By Darren Mcvey

There aren’t many television shows that can detonate a nuclear bomb in Los Angeles and the audiences believe it. There is one show, however, that has managed to shiver spines, widen eyes and inspire a devout following of millions of viewers. The show is “24.” The reason is realism.

The plot of the highly anticipated premiere of 24 this season centered on an eleven-week suicide bombing campaign culminating with the detonation of a suitcase-sized nuclear bomb in Valencia, Calif. But unlike every other film and television show since political correctness took over, the perpetrators of this attack are not Russian separatists or white supremacists. The villains of 24’s new season are Islamic extremists.

It’s hard to believe. I had assumed from almost every movie made since my birth that we are at fake war with men with buzz cuts, face scars and Russian accents. In the Middle East we are fighting theocratic tyrants who want to destroy western civilization and impose Sharia law and in L.A., their biggest threat is Boris and his Bosnian henchmen.

These thrillers are fiction, of course, but to truly entertain takes some realism. If the audience doesn’t believe in the story, they won’t care about it. And no doubt, most of the 30 million viewers of 24’s premiere at least entertained the reality. Which is why 24 is so popular.

Most Americans know that, no matter what the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) says, the biggest threat to America today is Islamic extremism. The detonation of the nuclear bomb on 24 is sobering because the reality is that there may be one hundred Russian suitcase nukes left unaccounted for. And one would have to be a fool to doubt that the same type of life forms that pulled off Sept. 11, would hesitate to set off one of these bombs in Manhattan or L.A.

24 did not take such a stand without controversy. Fox met with CAIR officials on Jan. 12 to discuss 24’s portrayal of Muslims. CAIR was especially concerned with a subplot showing a suburban Muslim family attacked by a blue-collar neighbor but defended by their more tolerant neighboring family. As it turned out, the son of this Muslim family was a teenage terrorist and an integral part of the suitcase nuke attack. According to the Associated Press, Rabiah Ahmed, a spokeswoman for CAIR, said, that after the premiere episode, she “was afraid to go to the grocery store because I wasn’t sure the person next to me would be able to differentiate between fiction and reality.”

Of course it is heartbreaking that innocent Muslim families feel threatened in suburban American. Ahmed, however, must have a distorted sense of reality. The producers of 24 are not responsible for the fact that their fictitious plots may portray an actual potential reality. Although Muslims are likely to be very safe going to the grocery store, if anti-Islamic violence happened to take place, 24 is not responsible.

The producers of 24 go out of their way to portray terrorist who are not Muslims and Muslims who not terrorists. The season premier even had a former Islamic terrorist who turned a new leaf and began working with the United States.

Anti-Islamic violence is not a huge problem in America. According to the FBI, of the 1,314 religious hate crimes reported in 2005, only 145 of them were “motivated by anti-Islamic bias.” That is 145 too many but compare it with the 900 hate crimes “motivated by anti-Jewish bias.” Statistically, Ahmed should feel quite safe going to an American grocery store, regardless of what was on television the night before.

Thank you 24. Thank you for portraying reality in the face of controversy, and not surrendering to CAIR and other politically correct critics. Most of all thank you for making a great show.

Darren McVey is a junior majoring in political science. E-mail him at opinion@louisvillecardinal.com.