Tuesday, August 28, 2007
God's Warriors Savaged
CNN's Pressroom announced that its upcoming six-hour special “God's Warriors,” reported by Christiane Amanpour, will discuss “the impact of religious fundamentalism as a powerful political force.” In the process, CNN revealed what it thinks about the various “fundamentalists” around the world by pushing the typical multi-culti PC media position that no one religion is more problematic or violent than another, with all types of fundamentalism being equally dangerous.
Their examples of fundamentalists spoke volumes. Photo captions on the program's website easily labeled a Jewish group “terrorist,” but in every mention, called Palestinian suicide bombers “martyr” or “martyrs.” Into that mix of religious violence, CNN bizarrely included the non-violent American Christian youth group, Battle Cry. Sure, that makes sense. No conviction by association there.
The press release lumped the “fundamentalism” of America's “Christian Right” (because all of the Christian Right are fundamentalists) and the Moral Majority with “fundamentalism” of the “militant” “Islamic jihadist” who assassinated Anwar Sadat and with the “militant Jewish” “fundamentalist” who assassinated Yitzak Rabin. As Sesame Street might sing, “One of these things is not like the others...” (emphasis mine throughout):
God’s Warriors includes interviews with former President Jimmy Carter about the political impact of the Christian Right in the United States; the Rev. Jerry Falwell – in his last television interview – about the political and cultural legacy of the Moral Majority movement in America; Noa Ben-Artzi, granddaughter of slain Israeli Prime Minister Yitzak Rabin, discusses his assassination by a militant Jewish fundamentalist; and Kamal el-Said Habib, a reformed Islamic jihadist who was part of the violent militant group that assassinated Egyptian President Anwar Sadat.
I'm sure Hamas-fan Carter, who was likely brought in to balance the late Falwell's Republican-favoring pro-Israel stance, will be very reasonable toward the “Christian Right,” especially their support of the Jewish state. I wonder if CNN will address Carter's established bias against Israel and his support of supporting these same violent militant Islamic groups.
One can argue the political influence of groups chosen by CNN, but the difference among the three in their use of violence is stark. The global footprint of militant fundamentalist Islam is far greater than militant Jewish and Christian fundamentalism, and as a group the Christian Right condemned the anti-abortion violence in the 1990s. The special seems to be comparing legal American political activism and a marginalized small-time Israeli terrorist group to a brutal global Islamic movement that tolerates no dissent, even from other Muslims. I hope I'm wrong, and CNN shows that difference.
The images posted on the “God's Warriors” site further back up this unbalanced view. Several of the images of Muslims addressed suicide bombers (which the readers must identify through CNN's use of the biased term) while injecting sympathy and victimhood by showing the grieving female relatives of the “martyrs” instead of, say, the deadly results of the "martyrs." Even the examples of militant Jewish fundamentalists were portrayed as bombers, but the weirdly semi-ominous images of the Christian “warriors” were mostly of the youth group Battle Cry, whose “battle” is for raising awareness for traditional values. Compare that to plucking out eyeballs and beheadings. Eh, to-may-to, to-mah-to.
Will “God's Warriors” be bold and address the obvious differences, or will it stick to the usual MSM playbook of minimizing the influence of Islam on politics, especially in Europe, and pretending that the “threat” of Jewish and Christian fundamentalism equals the Islamic kind?
Mika Brzezinski might be taking a break from "Morning Joe," but the MSNBC show hasn't missed a liberal beat with her replacement. Tamron Hall today seemed to suggest that Christians and Jews could be next to emulate Muslim terror tactics.
At 6:35 A.M. EDT today, talk turned to the CNN series "God's Warriors," a classic exercise in moral equivalence. Hosted by Christiane Amanpour, the series focuses on extremists in Christianity, Judaism and Islam.
Earlier today, Hall had watched the segment on Jewish extremists. Scarborough called CNN on its moral relativism.
JOE SCARBOROUGH [Note: speaking very much tongue-in-cheek]: I'm sure we're going to find that there are Jewish and Christian organizations, international terror networks, that are set on the destruction of entire civilizations as we find in the Muslim world.
That's when Hall began to rise to CNN's defense.
View video here.
TAMRON HALL: I think they were careful. They kept bringing in the Muslim aspect of it. They're trying, they're fighting a delicate dance here. You know that, because they know that people like you are ready to say "are you insane?, what's going on here, the terrorists . . ."
SCARBOROUGH: The way they're promoting this, they're promoting this as "God's Warriors." And there is a moral eqivalency argument here, that somehow there's extremism in all religions, and somehow it's all equal. It is the Rosie O'Donnell argument that we should be just as nervous with Christian extremism as Muslim extremism.
HALL: I don't think that's what they're implying. I don't think that. I can't speak for . . .
SCARBOROUGH: It's certainly what it looks like in the advertisements.
A bit later:
SCARBOROUGH: There is a big, big difference between me believing that Scientologists don't have the way to heaven, and me going out and blowing up Scientology centers. And that right now is what separates Muslim extremists from Christian and Jewish extremists.
That's when Hall took her argument one giant step further . . .
HALL: But is it fair to ask the question "how long does that separation exist?" Because you never know who the next [terrorist] group [will be]. I'm not saying that [a few additional unintelligible words]."
It sure seemed that you did.
ASIDE: Her defense of CNN aside, Hall, who often mentions her Texas Bible Belt background, comes across affably. In a surfeit of sensitivity, she repeatedly spoke of "Jewish people" rather than "Jews." It's OK, Tamron, we're happy to be called "Jews." You Christian people should feel free to do so ;-)
CNN’s "God's Warriors" hinted that CNN and Christiane Amanpour gave Muslim "fundamentalists" in the U.S. sympathetic treatment, while they showed discomfort towards Christian conservatives. The original intention was to give examples of each in that post, but the distinction is so clear and important that it deserves its own separate post.
Bob Knight of MRC’s Culture and Media Institute detailed some examples of Amanpour’s biased treatment of Christian conservatives in his latest column. She spent the last 20 minutes of "God’s Christian Warriors" profiling the Battlecry Campaign of Ron Luce, an evangelical Christian who runs a larger organization called Teen Mania Ministries.
As Knight pointed out, Amanpour "couldn’t quite conceal her hostility" towards Luce. A partial transcript from this segment showing the full context of her rather-pointed questions clearly demonstrated this hostility.
Video (1:39): Real (1.21 MB) or Windows (1.03 MB), plus MP3 audio (759 kB).
AMANPOUR (voice-over): His [Luce's] ministry is located on 472 acres in rural east Texas.... Here, he trains teenagers how to spread his message.... They are the foot soldiers in Ron Luce's army for God.... They also serve as the backbone for BattleCry. They plan the events, act in them and even create their own media to combat today's mass media.... On campus, students must follow a strict set of rules.... No secular music or television. No "R"-rated movies. No alcohol. No drugs. No dating.
AMANPOUR (on camera): When I, you know, read that women have to wear skirts of a certain length, and guys aren't allowed to, you know, go on the Internet, unsupervised. And I think, you know, totalitarian regimes.
LUCE: No. It's about learning to have disciplines that communicate purity. You know? The skirts' length are to keep guys from -- you know, any man on the planet can be distracted, and we don't want to unintentionally create distraction.
AMANPOUR: But, Ron, that's what the Taliban said. They kept women in their house, because men couldn't be trusted around them.
LUCE: Well, there's extremists. You came to our campus. They did, your team did. They can see that we're not extremists. The kids are normal, and they have fun, and they wear normal clothes. It's just not -- it's not -- they've not adapted. We haven't adapted the dress code to the sexualization that's happened in our culture.
Amanpour is being more than a bit hyperbolic concerning how Luce and his organization treats his young female students. In the video accompanying her voice-over detailing Luce’s east-Texas campus, there are more than a few women visible who are wearing pants instead of skirts. The young woman featured immediately after Luce’s answer to Amanpour’s "Taliban" comment wore blue jeans during all of the time she appeared on-camera. She also obviously couldn’t tell the difference between the Taliban, who, as she said, "kept their women in their house," and the students on Luce’s campus, who are free to come and leave as they please.
It should also be pointed out that all of the people and groups detailed in "God’s Christian Warriors" belonged to conservative evangelical/Protestant Christianity. Other than Amanpour’s passing reference to "Catholic, Mormons, and social conservatives" joining Jerry Falwell in his Moral Majority, and stock footage of the annual pro-life March for Life in Washington, DC in which a protester praying the Rosary is prominent, there is no significant mention of other conservatives in the program. The evangelicals are clearly a bigger "boogeyman" for CNN and Amanpour.
By contrast, Amanpour spent a whole segment detailing the plight of Muslims in the U.S. The six-and-a-half minute segment, titled "A Personal Jihad," profiled Rehan Seyam, an American-born Muslim of Egyptian descent who, in Amanpour’s words, is a "jihadist, just not the sort you’re thinking of."
The following partial transcript demonstrates the clear sympathetic treatment Seyam and her fellow American Muslims received from Amanpour.
Video (2:07): Real (1.54 MB) or Windows (1.29 MB), plus MP3 audio (965 kB)
AMANPOUR (voice-over): She's a lifelong American.... Born and raised in Islip, Long Island.... But Rehan Seyam is a jihadist, just not the sort you're thinking of.
SEYAM: The word jihad means struggle. I treat me wearing hijab in the United States as a struggle, jihad itself, struggle. That's my jihad. I mean, holy war, really? Who made that up? That's really a very bad translation. It's a self-struggle. Living in a secular society, where you have to work to maintain your Islamic values, that's jihad.
AMANPOUR: Rehan Seyam's parents came here from Egypt. They were devout. But, like so many immigrant children, she was a typically Americanized teenager.
SEYAM: So, when I would be called to pray by my parents, I would just run between commercial breaks, and wash up and pray, and run back, and hopefully I didn't miss my TV show.
AMANPOUR: But, as she grew up and went to college in what was now a post-9/11 world, she began to get closer to Islam. And, one morning, she made a decision that would change her life, to wear the hijab, the traditional Muslim head scarf.
SEYAM: It was very dramatic for me. And I remember how -- like, even now, thinking about it, it really does make my heart beat a little bit faster, because I was making a decision I knew was permanent. You put on hijab, you don't take it off. So, I said, that's it.
AMANPOUR: Rehan's jihad isn't violence, not even close, but it is public. It is a deliberate display of faith, not just covering her head, but swearing off alcohol, praying five times a day, which isn't easy in a typically busy American life.... For Rehan and her husband, Rahmi... and most practicing Muslims, Islam is their identity. It shapes every aspect of who they are.
SEYAM: Islam is a way of life. Ask anyone who practices. They will tell you, it's not just your religion. A lot of people go to the church on Sunday, and that's their religion for their week. Mine is every single day, every minute of my day.
AMANPOUR: Islam even shaped their courtship. Rahmi asked Rehan's parents for permission before he asked her out.
SEYAM: I like that. I was like, he's, like -- he's religious, like, I could tell he wasn't going to try to meet me without any sort of, like, parental notification.
Islam shaped Seyam and her husband’s courtship? Could you imagine Amanpour’s reaction if one of the BattleCry students had said that their Christianity shaped their courtship?
Amanpour continued her profile of Seyam by focusing on her use of the Islamic veil, the hijab.
AMANPOUR: Rehan insists that covering up is not a sign of a woman's inferiority, as many Westerners believe, but a sign that Muslim women refuse to be degraded, as she feels they can be in American culture.
SEYAM: I don't want any guy looking at me, except for my husband, provocatively. Why would I want that? Why do I want to be a piece of meat?
Amanpour brought in author and religious historian Karen Armstrong, who was featured on all three segments of "God’s Warriors," to comment on this statement by Muslim women, since she as a former Catholic nun wore a habit, which is similar to the hijab.
KAREN ARMSTRONG, RELIGIOUS HISTORIAN: In some ways, it was very liberating. For seven whole years I never had once to think about my hairstyle, my makeup, my clothes. I never had to wear man-pleasing garments. I never had to fill my head with the junk that society tells women, to trivialize their lives about.
Earlier, Armstrong even came to the defense of Islam during Amanpour’s examination of Islamic fundamentalists’ treatment of women.
KAREN ARMSTRONG, RELIGIOUS HISTORIAN: It's important to say that none of the great world religions has been good for women, not a single one of them.
AMANPOUR: Religious historian Karen Armstrong says that Islam's Prophet Mohammed was actually ahead of his time when it came to women.
ARMSTRONG: The Koran gives women rights of inheritance and divorce that Western women would not receive until the 19th century. There is nothing in the Koran about all women having to be veiled or secluded in a certain part of the house. That came in later.
Unsuprisingly, Amanpour didn’t challenge Armstrong’s claim about Mohammed, who had 11 or 13 wives, and consummated the marriage to his "favorite" wife Aisha when she was nine years old.
Steve Kellmeyer of "The Fifth Column" blog (hat tip to Dawn Eden of The Dawn Patrol blog) pointed out in a column before the airing of "God’s Warriors" that the Jewish settlers on the West Bank featured in "God’s Jewish Warriors" drew their inspiration from the Book of Ezekiel. In fact, the verse from the Book of Ezekiel is only one of two religious texts that are directly cited in the six hours of programming of the miniseries, and it also appears prominently on the screen. Amanpour’s only other reference made to a religious text by name in "God’s Jewish Warriors" is that "in the Jewish bible, the Torah, the Book of Genesis says God gave this land to the Jewish people."
There is no direct reference to any passage in the Koran in "God’s Muslim Warriors." There are only three indirect references - the indirect reference by Armstrong mentioned above; a reference by religious historian Bruce Lawrence that in Islamist suicide bombers’ "interpretation of scripture, [their] reading of the Koran, martyrs go to paradise;" and in an interview of the family of a Palestinian gunman killed after he opened fire on Israelis, Amanpour mentioned that "the Koran says that suicide is haram, that you don't go to heaven if you kill yourself."
The "Christian Warriors" featured by Amanpour do talk about the Bible. For example, John Hagee, a pastor and "Christian Zionist" from Texas, made the second of two direct references to religious texts in the entire series, when he cited Genesis 12:3, that God "will bless those who bless you [the Jewish people] and I will curse those who curse you." But the only reference to a religious text by name by Amanpour in "God’s Christian Warriors" is her mention that "fifty-three percent, that's more than half of all Americans, believe in creationism, that God created the earth and everything on it, as it says in the book of Genesis."
Not everything in "God’s Warriors" is biased. In fact, Amanpour should be applauded for her profile of one of the "founding fathers" of modern Islamic radicalism, Sayyid Qutb, in "God’s Muslim Warriors," a figure who is not as well-known by Westerners as he should be. Also, while Amanpour did show her apparent hostility to Ron Luce and his BattleCry ministry in the last 20-minutes of "God’s Christian Warriors," her coverage of a BattleCry protest in front of San Francisco’s city hall did, perhaps inadvertently, show the organization in a good light, as the protest’s opponents came out in strength in their own display of intolerance towards Christians (as mentioned by Bob Knight in his column).
As Amanpour closed out her miniseries at the BattleCry concert in San Francisco, she said that "what struck me [at the BattleCry concert in San Francisco] was one woman in the wings." This young woman, named Jodie Dickens, poured out her heart about her love of God, as Amanpour listened sympathetically. This moment even "choked-up" one analyst for MRC. But it is clear that Amanpour approached the subject of "religious fundamentalism" from a more secular perspective.
CNN's upcoming miniseries "God's Warriors," hosted by left-wing bias exemplar Christiane Amanpour, looks like it will play the old liberal game of moral equivalence. Amanpour reportedly compares Christian chastity advocates to the Taliban in the miniseries. Even the promos for the miniseries which have been running on CNN for the past few weeks demonstrate the probable "game plan" that Amanpour and CNN have in mind, grouping together pro-life Christian college students protesting in front of the Supreme Court, Jewish settlers on the West Bank, and Islamic radicals. To paraphrase an old children's jingle, "two of these things are not like the other."
An "unprecedented six-hour television event," the miniseries will examine "God's Jewish Warriors" on Tuesday night, "God's Muslim Warriors" on Wednesday night, and "God's Christian Warriors" on Thursday night. A preview of "God's Christian Warriors," which ran on Friday's "The Situation Room," featured an interview of Jerry Falwell, which was conducted a week before the evangelical pastor's death. As one might expect, Amanpour asked Falwell about his much-publicized connection of the 9/11 attacks with secularism in America, in particular, the legalization of abortion.
The preview also juxtaposed clips from the Falwell interview with file footage of the bombing at a Birmingham, Alabama abortion clinic in 1998, and other attacks on abortionists from the 1990s that, in Amanpour's words, were conducted by "radical opponents [who] had long waged their holy war against abortion clinics," which also "terrified many women."
Amanpour also claimed that this violence "not only frightened a number of abortion clinics into closing, it also caused a public backlash," presumably against the wider pro-life movement, which is a debatable claim, given the continued viability of the pro-life movement. It is not clear from this preview whether Amanpour mentions in her documentary the fact that all mainstream pro-life leaders and organizations have repeatedly condemned violence against abortion providers.
The AP's David Bauder wrote positively of Amanpour and the upcoming minseries in an article on Monday. Bauder mentioned Amanpour's treatment of a "fundamentalist Christian group" called BattleCry in the miniseries (a preview of this can be viewed on YouTube). The following excerpt is another clue which supports the theory that Amanpour and CNN have their "moral equivalence" hat on.
The segment on Christians explores BattleCry in some depth, digging at the roots of an organization that fights against some of the cruder elements of popular culture and urges teenagers to be chaste. In noting how girls at some BattleCry events are encouraged to wear long dresses, Amanpour asks the group's leader how it is different from the Taliban.
Encouraging modest dress is the same as forcing girls out of school, beating women who don't wear burkhas, and publicly-executing offenders?
Christiane Amanpour’s six-hour miniseries "God’s Warriors" reflects less of the reality of "fundamentalist" monotheists - Jews, Muslims, and Christians - and more of liberals’ attitudes about these faiths. It is clear, given how CNN and Amanpour covered each faith, that they have sympathy towards Muslims in the U.S., "concern" with the Jewish settlers in the West Bank, and are uncomfortable towards the beliefs and practices of Christian evangelicals.
Tuesday night’s "God’s Jewish Warriors" focused on the cause of the "right-wing" Jewish settlers. The term "right wing" is used seven times to describe the settlers and/or their supporters in Israel and in the United States, and "fundamentalist/-ism" was used three times, once in reference to Christian supporters of the settlers in the U.S. On Wednesday night’s "God’s Muslim Warriors," "fundamentalist/-ism" was the more prevalent term, used 11 times. "Right wing" is used twice, only to describe Geert Wilders, a member of the Dutch Parliament.
A partial transcript of the first occasion Amanpour used the term "right-wing" to describe Wilders:
AMANPOUR: Across Europe, Islam is the fastest growing religion, the number of Muslims tripling in the last 30 years. This increased Muslim presence, and violence like the Van Gogh murder, play into the hands of right-wing politicians, like Geert Wilders, a member of the Dutch parliament...
GEERT WILDERS, MEMBER OF DUTCH PARLIAMENT: Yes, here we have my seat.
AMANPOUR: ...who fears the Dutch are losing their country to an alien culture. The party he's founded has staked its political future in large part on an anti-Islam platform. He's proposed shutting down immigration from non-western countries and banning burkas and nikabs, the head-to-toe coverings worn by some Muslim women, even though few here wear them.
A few minutes later, after talking about the "culture clash" between the native European Dutch and the Muslims in the country, Amanpour continued her profile of Wilders.
AMANPOUR: Emerson Vermaat, a Dutch investigative journalist, has spent years studying the group [the so-called “Hofstad Group,” a terror cell in the Netherlands] and the murder of Van Gogh.
EMERSON VERMAAT, DUTCH JOURNALIST: There was a meeting of Hofstad (ph) in Amsterdam, and they said, "We must do something. We must maybe kill someone, but we must revenge. Allah has been offended. The Koran has been offended."
AYAAN HIRSI ALI, FORMER MEMBER OF DUTCH PARLIAMENT: They would sit together. They would watch videos with beheadings and read the Koran together and then plot jihadi activities.
AMANPOUR: It is a twisted version of Islam fueled by the culture clash here. But also by a steady stream of Internet websites which offer radical Islam as the antidote to Western culture. This extremism has generated an extreme response from far-right politicians like Geert Wilders.
Thursday night’s "God’s Christian Warriors," by contrast, took the use of "right-wing" or similar terms to a new high. "Religious right" is used ten times, "Christian right" is used twice (once by a left-wing protester in San Francisco), "right" is used once, and "right-wing" is used once, for a total of 14 uses of "right" terms.
Amanpour also spent much more time focusing on opponents and/or dissenters of the "Christian Right" in the United States during her look at "God’s Christian Warriors." She used three whole segments on profiles of Jimmy Carter, whose new cause is for Christians to "focus on issues like poverty rather than on divisive issues like abortion and gay marriage," and opposing "the growing influence of fundamentalism in many religions characterized by rigidity, male domination, and exclusion;" Greg Boyd, a Yale and Princeton-trained minister in Minnesota who wants calls for a "divorce" in the "marriage between "conservative" Christianity" and "right-wing politics;" and Richard Cizik, the vice president for the National Association of Evangelicals, who, in Amanpour’s words, preaches the "gospel of saving the planet." These segments take up over 20 minutes of time in the two-hour special, which probably has more than a half-hour of commercials in it.
These 20 minutes compares with about 14 minutes spent on former Muslims and/or former Islamic radicals in "God’s Muslims Warriors. - under 8 minutes of a full segment on Daveed Gartenstein-Ross, a senior fellow at the conservative Foundation for Defense of Democracies, who was a Muslim radical; and clips from interviews of Ed Husain, a Muslim in the UK who was once a member of the radical Hiz Ut-Tahrir organization, and wrote a book to "raise the alarm" about Islamism; and Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a Somali Muslim-turned-atheist who is a former member of the Dutch Parliament. Neither Husain, who was given about 5 minutes; nor Ali, who was given just under a minute and a half; were profiled in full segments.
Critics of the Jewish settlers in "God’s Jewish Warriors" - Theodor Meron, a Holocaust survivor and international lawyer who stood by his 40-year old opinion that the Jewish settlements on the West Bank violate the Fourth Geneva Convention; Jimmy Carter; John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago, who wrote an article critical of the pro-Israel lobby in the U.S.; and Dror Etkes of the Israeli organization "Peace Now" received just over 3 minutes of air time in various segments.
In last night’s installment of the six-hour, three-part series God’s Warriors, CNN reporter Christiane Amanpour loads the deck to portray conservative Christians as dangerously at odds with science. She first uses an interview with maverick Rich Cizik of the National Association of Evangelicals, who has been criticized by many Christian leaders for his embrace of man-made Global Warming theory as fact, then turns to a family of homeschoolers.
Here’s a partial transcript:
AMANPOUR to CIZIK: You're saying it's the science that led you to this conclusion, whereas some of your fellow evangelicals, those who criticize your position, say it's the precisely the science and their suspicion of science which cause them to doubt and to reject what you're doing.
CIZIK: Yes, because, historically, evangelicals have reasoned like this: Scientists believe in evolution. Scientists are telling us climate change is real. Therefore, I won't believe what scientists are saying. It's illogical. It’s an erroneous kind of syllogism. But is that what's been occurring? Absolutely.
Wonder if CNN would agree that Christians are “poor, uneducated and easy to command,” too, as a Washington Post reporter described them famously a few years ago? Do monkeys like bananas? Skeptics point to rival scientific theories; they don’t trash science itself. There is no balance presented from any theologians, Intelligent Design advocates or scientists who contend that science has not proven beyond doubt either Darwinian macro-evolution or man-made Global Warming.
Amanpour then interviews the Nevarrs, a home-schooling family from Virginia, who come across as intelligent and sincere. But she zeroes in on their opposition to the teaching of evolution as fact, followed by this loaded account:
AMANPOUR (voice-over): God's warriors have fought the teaching of evolution in the schools and in the courts many times over the years. The most notable recent case was in Dover, Pennsylvania. The fight was over the theory of intelligent design, which maintains the universe is so complex, there has to be a master architect. The Dover school board said it could be taught. But opponents charged it was just creationism in disguise.
STEPHEN HARVEY, PLAINTIFF'S ATTORNEY: Intelligent design and religiously-motivated attacks on evolution have no place in our public school science classrooms.
AMANPOUR: And in December 2005, a judge agreed.
Amanpour then turns to Eugenie Scott, who directs the National Center for Science Education and, in Amanpour’s words, “monitors the creationist movement.” Scott talks about how some teachers skip teaching about evolution because of “the perception that evolution is very controversial.”
Now, check out this transition:
AMANPOUR: At the Nevarrs' house, the lessons continue.
Editor’s note: Those poor, poor children. The viewer is led to believe that they are being miseducated. Perhaps something should be done about this pesky home schooling movement ….
CNN's Pressroom announced that its upcoming six-hour special “God's Warriors,” reported by Christiane Amanpour, will discuss “the impact of religious fundamentalism as a powerful political force.” In the process, CNN revealed what it thinks about the various “fundamentalists” around the world by pushing the typical multi-culti PC media position that no one religion is more problematic or violent than another, with all types of fundamentalism being equally dangerous.
Their examples of fundamentalists spoke volumes. Photo captions on the program's website easily labeled a Jewish group “terrorist,” but in every mention, called Palestinian suicide bombers “martyr” or “martyrs.” Into that mix of religious violence, CNN bizarrely included the non-violent American Christian youth group, Battle Cry. Sure, that makes sense. No conviction by association there.
The press release lumped the “fundamentalism” of America's “Christian Right” (because all of the Christian Right are fundamentalists) and the Moral Majority with “fundamentalism” of the “militant” “Islamic jihadist” who assassinated Anwar Sadat and with the “militant Jewish” “fundamentalist” who assassinated Yitzak Rabin. As Sesame Street might sing, “One of these things is not like the others...” (emphasis mine throughout):
God’s Warriors includes interviews with former President Jimmy Carter about the political impact of the Christian Right in the United States; the Rev. Jerry Falwell – in his last television interview – about the political and cultural legacy of the Moral Majority movement in America; Noa Ben-Artzi, granddaughter of slain Israeli Prime Minister Yitzak Rabin, discusses his assassination by a militant Jewish fundamentalist; and Kamal el-Said Habib, a reformed Islamic jihadist who was part of the violent militant group that assassinated Egyptian President Anwar Sadat.
I'm sure Hamas-fan Carter, who was likely brought in to balance the late Falwell's Republican-favoring pro-Israel stance, will be very reasonable toward the “Christian Right,” especially their support of the Jewish state. I wonder if CNN will address Carter's established bias against Israel and his support of supporting these same violent militant Islamic groups.
One can argue the political influence of groups chosen by CNN, but the difference among the three in their use of violence is stark. The global footprint of militant fundamentalist Islam is far greater than militant Jewish and Christian fundamentalism, and as a group the Christian Right condemned the anti-abortion violence in the 1990s. The special seems to be comparing legal American political activism and a marginalized small-time Israeli terrorist group to a brutal global Islamic movement that tolerates no dissent, even from other Muslims. I hope I'm wrong, and CNN shows that difference.
The images posted on the “God's Warriors” site further back up this unbalanced view. Several of the images of Muslims addressed suicide bombers (which the readers must identify through CNN's use of the biased term) while injecting sympathy and victimhood by showing the grieving female relatives of the “martyrs” instead of, say, the deadly results of the "martyrs." Even the examples of militant Jewish fundamentalists were portrayed as bombers, but the weirdly semi-ominous images of the Christian “warriors” were mostly of the youth group Battle Cry, whose “battle” is for raising awareness for traditional values. Compare that to plucking out eyeballs and beheadings. Eh, to-may-to, to-mah-to.
Will “God's Warriors” be bold and address the obvious differences, or will it stick to the usual MSM playbook of minimizing the influence of Islam on politics, especially in Europe, and pretending that the “threat” of Jewish and Christian fundamentalism equals the Islamic kind?
MY COMMENT,
THIS IS TYPICAL LIBERAL PAP ABSORBED AND BOUGHT BY LIBERALS AS FACT. THATS WHY THEY ARE ALL SUCH SHEEP.
Their examples of fundamentalists spoke volumes. Photo captions on the program's website easily labeled a Jewish group “terrorist,” but in every mention, called Palestinian suicide bombers “martyr” or “martyrs.” Into that mix of religious violence, CNN bizarrely included the non-violent American Christian youth group, Battle Cry. Sure, that makes sense. No conviction by association there.
The press release lumped the “fundamentalism” of America's “Christian Right” (because all of the Christian Right are fundamentalists) and the Moral Majority with “fundamentalism” of the “militant” “Islamic jihadist” who assassinated Anwar Sadat and with the “militant Jewish” “fundamentalist” who assassinated Yitzak Rabin. As Sesame Street might sing, “One of these things is not like the others...” (emphasis mine throughout):
God’s Warriors includes interviews with former President Jimmy Carter about the political impact of the Christian Right in the United States; the Rev. Jerry Falwell – in his last television interview – about the political and cultural legacy of the Moral Majority movement in America; Noa Ben-Artzi, granddaughter of slain Israeli Prime Minister Yitzak Rabin, discusses his assassination by a militant Jewish fundamentalist; and Kamal el-Said Habib, a reformed Islamic jihadist who was part of the violent militant group that assassinated Egyptian President Anwar Sadat.
I'm sure Hamas-fan Carter, who was likely brought in to balance the late Falwell's Republican-favoring pro-Israel stance, will be very reasonable toward the “Christian Right,” especially their support of the Jewish state. I wonder if CNN will address Carter's established bias against Israel and his support of supporting these same violent militant Islamic groups.
One can argue the political influence of groups chosen by CNN, but the difference among the three in their use of violence is stark. The global footprint of militant fundamentalist Islam is far greater than militant Jewish and Christian fundamentalism, and as a group the Christian Right condemned the anti-abortion violence in the 1990s. The special seems to be comparing legal American political activism and a marginalized small-time Israeli terrorist group to a brutal global Islamic movement that tolerates no dissent, even from other Muslims. I hope I'm wrong, and CNN shows that difference.
The images posted on the “God's Warriors” site further back up this unbalanced view. Several of the images of Muslims addressed suicide bombers (which the readers must identify through CNN's use of the biased term) while injecting sympathy and victimhood by showing the grieving female relatives of the “martyrs” instead of, say, the deadly results of the "martyrs." Even the examples of militant Jewish fundamentalists were portrayed as bombers, but the weirdly semi-ominous images of the Christian “warriors” were mostly of the youth group Battle Cry, whose “battle” is for raising awareness for traditional values. Compare that to plucking out eyeballs and beheadings. Eh, to-may-to, to-mah-to.
Will “God's Warriors” be bold and address the obvious differences, or will it stick to the usual MSM playbook of minimizing the influence of Islam on politics, especially in Europe, and pretending that the “threat” of Jewish and Christian fundamentalism equals the Islamic kind?
Mika Brzezinski might be taking a break from "Morning Joe," but the MSNBC show hasn't missed a liberal beat with her replacement. Tamron Hall today seemed to suggest that Christians and Jews could be next to emulate Muslim terror tactics.
At 6:35 A.M. EDT today, talk turned to the CNN series "God's Warriors," a classic exercise in moral equivalence. Hosted by Christiane Amanpour, the series focuses on extremists in Christianity, Judaism and Islam.
Earlier today, Hall had watched the segment on Jewish extremists. Scarborough called CNN on its moral relativism.
JOE SCARBOROUGH [Note: speaking very much tongue-in-cheek]: I'm sure we're going to find that there are Jewish and Christian organizations, international terror networks, that are set on the destruction of entire civilizations as we find in the Muslim world.
That's when Hall began to rise to CNN's defense.
View video here.
TAMRON HALL: I think they were careful. They kept bringing in the Muslim aspect of it. They're trying, they're fighting a delicate dance here. You know that, because they know that people like you are ready to say "are you insane?, what's going on here, the terrorists . . ."
SCARBOROUGH: The way they're promoting this, they're promoting this as "God's Warriors." And there is a moral eqivalency argument here, that somehow there's extremism in all religions, and somehow it's all equal. It is the Rosie O'Donnell argument that we should be just as nervous with Christian extremism as Muslim extremism.
HALL: I don't think that's what they're implying. I don't think that. I can't speak for . . .
SCARBOROUGH: It's certainly what it looks like in the advertisements.
A bit later:
SCARBOROUGH: There is a big, big difference between me believing that Scientologists don't have the way to heaven, and me going out and blowing up Scientology centers. And that right now is what separates Muslim extremists from Christian and Jewish extremists.
That's when Hall took her argument one giant step further . . .
HALL: But is it fair to ask the question "how long does that separation exist?" Because you never know who the next [terrorist] group [will be]. I'm not saying that [a few additional unintelligible words]."
It sure seemed that you did.
ASIDE: Her defense of CNN aside, Hall, who often mentions her Texas Bible Belt background, comes across affably. In a surfeit of sensitivity, she repeatedly spoke of "Jewish people" rather than "Jews." It's OK, Tamron, we're happy to be called "Jews." You Christian people should feel free to do so ;-)
CNN’s "God's Warriors" hinted that CNN and Christiane Amanpour gave Muslim "fundamentalists" in the U.S. sympathetic treatment, while they showed discomfort towards Christian conservatives. The original intention was to give examples of each in that post, but the distinction is so clear and important that it deserves its own separate post.
Bob Knight of MRC’s Culture and Media Institute detailed some examples of Amanpour’s biased treatment of Christian conservatives in his latest column. She spent the last 20 minutes of "God’s Christian Warriors" profiling the Battlecry Campaign of Ron Luce, an evangelical Christian who runs a larger organization called Teen Mania Ministries.
As Knight pointed out, Amanpour "couldn’t quite conceal her hostility" towards Luce. A partial transcript from this segment showing the full context of her rather-pointed questions clearly demonstrated this hostility.
Video (1:39): Real (1.21 MB) or Windows (1.03 MB), plus MP3 audio (759 kB).
AMANPOUR (voice-over): His [Luce's] ministry is located on 472 acres in rural east Texas.... Here, he trains teenagers how to spread his message.... They are the foot soldiers in Ron Luce's army for God.... They also serve as the backbone for BattleCry. They plan the events, act in them and even create their own media to combat today's mass media.... On campus, students must follow a strict set of rules.... No secular music or television. No "R"-rated movies. No alcohol. No drugs. No dating.
AMANPOUR (on camera): When I, you know, read that women have to wear skirts of a certain length, and guys aren't allowed to, you know, go on the Internet, unsupervised. And I think, you know, totalitarian regimes.
LUCE: No. It's about learning to have disciplines that communicate purity. You know? The skirts' length are to keep guys from -- you know, any man on the planet can be distracted, and we don't want to unintentionally create distraction.
AMANPOUR: But, Ron, that's what the Taliban said. They kept women in their house, because men couldn't be trusted around them.
LUCE: Well, there's extremists. You came to our campus. They did, your team did. They can see that we're not extremists. The kids are normal, and they have fun, and they wear normal clothes. It's just not -- it's not -- they've not adapted. We haven't adapted the dress code to the sexualization that's happened in our culture.
Amanpour is being more than a bit hyperbolic concerning how Luce and his organization treats his young female students. In the video accompanying her voice-over detailing Luce’s east-Texas campus, there are more than a few women visible who are wearing pants instead of skirts. The young woman featured immediately after Luce’s answer to Amanpour’s "Taliban" comment wore blue jeans during all of the time she appeared on-camera. She also obviously couldn’t tell the difference between the Taliban, who, as she said, "kept their women in their house," and the students on Luce’s campus, who are free to come and leave as they please.
It should also be pointed out that all of the people and groups detailed in "God’s Christian Warriors" belonged to conservative evangelical/Protestant Christianity. Other than Amanpour’s passing reference to "Catholic, Mormons, and social conservatives" joining Jerry Falwell in his Moral Majority, and stock footage of the annual pro-life March for Life in Washington, DC in which a protester praying the Rosary is prominent, there is no significant mention of other conservatives in the program. The evangelicals are clearly a bigger "boogeyman" for CNN and Amanpour.
By contrast, Amanpour spent a whole segment detailing the plight of Muslims in the U.S. The six-and-a-half minute segment, titled "A Personal Jihad," profiled Rehan Seyam, an American-born Muslim of Egyptian descent who, in Amanpour’s words, is a "jihadist, just not the sort you’re thinking of."
The following partial transcript demonstrates the clear sympathetic treatment Seyam and her fellow American Muslims received from Amanpour.
Video (2:07): Real (1.54 MB) or Windows (1.29 MB), plus MP3 audio (965 kB)
AMANPOUR (voice-over): She's a lifelong American.... Born and raised in Islip, Long Island.... But Rehan Seyam is a jihadist, just not the sort you're thinking of.
SEYAM: The word jihad means struggle. I treat me wearing hijab in the United States as a struggle, jihad itself, struggle. That's my jihad. I mean, holy war, really? Who made that up? That's really a very bad translation. It's a self-struggle. Living in a secular society, where you have to work to maintain your Islamic values, that's jihad.
AMANPOUR: Rehan Seyam's parents came here from Egypt. They were devout. But, like so many immigrant children, she was a typically Americanized teenager.
SEYAM: So, when I would be called to pray by my parents, I would just run between commercial breaks, and wash up and pray, and run back, and hopefully I didn't miss my TV show.
AMANPOUR: But, as she grew up and went to college in what was now a post-9/11 world, she began to get closer to Islam. And, one morning, she made a decision that would change her life, to wear the hijab, the traditional Muslim head scarf.
SEYAM: It was very dramatic for me. And I remember how -- like, even now, thinking about it, it really does make my heart beat a little bit faster, because I was making a decision I knew was permanent. You put on hijab, you don't take it off. So, I said, that's it.
AMANPOUR: Rehan's jihad isn't violence, not even close, but it is public. It is a deliberate display of faith, not just covering her head, but swearing off alcohol, praying five times a day, which isn't easy in a typically busy American life.... For Rehan and her husband, Rahmi... and most practicing Muslims, Islam is their identity. It shapes every aspect of who they are.
SEYAM: Islam is a way of life. Ask anyone who practices. They will tell you, it's not just your religion. A lot of people go to the church on Sunday, and that's their religion for their week. Mine is every single day, every minute of my day.
AMANPOUR: Islam even shaped their courtship. Rahmi asked Rehan's parents for permission before he asked her out.
SEYAM: I like that. I was like, he's, like -- he's religious, like, I could tell he wasn't going to try to meet me without any sort of, like, parental notification.
Islam shaped Seyam and her husband’s courtship? Could you imagine Amanpour’s reaction if one of the BattleCry students had said that their Christianity shaped their courtship?
Amanpour continued her profile of Seyam by focusing on her use of the Islamic veil, the hijab.
AMANPOUR: Rehan insists that covering up is not a sign of a woman's inferiority, as many Westerners believe, but a sign that Muslim women refuse to be degraded, as she feels they can be in American culture.
SEYAM: I don't want any guy looking at me, except for my husband, provocatively. Why would I want that? Why do I want to be a piece of meat?
Amanpour brought in author and religious historian Karen Armstrong, who was featured on all three segments of "God’s Warriors," to comment on this statement by Muslim women, since she as a former Catholic nun wore a habit, which is similar to the hijab.
KAREN ARMSTRONG, RELIGIOUS HISTORIAN: In some ways, it was very liberating. For seven whole years I never had once to think about my hairstyle, my makeup, my clothes. I never had to wear man-pleasing garments. I never had to fill my head with the junk that society tells women, to trivialize their lives about.
Earlier, Armstrong even came to the defense of Islam during Amanpour’s examination of Islamic fundamentalists’ treatment of women.
KAREN ARMSTRONG, RELIGIOUS HISTORIAN: It's important to say that none of the great world religions has been good for women, not a single one of them.
AMANPOUR: Religious historian Karen Armstrong says that Islam's Prophet Mohammed was actually ahead of his time when it came to women.
ARMSTRONG: The Koran gives women rights of inheritance and divorce that Western women would not receive until the 19th century. There is nothing in the Koran about all women having to be veiled or secluded in a certain part of the house. That came in later.
Unsuprisingly, Amanpour didn’t challenge Armstrong’s claim about Mohammed, who had 11 or 13 wives, and consummated the marriage to his "favorite" wife Aisha when she was nine years old.
Steve Kellmeyer of "The Fifth Column" blog (hat tip to Dawn Eden of The Dawn Patrol blog) pointed out in a column before the airing of "God’s Warriors" that the Jewish settlers on the West Bank featured in "God’s Jewish Warriors" drew their inspiration from the Book of Ezekiel. In fact, the verse from the Book of Ezekiel is only one of two religious texts that are directly cited in the six hours of programming of the miniseries, and it also appears prominently on the screen. Amanpour’s only other reference made to a religious text by name in "God’s Jewish Warriors" is that "in the Jewish bible, the Torah, the Book of Genesis says God gave this land to the Jewish people."
There is no direct reference to any passage in the Koran in "God’s Muslim Warriors." There are only three indirect references - the indirect reference by Armstrong mentioned above; a reference by religious historian Bruce Lawrence that in Islamist suicide bombers’ "interpretation of scripture, [their] reading of the Koran, martyrs go to paradise;" and in an interview of the family of a Palestinian gunman killed after he opened fire on Israelis, Amanpour mentioned that "the Koran says that suicide is haram, that you don't go to heaven if you kill yourself."
The "Christian Warriors" featured by Amanpour do talk about the Bible. For example, John Hagee, a pastor and "Christian Zionist" from Texas, made the second of two direct references to religious texts in the entire series, when he cited Genesis 12:3, that God "will bless those who bless you [the Jewish people] and I will curse those who curse you." But the only reference to a religious text by name by Amanpour in "God’s Christian Warriors" is her mention that "fifty-three percent, that's more than half of all Americans, believe in creationism, that God created the earth and everything on it, as it says in the book of Genesis."
Not everything in "God’s Warriors" is biased. In fact, Amanpour should be applauded for her profile of one of the "founding fathers" of modern Islamic radicalism, Sayyid Qutb, in "God’s Muslim Warriors," a figure who is not as well-known by Westerners as he should be. Also, while Amanpour did show her apparent hostility to Ron Luce and his BattleCry ministry in the last 20-minutes of "God’s Christian Warriors," her coverage of a BattleCry protest in front of San Francisco’s city hall did, perhaps inadvertently, show the organization in a good light, as the protest’s opponents came out in strength in their own display of intolerance towards Christians (as mentioned by Bob Knight in his column).
As Amanpour closed out her miniseries at the BattleCry concert in San Francisco, she said that "what struck me [at the BattleCry concert in San Francisco] was one woman in the wings." This young woman, named Jodie Dickens, poured out her heart about her love of God, as Amanpour listened sympathetically. This moment even "choked-up" one analyst for MRC. But it is clear that Amanpour approached the subject of "religious fundamentalism" from a more secular perspective.
CNN's upcoming miniseries "God's Warriors," hosted by left-wing bias exemplar Christiane Amanpour, looks like it will play the old liberal game of moral equivalence. Amanpour reportedly compares Christian chastity advocates to the Taliban in the miniseries. Even the promos for the miniseries which have been running on CNN for the past few weeks demonstrate the probable "game plan" that Amanpour and CNN have in mind, grouping together pro-life Christian college students protesting in front of the Supreme Court, Jewish settlers on the West Bank, and Islamic radicals. To paraphrase an old children's jingle, "two of these things are not like the other."
An "unprecedented six-hour television event," the miniseries will examine "God's Jewish Warriors" on Tuesday night, "God's Muslim Warriors" on Wednesday night, and "God's Christian Warriors" on Thursday night. A preview of "God's Christian Warriors," which ran on Friday's "The Situation Room," featured an interview of Jerry Falwell, which was conducted a week before the evangelical pastor's death. As one might expect, Amanpour asked Falwell about his much-publicized connection of the 9/11 attacks with secularism in America, in particular, the legalization of abortion.
The preview also juxtaposed clips from the Falwell interview with file footage of the bombing at a Birmingham, Alabama abortion clinic in 1998, and other attacks on abortionists from the 1990s that, in Amanpour's words, were conducted by "radical opponents [who] had long waged their holy war against abortion clinics," which also "terrified many women."
Amanpour also claimed that this violence "not only frightened a number of abortion clinics into closing, it also caused a public backlash," presumably against the wider pro-life movement, which is a debatable claim, given the continued viability of the pro-life movement. It is not clear from this preview whether Amanpour mentions in her documentary the fact that all mainstream pro-life leaders and organizations have repeatedly condemned violence against abortion providers.
The AP's David Bauder wrote positively of Amanpour and the upcoming minseries in an article on Monday. Bauder mentioned Amanpour's treatment of a "fundamentalist Christian group" called BattleCry in the miniseries (a preview of this can be viewed on YouTube). The following excerpt is another clue which supports the theory that Amanpour and CNN have their "moral equivalence" hat on.
The segment on Christians explores BattleCry in some depth, digging at the roots of an organization that fights against some of the cruder elements of popular culture and urges teenagers to be chaste. In noting how girls at some BattleCry events are encouraged to wear long dresses, Amanpour asks the group's leader how it is different from the Taliban.
Encouraging modest dress is the same as forcing girls out of school, beating women who don't wear burkhas, and publicly-executing offenders?
Christiane Amanpour’s six-hour miniseries "God’s Warriors" reflects less of the reality of "fundamentalist" monotheists - Jews, Muslims, and Christians - and more of liberals’ attitudes about these faiths. It is clear, given how CNN and Amanpour covered each faith, that they have sympathy towards Muslims in the U.S., "concern" with the Jewish settlers in the West Bank, and are uncomfortable towards the beliefs and practices of Christian evangelicals.
Tuesday night’s "God’s Jewish Warriors" focused on the cause of the "right-wing" Jewish settlers. The term "right wing" is used seven times to describe the settlers and/or their supporters in Israel and in the United States, and "fundamentalist/-ism" was used three times, once in reference to Christian supporters of the settlers in the U.S. On Wednesday night’s "God’s Muslim Warriors," "fundamentalist/-ism" was the more prevalent term, used 11 times. "Right wing" is used twice, only to describe Geert Wilders, a member of the Dutch Parliament.
A partial transcript of the first occasion Amanpour used the term "right-wing" to describe Wilders:
AMANPOUR: Across Europe, Islam is the fastest growing religion, the number of Muslims tripling in the last 30 years. This increased Muslim presence, and violence like the Van Gogh murder, play into the hands of right-wing politicians, like Geert Wilders, a member of the Dutch parliament...
GEERT WILDERS, MEMBER OF DUTCH PARLIAMENT: Yes, here we have my seat.
AMANPOUR: ...who fears the Dutch are losing their country to an alien culture. The party he's founded has staked its political future in large part on an anti-Islam platform. He's proposed shutting down immigration from non-western countries and banning burkas and nikabs, the head-to-toe coverings worn by some Muslim women, even though few here wear them.
A few minutes later, after talking about the "culture clash" between the native European Dutch and the Muslims in the country, Amanpour continued her profile of Wilders.
AMANPOUR: Emerson Vermaat, a Dutch investigative journalist, has spent years studying the group [the so-called “Hofstad Group,” a terror cell in the Netherlands] and the murder of Van Gogh.
EMERSON VERMAAT, DUTCH JOURNALIST: There was a meeting of Hofstad (ph) in Amsterdam, and they said, "We must do something. We must maybe kill someone, but we must revenge. Allah has been offended. The Koran has been offended."
AYAAN HIRSI ALI, FORMER MEMBER OF DUTCH PARLIAMENT: They would sit together. They would watch videos with beheadings and read the Koran together and then plot jihadi activities.
AMANPOUR: It is a twisted version of Islam fueled by the culture clash here. But also by a steady stream of Internet websites which offer radical Islam as the antidote to Western culture. This extremism has generated an extreme response from far-right politicians like Geert Wilders.
Thursday night’s "God’s Christian Warriors," by contrast, took the use of "right-wing" or similar terms to a new high. "Religious right" is used ten times, "Christian right" is used twice (once by a left-wing protester in San Francisco), "right" is used once, and "right-wing" is used once, for a total of 14 uses of "right" terms.
Amanpour also spent much more time focusing on opponents and/or dissenters of the "Christian Right" in the United States during her look at "God’s Christian Warriors." She used three whole segments on profiles of Jimmy Carter, whose new cause is for Christians to "focus on issues like poverty rather than on divisive issues like abortion and gay marriage," and opposing "the growing influence of fundamentalism in many religions characterized by rigidity, male domination, and exclusion;" Greg Boyd, a Yale and Princeton-trained minister in Minnesota who wants calls for a "divorce" in the "marriage between "conservative" Christianity" and "right-wing politics;" and Richard Cizik, the vice president for the National Association of Evangelicals, who, in Amanpour’s words, preaches the "gospel of saving the planet." These segments take up over 20 minutes of time in the two-hour special, which probably has more than a half-hour of commercials in it.
These 20 minutes compares with about 14 minutes spent on former Muslims and/or former Islamic radicals in "God’s Muslims Warriors. - under 8 minutes of a full segment on Daveed Gartenstein-Ross, a senior fellow at the conservative Foundation for Defense of Democracies, who was a Muslim radical; and clips from interviews of Ed Husain, a Muslim in the UK who was once a member of the radical Hiz Ut-Tahrir organization, and wrote a book to "raise the alarm" about Islamism; and Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a Somali Muslim-turned-atheist who is a former member of the Dutch Parliament. Neither Husain, who was given about 5 minutes; nor Ali, who was given just under a minute and a half; were profiled in full segments.
Critics of the Jewish settlers in "God’s Jewish Warriors" - Theodor Meron, a Holocaust survivor and international lawyer who stood by his 40-year old opinion that the Jewish settlements on the West Bank violate the Fourth Geneva Convention; Jimmy Carter; John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago, who wrote an article critical of the pro-Israel lobby in the U.S.; and Dror Etkes of the Israeli organization "Peace Now" received just over 3 minutes of air time in various segments.
In last night’s installment of the six-hour, three-part series God’s Warriors, CNN reporter Christiane Amanpour loads the deck to portray conservative Christians as dangerously at odds with science. She first uses an interview with maverick Rich Cizik of the National Association of Evangelicals, who has been criticized by many Christian leaders for his embrace of man-made Global Warming theory as fact, then turns to a family of homeschoolers.
Here’s a partial transcript:
AMANPOUR to CIZIK: You're saying it's the science that led you to this conclusion, whereas some of your fellow evangelicals, those who criticize your position, say it's the precisely the science and their suspicion of science which cause them to doubt and to reject what you're doing.
CIZIK: Yes, because, historically, evangelicals have reasoned like this: Scientists believe in evolution. Scientists are telling us climate change is real. Therefore, I won't believe what scientists are saying. It's illogical. It’s an erroneous kind of syllogism. But is that what's been occurring? Absolutely.
Wonder if CNN would agree that Christians are “poor, uneducated and easy to command,” too, as a Washington Post reporter described them famously a few years ago? Do monkeys like bananas? Skeptics point to rival scientific theories; they don’t trash science itself. There is no balance presented from any theologians, Intelligent Design advocates or scientists who contend that science has not proven beyond doubt either Darwinian macro-evolution or man-made Global Warming.
Amanpour then interviews the Nevarrs, a home-schooling family from Virginia, who come across as intelligent and sincere. But she zeroes in on their opposition to the teaching of evolution as fact, followed by this loaded account:
AMANPOUR (voice-over): God's warriors have fought the teaching of evolution in the schools and in the courts many times over the years. The most notable recent case was in Dover, Pennsylvania. The fight was over the theory of intelligent design, which maintains the universe is so complex, there has to be a master architect. The Dover school board said it could be taught. But opponents charged it was just creationism in disguise.
STEPHEN HARVEY, PLAINTIFF'S ATTORNEY: Intelligent design and religiously-motivated attacks on evolution have no place in our public school science classrooms.
AMANPOUR: And in December 2005, a judge agreed.
Amanpour then turns to Eugenie Scott, who directs the National Center for Science Education and, in Amanpour’s words, “monitors the creationist movement.” Scott talks about how some teachers skip teaching about evolution because of “the perception that evolution is very controversial.”
Now, check out this transition:
AMANPOUR: At the Nevarrs' house, the lessons continue.
Editor’s note: Those poor, poor children. The viewer is led to believe that they are being miseducated. Perhaps something should be done about this pesky home schooling movement ….
CNN's Pressroom announced that its upcoming six-hour special “God's Warriors,” reported by Christiane Amanpour, will discuss “the impact of religious fundamentalism as a powerful political force.” In the process, CNN revealed what it thinks about the various “fundamentalists” around the world by pushing the typical multi-culti PC media position that no one religion is more problematic or violent than another, with all types of fundamentalism being equally dangerous.
Their examples of fundamentalists spoke volumes. Photo captions on the program's website easily labeled a Jewish group “terrorist,” but in every mention, called Palestinian suicide bombers “martyr” or “martyrs.” Into that mix of religious violence, CNN bizarrely included the non-violent American Christian youth group, Battle Cry. Sure, that makes sense. No conviction by association there.
The press release lumped the “fundamentalism” of America's “Christian Right” (because all of the Christian Right are fundamentalists) and the Moral Majority with “fundamentalism” of the “militant” “Islamic jihadist” who assassinated Anwar Sadat and with the “militant Jewish” “fundamentalist” who assassinated Yitzak Rabin. As Sesame Street might sing, “One of these things is not like the others...” (emphasis mine throughout):
God’s Warriors includes interviews with former President Jimmy Carter about the political impact of the Christian Right in the United States; the Rev. Jerry Falwell – in his last television interview – about the political and cultural legacy of the Moral Majority movement in America; Noa Ben-Artzi, granddaughter of slain Israeli Prime Minister Yitzak Rabin, discusses his assassination by a militant Jewish fundamentalist; and Kamal el-Said Habib, a reformed Islamic jihadist who was part of the violent militant group that assassinated Egyptian President Anwar Sadat.
I'm sure Hamas-fan Carter, who was likely brought in to balance the late Falwell's Republican-favoring pro-Israel stance, will be very reasonable toward the “Christian Right,” especially their support of the Jewish state. I wonder if CNN will address Carter's established bias against Israel and his support of supporting these same violent militant Islamic groups.
One can argue the political influence of groups chosen by CNN, but the difference among the three in their use of violence is stark. The global footprint of militant fundamentalist Islam is far greater than militant Jewish and Christian fundamentalism, and as a group the Christian Right condemned the anti-abortion violence in the 1990s. The special seems to be comparing legal American political activism and a marginalized small-time Israeli terrorist group to a brutal global Islamic movement that tolerates no dissent, even from other Muslims. I hope I'm wrong, and CNN shows that difference.
The images posted on the “God's Warriors” site further back up this unbalanced view. Several of the images of Muslims addressed suicide bombers (which the readers must identify through CNN's use of the biased term) while injecting sympathy and victimhood by showing the grieving female relatives of the “martyrs” instead of, say, the deadly results of the "martyrs." Even the examples of militant Jewish fundamentalists were portrayed as bombers, but the weirdly semi-ominous images of the Christian “warriors” were mostly of the youth group Battle Cry, whose “battle” is for raising awareness for traditional values. Compare that to plucking out eyeballs and beheadings. Eh, to-may-to, to-mah-to.
Will “God's Warriors” be bold and address the obvious differences, or will it stick to the usual MSM playbook of minimizing the influence of Islam on politics, especially in Europe, and pretending that the “threat” of Jewish and Christian fundamentalism equals the Islamic kind?
MY COMMENT,
THIS IS TYPICAL LIBERAL PAP ABSORBED AND BOUGHT BY LIBERALS AS FACT. THATS WHY THEY ARE ALL SUCH SHEEP.
