Bring In the Reinforcements

The American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee is presenting its regular “Advancing Tolerance” award at its annual conference this weekend in Washington.

It goes to Michal Goldman, producer of “Umm Kuthum: A Voice Like Egypt,” a documentary shown last year at a film festival at New York’s Lincoln Center.

For the first time, however, the committee is also handing out a second television award, this one to Saturday’s HBO movie, “Path to Paradise: The Untold Story of the World Trade Center Bombing.”

For “Enhancing Intolerance.”

HBO calls its account “the story behind” the 1993 terrorist explosion in Lower Manhattan that killed six people and injured 1,000 more--an act for which four followers of Egyptian-born Muslim Sheik Omar Abdel-Rahman were convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment.

The sheik himself and more of his followers were later convicted and imprisoned for plotting what prosectors called a jihad, or holy war, against the United States, a nation he considers an enemy of Islam pursuing an evil policy in the Middle East. Another of the sheik’s disciples was sentenced to life imprisonment for the 1990 murder of Rabbi Meir Kahane, fanatical founder of the Jewish Defense League.

“Path to Paradise” is very watchable, emblazoned by some of the kinetic flourishes and eye-catching froufrou visible on the episodes of NBC’s “Homicide: Life on the Street” and many music videos directed by Leslie Libman and Larry Williams, the wife-and-husband directors making their full-length feature debut here.

Style is commendable. Unfortunately, their work on “Path to Paradise” at times also recalls the magnified echo chamber of the TV tabloid “Hard Copy,” not quite the tone you’d prefer for a docudrama so potentially volatile.

“It does more to advance intolerance and racism than any single TV movie I’ve ever seen,” Jack G. Shaheen charged recently from his home in Hilton Head, S.C. And Shaheen has seen plenty. A respected scholar and severe critic of stereotyping, he’s the author of “The TV Arab,” a 1984 methodical bashing of the medium’s inhumane treatment of Arabs.

There’s a jihad here, he continues to believe, being conducted on the screen against Arabs.

Telling “Path to Paradise” mostly through the eyes of FBI agent John Anticev (Peter Gallagher) and, to a lesser degree, agent Nancy Floyd (Marcia Gay Hardin), Ned Curren’s script accuses the feds of bungling and failing to act on general knowledge they supposedly had about the terrorists’ plans before the bombing. In the movie, that information comes from Emad Salem (Ned Eisenberg), a paid informant and one of the sheik’s followers.

“Path to Paradise” also charges U.S. immigration officials with allowing absurdly easy entry (something the film plays almost as black comedy) to foreign-based terrorists. One is Ramzi Ahmed Yousef (Art Malik), the indicted, untried Muslim extremist accused of assembling the 1,200-pound fertilizer bomb planted in the basement garage of the twin-tower World Trade Center complex. (If it had been positioned more expertly, the toll would have been higher, perhaps killing even more than the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah federal building in Oklahoma City, according to law enforcement officials.)

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Thus, by far the heaviest heavies in this tragedy are Arab Muslims, motivated mainly by their hatred of the U.S. and its policies. They perpetrated the bombing and, as Shaheen says, “Damn them for doing that!” So what’s the problem?

Of the estimated 1.1 billion Muslims worldwide, more than 5 million reportedly live in the United States--the vast majority of whom are law-abiding and as worthy as anyone of being your next-door neighbor. Yet “Path to Paradise” never identifies the bombers as “a fringe group of a fringe group of a fringe group,” charged Shaheen, who was shown the movie by HBO last month. “It selectively frames every Muslim as a son of a bitch.”

Well, not every Muslim, just the conspirators, who are scary and evil. Yet “Path to Paradise” does cast a much wider net by implication, its cumulative weight a potential crushing indictment of all Arabs, nourishing an ugly stereotype of them as being barbaric. Especially as TV, ever lagging behind reality, offers so few positive images of Arabs for contrast.

In the movie, for example, nearly every introduction of an Arab or Muslim character is punctuated by a vibrating boom that resembles a gunshot or explosion, a powerful signal that resonates beyond the conspirators whom it’s supposed to symbolize. And although the cynical informant Salem tells FBI agents that “Islam is for peace” and that the sheik’s followers “dishonor my religion,” that early factoid counts little when so much that follows blurs the Koran’s teachings vis-a-vis violence.

The resulting impression, as Shaheen notes, is that “Islamic holy law says to strike terror in the heart of your enemies.”

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Intentional or not, that is one of the movie’s freeze-framed messages. As if Allah personally had ordered the World Trade Center leveled, the end credits roll ominously while what seem to be Islamic prayers are chanted in the background. Much like the chanting that came from Mecca’s sea of white robes--but in a calmer, more spiritual context--during “The Hajj,” a sensitive, thoughtful, serene, well-rounded mini-documentary about the holy city of Islam presented by ABC’s “Nightline” in April.

It’s not easy spreading fairness equally in a story as vividly gruesome as “Path to Paradise,” and one whose fanatical perpetrators are so identifiable as coming from one particular religious or ethnic group. After all, these people are who they are. Shaheen said he and representatives of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee and the American Muslim Council offered their ideas on how to approach the topic when invited to meet with HBO officials to discuss “Path to Paradise” last November, but then curiously were told the movie was a “done deal.”

Shaheen wrote in his 1984 book that he hoped someday to see a more balanced image of Arabs on TV. After “Path to Paradise,” he and others will still be waiting.

* “Path to Paradise: The Untold Story of the World Trade Center Bombing” can be seen Saturday at 9 p.m. on HBO. The network has rated it TV-14 (may be inappropriate for children under the age of 14).