CNN's Ratings Warriors
Outside of the obligatory comment wars whenever we talk about Islam here, there hasn’t be much in the way of conversation about this ridiculous tirade that Christian Amanpour (who’s name I can’t say without thinking about Kuala Lumpur)has created for CNN, God’s Warriors. I have watched the first two about the Jews and the Muslims and all I can think about it the Tom Lehrer song “National Brotherhood Week.”
Oh, the Protestants hate the Catholics
And the Catholics hate the Protestants
And the Hindus hate the Moslems
And everybody hates the Jews
BUT NOT ON NATIONAL BROTHERHOOD WEEK!
However this show seems to have it inversed; everyone hates everyone! Outside of the issues conflating all Jewish (rightwing or otherwise) radicals with Rightwing Settlers and lumping all Muslim fundamentalism together, from London to Lebanon, and from Afghanistan to America while saying Palestine and Israel is at the core of it all, this “ground breaking series” is nothing of the sort.
I got say that the point of 24 hour news stations is to get ratings and these pieces were very entertaining. If I was some Joe American I might even think that all Jews support everything that the Settlers do and every Muslim in America under the age of 40 supports suicide bombing. While both groups have their set of crazies, and it may even seem that according to CNN both have about the same amount of wackos, that religion is an evil and scary thing to be studied in a laboratory and kept far away from the safety of tolerance that is the West. (oh that is FUNNY!)
The thing that cooked my goat however was the Kuala Lumpur Amanpour repeated “God’s Jewish/Muslim Warriors” almost every three or four minutes. COME WOMAN! Expand that intelligently-accented lexicon and say something else! At the beginning and end of each of the shows I saw it was clear that she was reporting as a Westerner and a secularist, an outsider. She would say things like “Millions throughout the woooorld see life through a religious lens.” No kidding!
OF COURSE millions of people see the world through a religious lens! But just because they keep kosher or read the Koran doesn’t mean they are going blow some shit up! Get real!
I have the last episode taped at home for watching this weekend. It is on God’s Christian Warriors. I am excited to see how Kuala Lumpur Amanpour deals with the fact that Christian fundamentalist come from the West, fight in the West and blow shit up in the West.
This is Peter Jacob – CNN.
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I’m watching God’s Christian Warriors now, I think it’s the most interesting of the three, but it really isn’t anything you couldn’t have watched or read elsewhere. They had so many commercials for this “special” the past few months, I thought maybe she’d tell us a few things we didn’t know.
Did anyone here who watched these feel like they learned something?
not a thing.
One wonders why in Amanpour’s God’s Warriors references to the Afghan war are reduced down to merely mention it as the cause celebre of a fringe bunch of some Arab youth. A fuller picture will
take account of other much pertinent factors worth taking note of:
According to Bob Woodward’s book ”Veil: The Secret Wars of the CIA 1981-1987.” William Casey believed not only in the President Reagan’s ”evil empire” brand of anti-Communism but also in taking risks. Casey had the instincts of a venture capitalist, but as Director of Central Intelligence he was playing not with money but with people’s lives.
CNN would recall interviewing Jere Van Dyk the author of “In Afghanistan” and a former reporter for The New York Times. In the early 1980s he covered the Afghan-Soviet war, living with the Afghan rebels. Van Dyk recalls:
In 1986, the CIA under William Casey, made a very clear decision to supply the Afghans with serious hardware, stinger missiles. The United States ultimately spent $10 billion supplying weapons to the men fighting the Soviet Union. All of these arms went through the Pakistani military, in particular, the intelligence arm, which is called ISI, Interservice Intelligence. The ISI gave most of these arms to the most radical elements in the mujahadin.
Van Dyk further reminds:
“In the mid-1980s, Pakistani and American military officers did train certain members of the mujahadin. We were introducing new weaponry to them, and we wanted them to win their war. So we did do some training. We did not fight with them. And bin Laden did, at the beginning, work with the Americans.”
Crile and the subject of the book, former Texas congressman Charlie Wilson, will speak to the Friends of the LBJ Library on October 7, 2003.
According to the book’s publisher, The Atlantic Monthly Press, “George Crile tells how Charlie Wilson, a maverick congressman from east Texas, conspired with a rogue CIA operative to launch the biggest, meanest, and most successful covert operation in the Agency’s history. At a time when Ronald Reagan faced a total cutoff of funding for the Contra war, Wilson, who sat on the all-powerful House Appropriations Committee, managed to procure hundreds of millions of dollars to support the mujadiheen.”
Another character worth a befitting mention is Charles Wilson, a Texas congressman who uses his political wiles to arm tribes of Afghan holy warriors…which ultimately led to the fall of the Soviet Union in the best-seller by George Cirle Charlie Wilson’s War: The Extraordinary Story of the Largest Covert Operation in History.
The Houston Post writes, “In Charlie Wilson’s War, George Crile reveals in extraordinary detail the over-the-top, under-the-table machinations of Charles Wilson, one of Capitol Hill’s ablest political bulldozers, as he spearheaded what eventually became known as the Soviets’ Vietnam.”
Amanpour was right-on, and I appreciate what she has done.
The reality is that religious extremism is on its way to destroying humanity, and Islam is the WORST of the worst.
Check out this scary site:
The Truth About Islam
http://islamwatchers.blogspot.com
It’s not really scary. Just paranoid and stupid. I find it very cute when abusive bigots try to come off as ‘truthful.’
I’m surprised Christiane Amanpour didn’t mention anything about the Lord’s Resistance Army.
Peter Jacob (Israel & USA):
It doesn’t mean they are going blow some shit up but it does mean it could end up in those practices because if reading Koran or keeping kosher is a religious practice, there are lots of crazy practices in religion too.
I think so Amanpour’s documentary is one of the best on its kind that without any bias to any religion is showing the truth about it.
Fariborz-
No question that religious practices are crazy but that doesn’t mean that a majority of believers will strap explosives and nails to tier body and try to kill as many civilians as possible.
And after watching the third piece of the series it is shocking how bad these represent extremists. This was silly TV
Not surprisingly, I thought the series was very good. I thought it captured the extremists on the Israeli and Islamic sides very well, and also some secular freaks, too.
Not being a fanatic, I don’t get offended when someone denounces Islamicism, for example, because Islamicism is not Islam.
Ray Hanania
http://www.hanania.com
Who do you claim to be God? Jesus, Buddah, Allah, etc. You can vote on this today at http://www.pollicious.com
As a Baha’i I believe there is only one God. But, people call him different things…
Peter Jacob:
That could be right. The thing is if a teaching is wrong it can develop hatred and extremism between future majority. e.g. like what is happening in Iraq between Sunnis and Shiites and they kill as many as civilians as possible just to take over power in Iraq!
Over all religion can be for good and bad. But these TV shows were just too simplistic to gather the over all ideas of Islam, Judaism and Christianty.
I truly enjoyed Amanpour’s series. I have yet to watch the Jewish Warriors one, but I have watched both the Muslim and Christian ones, and I did learn a lot – I also thought Amanpour did a great job of reporting without bias.
Of course, no intelligent person (and as a “Jessica American” I know a lot of “Joe Americans”) watching this series would assume that “all Jews support everything that the Settlers do and every Muslim in America under the age of 40 supports suicide bombing. While both groups have their set of crazies, and it may even seem that according to CNN both have about the same amount of wackos, that religion is an evil and scary thing to be studied in a laboratory and kept far away from the safety of tolerance that is the West.”
I think it was made pretty clear that although the ideologies are similar in most of the religious fundamentalists – regardless if they are Jewish, Christian, or Muslim – the methodologies are different, and it is clear that some parts of some religions advocate more violence than others.
Yes, religious extremism may be paranoid, stupid, and silly but dismissing it in those ways WITHOUT addressing it as the serious threat that it is and can be is exactly why our world is in its current state. I’m glad that Amanpour made this series so that everyone can get a glimpse of what is really going on and hopefully address it – clearly, the West is not safe and not 100% tolerant, and both sides of that coin need to be examined. That examination might just be prompted in more people by watching this series, and (in my humble “Jessica American” opinion) true, internal self-reflection is a good thing.