From 9/11 to Afghanistan loss, TV cheered war at great cost

A handful of merchants and workers gathered around an old TV in a dilapidated stall in Cairo’s Khan el-Khalili souk as a friend and I walked through the marketplace during a visit to Egypt in the late summer of 2001. There’s no shortage of documentaries and specials commemorating the 20th anniversary of the 2001 terror strikes, when four coordinated attacks by Al Qaeda operatives were carried out via commercial jetliners on civilian and government targets: Apple TV+’s “9/11: Inside the President’s War Room,” NatGeo’s “One Day in America,” HBO’s “NYC Epicenters 9/11-2021½” by Spike Lee, four documentaries from the History Channel. Even after Iraq’s Hussein was captured by U.S. forces during an operation named after the movie “Red Dawn,” his tribunal and 2006 execution were sparsely covered on American news, likely because it was so brutal, and that sort of ending doesn’t fit a tidy narrative of democratic nation-building. Television ‘Do not tell anybody you’re Muslim’: ‘Ramy’ stars reflect on Hollywood’s longtime neglect Ramy Youssef and Mahershala Ali discuss Season 2 of Hulu series “Ramy” and Hollywood’s long neglect of Muslim stories and characters. It’s this amazing tradition that shows the entire world that even the president is not beyond the reach of the 1st Amendment.” Ramy Youssef, right, and Hiam Abbass in the “Ramy” episode “Do the Ramadan.” And then there’s the Hulu dramedy “Ramy,” comedian Ramy Youssef’s semi-autobiographical series about a first-generation Muslim American millennial in New Jersey.