Although the Hanafi Siege (as it came to be called, after the particular branch of Islam that the gunmen supposedly adhered to) ended with only one death - that of a radio journalist – and Bernard Simon and the other hostages were released, the episode must have had a profound effect on the young David Simon, who was still in high school when it happened. Consequently, it has often attracted the ire of anti-Semites, notably in March 1977, when Bernard Simon, along with more than a hundred other people, was held hostage by a group of gunmen led by Hamaas Abdul Khaalis, a former official with the controversial Muslim group, Nation of Islam. His father, Bernard, had originally been a journalist (as Simon himself would become) but then became the public relations director for B’nai B’rith, a Jewish cultural and social organization that describes itself as “The Global Voice of the Jewish Community”. The most remarkable part of Simon’s childhood in Washington was truly remarkable. Instead, in an irony that will not be lost on Wire-heads everywhere, he was born in 1960 in Washington DC, the administrative and political capital of America which, although it is less than 40 miles from Baltimore in physical distance, is repeatedly shown in the series to be a million miles away culturally. “The Bard of Bodymore”, as Simon has been dubbed, is not quite a native of Baltimore, the city that he made world-famous. And that, in large part, is down to the unique vision of its creator, David Simon. Instead of the stream of Wire-type masterpieces that might have been expected to follow it, The Wire still stands alone magnificently, the greatest television series ever made and possibly the greatest television series that ever will be made. The irony is that, like Citizen Kane, The Wire was so remarkable, so revolutionary, that it was virtually impossible for anything else to follow it, let alone top it. The Wire is the Citizen Kane of television, revolutionizing television and televisual storytelling just as Citizen Kane revolutionized cinema and cinematic storytelling.
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