"Boy, the way Cat Stevens played..."

(Note: I stole my title from the witty comment of a reader at FrontPageMag.com, Steve Buirstein.)

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Back in January of this year, Robert Spencer penned an articulate retort to an idea which the sly pseudo-reformer Muslim Reza Aslan broached, thinking (and jihading) out loud, while sitting next to the classical Leftist television producer, Norman Lear when the latter appeared as Aslan's first guest on his new chit-chat show, "Rough Draft With Reza Aslan".  That idea couched rhetorically by Aslan was:   

"I'm waiting for a Muslim 'All in the Family'."

Recently, Spencer had occasion to mention this again, in his report of yet another public call for a television sit-com about Muslims that will expose the Islamophobia of the typical non-Muslim American.  As the Miami Herald reporter cited by Spencer, Hannah Allam, put it (and what's up with that name? -- see more on that here...):

Muslim writers and artists agreed that they haven’t yet reached what some regard as their “Cosby Show moment,” a breakthrough hit that transforms mainstream thinking about Islam the way “The Cosby Show” challenged images of African Americans.

Spencer, however, I think misconstrues Reza Aslan's appeal.  Spencer wrote:

Reza Aslan, with his typical moronic arrogance, later updated the demand and called for a Muslim “All in the Family,” apparently not realizing that the central character of that show was a butt of jokes and an object of ridicule. But clearly he meant the same thing: if Americans could just see Muslims outside of the context of jihad terrorism, they would love them, and “Islamophobia” would evanesce.

The idea casually bounced around by Reza and All In the Family creator Norman Lear (still living at age 93 -- who said anti-American Leftism is bad for your health?) probably conceived of a non-Muslim Archie Bunker -- not a Muslim one, as Spencer seems to think.

This non-Muslim Archie would be updated from a 70s bigot into a 21st century Islamophobe -- with his daughter and son-in-law routinely, in that arrogantly self-righteous way that seems to come naturally to Leftists, chiding him for his regressive close-minded attitudes, as his pleasantly ditzy wife anxiously furrows her brow in the intuition that her husband means well, but is being unfair to all those nice Muslims.

Meanwhile, the show would parade in through its weekly revolving door of guests plenty of Muslim-American characters each week as foils to demonstrate Archie’s Islamophobia. One show could even have Archie’s daughter Gloria considering conversion to Islam — while Archie has a series of conniption fits at which the audience laughs like he’s a clown, while she and “Meathead” lecture Archie on why he’s over-reacting and being “paranoid” and “bigoted”, etc.

And, if (Allah forbid) this idea ever became realized -- “Allah in the Family” -- it’s highly unlikely the new actor to play the bigoted head of the family would be as brilliant as Carroll O’Connor who, in his ingenious ability to play the bigoted clown, still managed to invest the character with a degree of redeeming and even touching common sense (sort of the mirror image of Ben Vereen's blackface yet retaining the dignity of the black man).  And in so doing, O'Connor's genius as Archie lifted that show up from being the one-dimensional Stalinist propaganda which the arch-Leftist Norman Lear probably had in mind.