Sunday, August 26, 2007

God's warriors II

Now that I have seen all three of the two hour specials by Christiane Amanpour on "God's warriors," I think I can give a more informed appraisal. I think this special was conceived as a way of tackling the newsworthy predominance of Muslim terrorism and violence in the world without appearing to be biased by concentrating only on that and throwing in equally long segments on Judaism and Christianity for balance. This is CNN's way of covering the subject, but without actually exposing the truth for what it is. Namely that Islam is a terribly violent and martyrdom-obsessed religion quite different from Judaism and Christianity, with a large minority of millions of adherents who are prepared to kill, behead and slosh through rivers of infidel blood in order to take over the world.
In the segment on Islam many of them came across as simply mad! And what would the world be like if they could achieve a universal Caliphate, it would be devoid of music and entertainment, women would be totally suppressed and it would be economically depressed like the Muslim world is today. That is if the Caliphate were achieveable, which it is not, for even in the Muslim world there are enough schisms to prevent the formation of a unified Caliphate. The Shia would never accept a Sunni-dominated Caliphate, and the more liberal Muslim areas of southeast Asia would not accept Arab domination. Also, the Arab regimes in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, etc. are not going to go quietly. This is apart from European and US opposition, although the Europeans are at present both passive and self-destructive.
The segments on Jewish and Christian "warriors" were lame by comparison to the Muslims. The Jewish one was an excuse for CNN and Amanpour to let out all the stops in their general anti-Israel bias. According to her analysis the Arab-Israel conflict is due to Israeli "settlements" and "occupation" (how simplistic and wrong), while the actual amount of Jewish terrorism was infinitesimal compared to that of the Muslims. She actually quoted five (!) cases of Jewish terrorism, two of which were unsuccessful, and all of these extremists were caught by the Israeli police, tried, convicted and jailed! Would that Islamic countries did the same to their terrorists.
The three Jewish actions that were "successful" were the blowing up of Bassam Shaka, the mayor of Nablus in 1980, the massacre of Palestinians by Baruch Goldstein in Hebron in 1994 and the assassination of PM Rabin in 1995. In the 1970s I met Bassam Shaka in his office in Nablus with a delegation of American Professors for Peace in the Middle East. He was quite frank about his enmity for and hatred of Israel, and he was definitely not interested in a peaceful settlement.
Amanpour failed to point out that Judaism is different from Islam and Christianity in that it is non-proselytizing, and therefore in no way do Jews try to "force" their religious views and culture on anyone else. In the Christian segment all the people she interviewed were essentially nonviolent and were using the democratic process (which is their right). Nothing compared to the horrible and frightening segment covering the Muslims. If she had chosen to focus on the extreme right wing Christian fringe groups, such as the so-called Christian Identity Movement, the Ku Klux Klan and various Nazi groups in America they would have been more equivalent to the Muslims she interviewed. But, they are miniscule in number and influence compared to the Muslim extremists, and that's probably why she ignored them.
Thousands have been killed by Muslim terrorism around the world, from Bali to London, from New York to Casablanca, from Spain to Iraq. It is of a completely different order of magnitude compared to Jewish and Christian extremism, and in that respect Amanpour's series was a sham.

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