Companies Apologize For Image Of Troops Attacking Mosque
Officials from Boeing and Bell Helicopter Textron are attempting
to ease fallout in the Islamic community caused by an advertisement
that ran recently in the National Journal and Armed Forces Journal
magazines.
The ad (above) shows Special Forces troops descending from a
hovering CV-22 Osprey onto the roof of a smoking building with the
words "Muhammed Mosque" displayed on a sign in Arabic.
"It descends from the heavens. Ironically it unleashes hell,"
reads the ad, which ran this week in the National Journal and
earlier in the Armed Forces Journal. "Consider it a gift from
above."
The Council on American-Islamic Relations, an Washington,
D.C.-based Islamic civil-liberties group, fears the ad will further
bolster the belief held by many in the Muslim world that the US war
on Islamic extremists is a war on all of Islam.
"This can be used by
the extremists to reinforce that," said Corey Saylor, the council's
government-affairs director, to the Seattle Times. "And we
certainly don't want that."
Boeing and Bell officials were quick to state the ad never
should have been published.
"We consider the ad offensive, regret its publication and
apologize to those who, like us, are dismayed with its contents,"
said Boeing VP of Communications Mary Fester. A statement on the
Boeing website says the CV-22 advertisement is "clearly offensive,
and did not proceed through the normal channels within Boeing
before production."
"The bottom line is that the [Bell] people who approved this
didn't have authority to approve it," said Bell VP Mike Cox. He
said the company had asked the ad agency, TM Advertising of Irving,
TX, to come up with an image depicting the Osprey deploying troops
into a restrictive-access area.
The resulting image used in the ad was spliced together from
several photographs. "We didn't actually hover an Osprey over a
mosque," Cox said.
Boeing officials were alerted of potential trouble by their own
advertising agency when the ad originally ran in the Armed Forces
Journal. Boeing spokesman Walt Rice says the company contacted Bell
officials immediately to express their concerns about the ad.
The advertisement was subsequently cancelled all scheduled
bookings in other publications, including the National Journal
magazine, a publication geared to Washington lobbyists and members
of Congress. Nevertheless, the ad mistakenly ran in that
publication this week.