Canadian novelist and veteran documentary filmmaker Martyn Burke is not someone you'd expect to get into an ugly ideological spitting match with the folks who run PBS.

Burke, who lives and works in the heart of the Hollywood creative community, considers himself neither conservative nor liberal. But "Islam vs. Islamist," the documentary he made about how moderate Muslims are being silenced and intimidated by Islamist extremists, will not be part of "America at a Crossroads," PBS's new 11-part, six-night series about post-9/11 America that begins Sunday night at 9.

Executives at WETA in Washington, D.C., the public station overseeing the series for PBS, say the documentary was cut from the "Crossroads" lineup because it wasn't completed in time and because it was “alarmist” and not objective. PBS says it may run it at a later date.

Burke, however, says his documentary, made with $700,000 in Corporation for Public Broadcasting money, was interfered with and then dropped because he refused to fire his two co-producers, Frank Gaffney and Alex Alexiev, who run the Center for Security Policy think tank.

Burke says he is telling his side of the story because "of a long litany of unbelievably unprofessional things" that have happened and because PBS series producers violated "the basic tenets of journalism." I talked to Burke by telephone on Thursday, April12, from his home in Santa Monica, Calif.:

Q: Is this what you get for taking $700,000 from the taxpayers to make a documentary?
A: Probably. I think I’m paying for my sins of working on the public purse right now. But, no, we took this on because we just wanted to ask one simple question after 9/11: Where are the moderate Muslims and why aren’t they speaking out? We took this for a very serious purpose. We thought it was a question that needed answering and the answer we found was that the moderate Muslims have been generally intimidated, in many cases, through coercion, ostracism or sometimes outright fear of physical violence. That is what we wanted to show.

Q: That’s what “Islam vs. Islamists” is about?
A: Yes. We portrayed a number of moderate Muslims in Denmark, in France, in Canada and in the United States -- the U.S. being one community in Flint, Mich., and one in Phoenix. We chose moderate Muslims. We hired a team of journalists, some of the best we could get our hands on, who are reporters from major newspapers in France, Denmark and Toronto. We had a Pulitzer Prize nominee and a woman profiled in The New York Times for the excellence of her team. We were just about making a documentary on this topic but we found ourselves enmeshed in politics unlike I have never seen before.

Q: A lot of people don’t realize that documentaries are not meant to be balanced and neutral -- they always have a point of view. So what is the slant or agenda of “Islam vs. Islamists”?
A: One of the absolutely growing elements of hysteria from WETA within PBS was that we have a point of view. We said, “Of course we have a point of view.” Our point of view -- based on the research, based on the reporting and the discussions with all these world-class reporters that we had engaged on this topic -- was that there is a large community of moderates within the Muslim world who are afraid to speak up and we’re showing why. It’s because of the attacks of the Islamists.

What PBS/WETA attacked us on was they wanted us, in our opinion, to become virtually apologists for the Islamists, those who are the fundamentalists in this world.

Basically, the attitude of this one small group -- and again I have to say within WETA -- was that the Muslims we were portraying as the moderates were in some way, in their view, not true Muslims because they were Westernized; they believed in democracy, which by the way the Islamists do not and will openly say that.

But they (the group within WETA) felt that the Islamists … somehow represented a truer strain of Islam. We said that is not the case as we have found it. And it became a sort of battle, with them saying to us, “Well, you control this. It is your film, but” – and it was a huge, capital-letter “But” – “if you do not do what we want, we will throw you out of the series.” Continued...