Although this season doesn't deal with Arab-American issues as directly as last, I'd like you to watch "24" on Fox tonight at 8. The show is about the Counter-Terrorism Unit (CTU) in Los Angeles. The first season was about an attempted assassination of a presidential candidate. That was in 2001. In 2002, the theme turned to international terrorism, specifically Islamic terrorism. Last season was about a plot to detonate a nuclear warhead in Los Angeles, and naturally the terrorists responsible for the attempted attack were Islamic extremists. Some of them were ethnically Arab, others were Iranian and Pakistani. We'll see a clips from that season in class tomorrow.

Tonight's episode will be about the revelation that the sitting U.S. president has schemed to unleash a terrorist attack in the United States to secure his political plans for the oil fields of (Muslim) Central Asia and consolidate support arround something like the Patriot Act. Very subversive stuff for Fox.

In any case, watch the episode and discuss it in terms of the war on terror and the U.S. Patriot Act.