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.

FMI: www.boeing.com, www.bellhelicopter.com