In Salon, Gary Kamiya has a long piece about the PBS series America at the Crossroads, a 12-part examination of U.S. foreign policy, Islam and terrorism post-9/11. There has been a good deal of controversy surrounding the series and its alleged right-wing tilt, which Kamiya confirms. But in doing so, he also displays unsettling biases against Islam's internal critics. Kamiya goes after one of the documentary producers, my friend Irshad Manji the heroic Muslim human rights activist whose book, The Trouble with Islam Today, is an international bestseller translated into over 25 languages. Along with Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Irshad is part of a small, vocal cohort of Muslims (though Ali is now an apostate) calling for urgent reform of their religion. Both women have had to live under stringent security measures because of frequent death threats. Kamiya writes that Irshad's documentary, "Faith Without Fear," is "about a figure too eccentric to speak for anyone except herself, and its inclusion in the series is highly dubious." He goes onto call her a "peculiar figure" and claims that her "attitude toward her religion seems so perversely critical that it's hard to believe she really believes either in Islam or any institutional religion at all." Why? Because she doesn't think that suicide bombers have "legitimate grievances," as we often hear from Muslim apologists or their friends in the Western left? Because Irshad is unashamed to speak about the faults within her faith, nor does she believe that the United States and Israel are the roots of all evil, she is therefore "peculiar" (notice how Kamiya writes about her as if she were a scientific specimen) and not worth listening to. Just as Timothy Garten Ash called Ali an "enlightenment fundamentalist" (whatever that means), many on the left expect "authentic" Muslims to be aggrieved towards the United States. Those who fail to toe this line are just co-opted neo-cons. Kamiya concludes that "the change [within Islam] is not going to be produced by someone as far out of the Arab and Muslim mainstream as she is." Kamiya is correct that Irshad is "far out of the Arab and Muslim mainstream." But the anomaly of Irshad Manji is an indictment of the Arab and Muslim world, not her. --James Kirchick