" August 27, 2007 by Dexter Van Zile

God's Christian Warriors— CNN Slurs Christians

On August 23, CNN aired the final episode of its three-part series, "God's Warriors," hosted by Christiane Amanpour. At the end of this segment, devoted to "God's Christian Warrirors," Amanpour left viewers with a warning that society cannot ignore “the millions of people who feel their faith is being ignored, is being pushed aside and who are certain they know how to make the world right.”

Given the huge levels of religiously motivated violence taking place in the world today – most of it perpetrated by Muslims against Muslims – Amanpour is right. Religious fundamentalism cannot be ignored. Events of recent years have demonstrated that religious belief can be a source of violence on a global scale and can be used to justify depriving people – women especially – of their human rights.

But if Americans are going to determine how to respond to religious extremism on both an international and societal level, they surely cannot rely on Amanpour’s coverage of the issue. In her coverage of "Christian Warriors" Amanpour demonstrates a predictable inability to discern the difference between Christians in the U.S. who organize politically to affect public policy and suicide bombers in the Middle East who target civilians in an attempt to intimidate their opponents into submission.

Amanpour’s inability to discern the difference between believers who play by the rules of democratic pluralism and those who perpetrate violence to create a theocratic state was most evident during her interview with Ron Luce, founder of a ministry called "Tean Mania" headquartered in rural Texas, which has a strict moral code including no secular music, no television, no “R”-rated movies, no alcohol, no drugs and no dating.

AMANPOUR: 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’ lengths are to keep guys from – you know, any many 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 woman in their house, because men couldn’t be trusted around them.
Amanpour draws an outrageous comparison between the leader of a teen ministry that insists that young women wear long skirts and an honor-killing terrorist organization which according to Amanpour’s own reporting from November 2001, is responsible for driving women in Afghanistan into their homes.

For five years, the religious police known as the Department of the Prevention of Vice and the Promotion of Virtue issued a series of edicts against women, banning them from wearing makeup, from wearing high heels, from making a noise on the street when they walked, banning them from work, from education, from sitting next to men on busses or in cars.
Amanpour knows full well that Luce, the man standing in front of him during the interview, has nothing in common with the Taliban. An article of hers published in Time in June 2001, makes this perfectly clear:

From the day they marched into Kabul, the Taliban's adherents have sought to eradicate women from public life. In a land where the women have had to work while the men fought, the regime has barred females from taking any job outside the home or even leaving their houses without a male relative to accompany them. Girls have been thrown out of school. Foreign-aid agencies have been forbidden to offer any of their services or assistance directly to females.
Today Afghan women cannot even expect proper medical care. Three weeks ago, the Taliban decreed that female patients could no longer be treated at any of the main hospitals in Kabul and would be completely separated from male patients and medical personnel. We discovered that sick women are being sent to a crumbling old building that has no windowpanes, no running water, no proper operating room and barely enough electricity to power lightbulbs. The patients are tended by a meager female-only staff.
…
The toll such measures take on Afghan women is impossible to assess. Several told us how dispiriting it is to be thrown off a bus or forced to sit in the back. We heard reports of an increase in the suicide rate among females, and that many have sunk into despair and depression. For Afghanistan's tyrannized women, there is no escape from an unsparing, medieval way of life.
That Amanpour can equate Christians in the U.S. with the Taliban who shoved women into the shadows of Afghanistan beggars belief. None of the Christians she met insisted that she change into a more modest outfit as a prerequisite for the interview – while her interview regarding the Hidden Imam in Iran required her to put on a full headgear. And the cleric she interviewed about the subject would not even look at her during the course of the interview. By way of comparison, Jerry Falwell, founder of Moral Majority, spoke directly to Amanpour, telling her that he would support any presidential candidate – male or female – that was strong on security:

Well, certainly, we’d love to get, in one package, a man, a woman, who is strong on security and right on social issues. We’ve got to find the person closest to where we are.
It is interesting to note that the segment on Christianity included an interview with Mandy Chapman, a student at Falwell’s Liberty University who hopes to become a lawyer. Amanpour seems unable to discern the difference between the Taliban, a movement that denies women the right to attend school, with a movement that encourages them to attend college and become lawyers.

Compare Amanpour’s suspicion of Evangelical notions of chastity with Muslim convert Rehan Seyam’s desire to cover herself completely:

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: A feeling echoed by religious historian Karen Armstrong, who herself used to wear a habit as a former Roman Catholic nun.
ARMSTRONG: 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.
Amanpour did not challenge either of these interview subjects with the charge that they are pushing forth a Taliban-like agenda, but reserves that charge for Ron Luce, an Evangelical in Texas. Why?

Another revelatory moment came when Amanpour discussed the issue of woman’s rights with Kamal Al-Saad Habib, a former Egyptian jihadist and a member of the group that plotted the assassination of Anwar Sadat. When Habib informed Amanpour that women should not be allowed to govern over men, she smiles and wags her finger at Habib as if he were a naughty child, evoking laughter from the film crew. Hilarity for Habib and a gratuitous insult for Luce.

End Times

In her coverage of John Hagee and Christians United For Israel, Amanpour reports Hagee’s scenario for the end times: “Russia and its allies invade Israel. The anti-Christ appears as the head of the European Union. Armies mass and there’s a final battle at Armageddon resulting in a sea of human blood before Jesus returns to slay nonbelievers and reign over an era of peace.”

This is a frightening scenario, especially when its compared with Amanpour’s pretty benign portrayal of the Hidden Iman prophecy adhered to by Shia Muslims in Iran.

AMANPOUR: If Christians and Jews don't follow the Hidden Imam, clerics say there will be trouble.
MOHAMED REZAIE, MAGAZINE EDITOR, BRIGHT FUTURE INSTITUTE (through translator): If Judaism and Christianity don't recognize him, conflicts are possible. So, God will send Jesus to mediate.
In addition to giving relatively short shrift to the apocalyptic violence (“there will be trouble”) envisioned by adherents of the Hidden Imam scenario, Amanpour fails to detail how children were sent to their deaths on behalf of the Hidden Imam during the Iran-Iraq War in the 1980s. To be sure, she mentions Iran's policy of sending children to their deaths during this war, but the link between this action and belief in the Hidden Imam was left unmentioned. Writing in the Telegraph, Michael Burleigh reports that during this war, belief in the Hidden Imam was used to send children to their deaths.

During the eight-year war, an enormous militia, called the Basij, was created under the aegis of the Revolutionary Guard. Boys aged 12 to 17 were dispatched against the Iraqi army, each armed with a plastic key to paradise, manufactured in bulk in Taiwan. A ghostly pale rider occasionally appeared, whose phosphorous-painted face was supposed to be that of the Hidden Imam, to urge these suicide waves on. Mowing these children down — and perhaps as many as 100,000 were killed — was so traumatic that even battle-hardened Iraqi veterans declined to fire.

By way of comparison, Christian Zionists, or pre-millenial dispensationalists as they are called by their critics, have not sent children off to war, they have not threatened to destroy a state with nuclear weapons, nor have they hijacked any planes, blown up any busses, or assassinated anyone. Despite the fearsome manner in which Amanpour describes Christian Zionists, they abide by the rules of pluralistic democracy, and they do not always win, as the 2006 congressional elections demonstrated.

Timothy Weber, author of On the Road to Armageddon: How Evangelicals Became Israel’s Best Friend (Baker Academic, 2005), and one of the harshest critics of the Christian Zionist movement, admitted as such at a conference on Christian Zionism held at North Park University in Chicago in 2005. At a closing panel of the conference Weber stated:

I just need to point out that dispensationalists [Christian Zionists] are not throwing bombs. They are not attacking people in the streets. You may argue that they are promoting things that may lead to that by other people. That’s arguable. I think that that is certainly a possibility. But in our own context, in our own world and our own culture they play by the rules of American democracy. They attack verbally. They promote their own ideas. They denigrate others. But that’s the American way.
This description, offered by a ferocious critic of Christian Zionism, is a far cry from Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s belief in the Hidden Imam, the end time scenario embraced by many Shia Muslims in Iran. As Amanpour’s own reporting revealed

[Ahmadinejad] has reportedly made his entire cabinet take an oath of allegiance to the Hidden Imam, a ninth century Shiite cleric who is a direct descendant of the Prophet Mohammed. He is meant to come back one day as a Shia messiah. President Ahmadinejad repeatedly says that his government must hasten that day.

Amanpour would do well to learn the difference between those who have religious and political beliefs she finds distastetful, and extremists who perpetrate violence to force their beliefs on others. "

" August 22, 2007

God's Jewish Warriors — CNN's Abomination

UPDATE: See here for comments on part 2 of the series, "God's Muslim Warriors" and here for comments on part 3 of the series, "God's Christian Warriors."

CNN's "God's Warriors," hosted by Christiane Amanpour, is a three-part series intended to examine the growing role of religious fundamentalism in today's world. Unfortunately, the first program in the series, "God's Jewish Warriors," is one of the most grossly distorted programs to appear on mainstream American television in many years. It is false in its basic premise, established in the opening scene in which Jewish (and Christian) religious fervency is equated with that of Muslims heard endorsing "martyrdom," or suicide-killing. There is, of course, no counterpart among Jews and Christians to the violent jihadist Muslim campaigns underway across the globe, either in numbers of perpetrators engaged or in the magnitude of death and destruction wrought.

While in reality Jewish "terrorism" is virtually non-existent, the program magnifies at length the few instances of violence or attempted violence by religiously-motivated Jewish individuals – including having to go all the way back to 1980, for example, to explore a bombing campaign against West Bank Arab mayors by a small group of Israeli Jews. In dredging up such an old incident Amanpour unintentionally undermines her own thesis.

And, of course, on the exceedingly rare occasions when Israeli Jews commit terrorist acts, the Israeli public and leadership condemns the act and the perpetrators. Prime Minister Rabin, for example, condemned Baruch Goldstein's terrorist attack in Hebron, terming it "a loathsome, criminal act of murder." In contrast, Palestinian suicide bombers who target Israelis are regarded as "martyrs" and become celebrities, with soccer tournaments named after them. Amanpour, of course, fails to inform her audience of this key difference.

Of much more interest to Amanpour are settlements, which are a key focus of the program, their residents and adherents being deemed "God's warriors" – along with those Americans, Jewish and Christian alike, who support them. American presidents and Members of Congress are said to be held hostage to the so-called "Israel Lobby," ostensibly dark forces consisting of AIPAC and other pro-Israel groups who supposedly enable the nefarious expansion of West Bank communities.

Disproportionate reliance on partisan voices, some extreme figures, skews the message dramatically. Jimmy Carter and John Mearsheimer, chief proponents of the discredited canards about Jews subverting American national interests to those of Israel, are repeatedly and respectfully interviewed. Carter, for example, claims that no American politician could survive politically while calling for settlement-related aid cuts to Israel: "There's no way that a member of Congress would ever vote for that and hope to be re-elected."

That would be news to politicians like Senate Majority Leader Robert Byrd, who has long been a critic of aid to Israel and opposed loan guarantees to Israel in 1992. As well, contrary to Amanpour and Carter, Representatives James Trafficante, Dana Rohrabacher, Nick Smith, Fortney Pete Stark, Neil Abercrombie, David E. Bonior, John Conyers Jr, John D. Dingell, Earl F. Hilliard, Jesse L. Jackson Jr., Barbara Lee, Jim McDermott, George Miller, Jim Moran, David R. Obey, Ron Paul and Nick J. Rahall II, have voted against aid to Israel and/or opposed other resolutions favoring Israel.

Amanpour ignores all this, and turns instead to former Senator Charles Percy, who joins in denouncing Jewish political influence. Only Morris Amitay is presented as balance on this critical issue.

Whether wittingly or not, Amanpour's program, with its reliance on pejorative labeling, generalities, testimonials, and a stacked lineup of guests, is a perfect illustration of classical propaganda techniques. Unfortunately propaganda is the opposite of journalism, the profession Amanpour is supposed to practice.

The program was misleading and inaccurate in many other ways as well:

Land

Amanpour says: "But it is also Palestinian land. The West Bank – it's west of the Jordan River – was designated by the United Nations to be the largest part of an Arab state."

This is highly deceptive. The United Nations 1947 Partition Plan proposed dividing all the land west of the Jordan into a Jewish and an Arab state; the Arabs rejected the plan, choosing instead to launch a war to eliminate Israel. The land did not become "Palestinian land" via this UN Plan. Likewise, UN Security Council Resolution 242, passed after the Six Day War, underscored that territorial adjustments related to the West Bank were to be expected.

Settlements

• Amanpour suggests settlements are the cause of Arab anger: "the Jewish settlements have inflamed much of the Arab world," yet the Arab world was just as anti-Israel (actually more so) before the settlements were built.

• She presents at length the views of Theodor Meron asserting the illegality of settlements as the definitive word, but makes no mention of more senior Israeli experts such as former Supreme Court Chief Meir Shamgar, who disagreed with Meron. Nor does Amanpour mention such foreign experts such as Professors Julius Stone and Eugene Rostow who also argued for the legality of settlements. (See for example CAMERA BACKGROUNDER: The Debate About Settlements and From "Occupied Territories" to "Disputed Territories" by Dore Gold.)

• She grossly misleads about America's position on settlements in the following sequence:

WILLIAM SCRANTON, U.S. AMBASSADOR TO U.N. UNDER GERALD FORD: My government believes that international law sets the appropriate standards.

AMANPOUR: From the earliest days of the settler movement, even the United States, Israel's closest ally, blasted Israel's settlement policy.

SCRANTON: Substantial resettlement of the Israeli civilian population in occupied territories, including East Jerusalem, is illegal.

AMANPOUR: Ever since American presidents both Democrat and Republican have spoken from virtually the same script. They consistently oppose settlement growth.

RONALD REAGAN, FORMER PRESIDENT: The United States will not support the use of any additional land for the purpose of settlements.

In fact, while the Carter administration did deem settlements illegal, President Reagan very much did not speak from the "same script." He explained: "As to the West Bank, I believe the settlements there — I disagreed when the previous Administration referred to them as illegal, they're not illegal" (NYTimes, Feb. 3, 1981). Other presidents, including Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, also did not term settlements "illegal."

• Amanpour does not discuss Jewish habitation in the West Bank and Gaza in post-Biblical times, before 1948—for example, in Hebron, Kfar Etzion, Kfar Darom (See: CAMERA BACKGROUNDER: The Debate About Settlements) but instead portrays Jewish settlement in the West Bank as an encroachment on "Arab" land—repeatedly referring to disputed territories as "Arab" or "occupied" land (22 times throughout the program).

• Amanpour continuously discounts the context of the Arab world. She says with regard to the post Six-Day War period: "But the Israeli government was divided – trade the captured land for peace or keep it and build Jewish settlements." Unmentioned is the Arab refusal after the Six-Day War to "trade" anything for peace, as embodied in the three "no's" delivered by Arab leaders at a summit in Khartoum in September 1967, declaring there would be no negotiation, no recognition and no peace with Israel.

Jerusalem/Temple Mount, and The Holy Places

• Amanpour says: "It was from here, according to Muslim scripture, that the Prophet Mohammed ascended to heaven around the year 630. But Hebrew scripture puts the ancient Jewish Temple in the same location, destroyed by the Romans in the year 70. For the next 1,900 years, even the last remnant of the temple known as the Wailing Wall, or the Western Wall, was lost to the Jews."

a) Muslim scripture refers to Mohammed ascending to heaven from the "farthest mosque," which could not have been on the Temple Mount, since the mosque there wasn't built until well after the death of Mohammed.
b) The Western Wall is part of the Temple Mount complex—not the actual Temple. It is a remnant of the retaining wall built to extend and flatten the Temple Mount. There are indeed actual remains of the First and Second Temples on the Temple Mount.
c) Although Amanpour notes the holiness of the Temple Mount to Jews and Muslims, and some Jews in clips say that it is the holiest site for Jews, she never points this out herself, nor does she mention that Hebron is Judaism's second holiest city with its second holiest shrine.
d) Amanpour interviews the Muslim Grand Mufti of Jerusalem to give a Muslim perspective on the Al Aqsa Mosque, but no Jewish Rabbinical figure is presented to discuss the paramount religious importance of the Temple Mount to Jews.

• Amanpour ignores the devastation of the Jewish Quarter of the Old City and the expulsion of its residents by the Jordanians in 1948, as she does the Jordanian destruction and desecration of synagogues and cemeteries in eastern Jerusalem .Nor does she discuss the denial of Jewish access to holy sites and restriction of Christian religious freedom after Jordan’s illegal annexation of eastern Jerusalem in 1950. Instead she redefines the history of the conflict over Jerusalem with a new timeline, alleging, "the 40-year tug of war over Jerusalem began when Israel bulldozed the Arab neighborhood next to the Western Wall and built a plaza where Jews now pray."

Carter and Mearsheimer

Amanpour states: " Most recently, former President Carter was criticized for criticizing Israel's treatment of the Palestinians. In his book, "Palestine: Peace, not Apartheid."

Carter was, of course, "criticized" for purveying multiple false statements about Israel and the Palestinians. See, for example, A Comprehensive Collection of Jimmy Carter's Errors.

Professor John Mearsheimer is also invited on to explain to viewers the allegedly pernicious effects of the "Jewish Lobby," with no mention by Amanpour of the extremely serious flaws that critics have identified in Mearsheimer's work.

Israel Lobby

• Amanpour also grossly misleads the public about a dispute in the early 1990s between then president George Bush and Israel's prime minister at the time, Yitzhak Shamir. President Bush decided to withhold American loan guarantees to Israel unless that country froze settlement activity. In CNN's version of events, the Israel lobby kicked into gear, and "Congress got the message." (For Amanpour, it seems, it is a given that members of Congress were responding to "the message" sent by the lobby as opposed to acting on their own convictions.) Then, "just a few months later, the very week of the Republican National Convention, the pro-Israel lobby had something to celebrate." President Bush announced his support for the loan guarantees. Clearly, according to Amanpour, the lobby forced Bush's hand.

What is absent from Amanpour's version of events is the reason why the Bush administration eventually reversed its position. A new Israeli government, willing to compromise on the issue of settlements, had come to power. The new prime minister, Yitzhak Rabin, backed down from previous Israeli Prime Minister Shamir's positions by promising to curtail settlement growth. Israeli-American relations subsequently improved.

• In addition, Amanpour uses inflammatory language unbecoming of a journalist to describe fundraising efforts by American Jews to help Israeli settlers. Not only does she take sides in the dispute over the legality of the settlements, she evokes negative stereotypes, stating:

Six thousand miles from Israel's settlements, in the heart of Manhattan, defiance of international law comes dressed in diamonds.

Muslim "Anger"

Interviewed by Amanpour, Gershom Gorenberg states: "You can't understand the anger of radical Islam unless you understand the conflict between you know, the Jews and the Palestinians." The false implication is that such "anger" is primarily rooted in the Israeli-Palestinian issue, disregarding the far greater forces driving radical Islam, including the titanic struggle between Shiites and Sunnis triggered in large measure by the overthrow of the Shah of Iran, the Khomenist revolution and the expansion of Saudi Wahabism, Saudi-sponsored mosques and schools built all over the globe inculcate vast numbers of Muslims with extreme, supremacist views.

As even the Ayatollah Khomeini put it, the United States was the "Great Satan," while Israel was only the "Small Satan."

And of course, the rise of the Internet and satellite TV has greatly amplified the false and misleading information put out by Muslim supremacist propagandists, inflaming the Muslim masses.

You can reach CNN's online comments page by clicking here."

I do believe you're oversimplifying the issue by looking at over a millenia of history and dismissing it simply as "no one is perfect."

It simply assumes that all misdeeds are equal, and that all bad things are done ignoring the teachings of the religion. Sorry, that's bunk and we both know it.

Truth is not "respective." There are no versions of the truth. Your statement is a logical fallacy, and internally contradictory. If you don't know why that is, think about it.

Excuse me, answer the argument. All people need a diety. I explained why in my post. Now your burden is to refute me, not simply wave your hand with "…some people need a diety, others don’t" as if that makes things magically go away.

No. It's not a bad bet at all. I'm living in this world, your living in the next world. Fear is the engine that drives religion. I have no problem with that.

Those who do not seek do not find. Very true. You were raised in the United States. Thus you became a fervent Christian. Had you been raised in Saudi Arabia, you probably would be a fervent Muslim. In Isreal, you'd be a fervent Jew. In any case, your truth would be as obvious as it is as to you as a Christian. Again, some people need a diety, others don't. Whatever path we pursure to find our respective truth, it is real to us. To me, that's the beauty of life.

Have a good day my friend,

Greg in NY

Everyone does have a diety in their life. It's a requirement. Everyone serves something. Everyone bows down to something as master, whether self, money, god, government, or possessions. Everyone chooses their diety and serves it.

"The three major religions claim to hold 'the truth' and believes the other two are dammed ." Your feeble attempt to impose moral equivalence is superficial and specious. There is only one truth by definition, and it isn't that hard to find. You're making excuses for your own intellectual laziness.

It isn't about "similar moral codes," which you just acknowledged. It isn't about superficial, dismissive comparisons. It isn't about how well others adhere to the tenents of their faith. It's about truth. "Chances are, we'll never know," but only because those who do not seek do not find.

If you're relying on the odds, what are you wagering with? Your life? Seems like a bad bet to me.

Greg In NY