery, according to an Aug. 21, 2007, San Francisco Chronicle article.
● In July of 2007, Cambridge University Press asked schools and libraries in the U.S. to turn in copies of the book Alms for Jihad. The U.K.-based publishing house agreed to destroy copies of the book to settle a libel suit brought by Saudi billionaire Khalid bin Mahfouz, who is identified in the book as a financial supporter of Al Qaeda.
● In April of 2007, PBS refused to air a documentary titled Islam vs Islamists after segments of the movie were played for Nation of Islam officials, who threatened to sue, according to an Arizona Republic newspaper article published April 10, 2007.
● In 2003, a Glyn O'Malley play titled Paradise was cancelled after Muslims in Cincinnati, Ohio complained about the depiction of a Palestinian girl who blew herself up in a suicide attack in Israel.
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What Readers are Saying:
Laura wrote: "hate speech? Jesus does not direct Christians to kill people that do not believe in Him, but the coran directs islamists to kill the infadels, [people who refuse to convert to islam. last time i checked, that's the hate speech duh!"
