As you read this, I will be in the hospital undergoing surgery. Fear not. Now, we all get to live as our infra-structures continue to crumble. Thus, I will have a new hip and will join the growing ranks of all the other bionic human beings. While I am away, I will be posting a mini-retrospective of some of my previously published, copy-righted work of the last few years. The work seems to hold up. In some cases, I will introduce the piece. In most cases, I will let the piece speak for itself.
But before we get in to this: CNN has continued to air the blatantly biased Amanpour series. No shame, no apology, no “other” point of view. The New York Times has just characterized the Muslim Brotherhood as “moderates” and al-Qaeda as “radically Islamist.” Yesterday, Palestinians marched in Copenhagen to condemn the “Judaization” of Jerusalem and Israel. Last week, poisonous, pro-Palestinian propaganda appeared all over the University of Santa Cruz; and at Columbia University, a handful of pro-Israel flyers posted by Jewish graduate students were completely disappeared and replaced with pro-Palestinian flyers.
On the home front: Please read Aaron Klein’s article about Pastor Otis Moss, Obama’s new pastor.
(This originally appeared as a blog on my own website. It was written before I started writing a blog for Pajamas Media. It also appeared in The Jewish Press.)
Christian Crusaders Also Want a Caliphate. The Gospel According to Christiane — August 24, 2007
In her three part series, Amanpour is far more combative and confrontational with both Jewish and Christian religious leaders than she is with Muslim leaders. She is warmer, softer, more “at home,” with even the most extreme of Islamist leaders, perhaps even more respectful, than she is with their allegedly Jewish or Christian counterparts.
Amanpour completely fails to make the distinction between Islamists who teach hatred of infidels and women and who blow infidel and Muslim civilians up (as well as honor-murder their own women); Israelis who are under perpetual terrorist siege and who are trying to defend themselves against Islamist attacks; and conservative Christians who are trying to mobilize votes, change laws, or win hearts and minds with words, not bombs (although she certainly has lots of footage of the bloody bombings at abortion clinics–bombings I personally abhor and mourn–as do many Christians).
Amanpour wants us to like Muslims–even the most extremist among them. They are human, prick them will they not bleed? But she does not want us to like Christians or Jews, especially those who are Zionists.
Amanpour does not seem to show the same respect towards conservative Christians who wish to dress modestly, remain chaste until marriage, and avoid a secular culture of rampant pornography and rape as she shows their far more extremist counterparts in the Islamist world or than she shows, at great length, one well-spoken Muslim-American woman who decides to “cover.”
In one instance, Amanpour accuses Ron Luce, a Christian leader of teenagers, as being like the Taliban. He actually answers Amanpour in a rather charming, disarming way. She will not be moved. Amanpour herself takes no stand on what Luce says about an American secular and popular culture which allows virgin teenager America to be raped on the sidewalk as we pass by without stopping or caring.
Perhaps Amanpour can’t forgive these “radical” Christians their support for Israel, their “Zionism.” She presents Pastor John Hagee (together with the late Jerry Fallwell) as Doctor Strangeloves. Hagee, by the way, sees Iran as a threat to America and Israel. As he speaks of his Christian love of Zion, Amanpour cuts to a presumed Israeli air attack against innocent civilians, replete with weeping, civilian Arab women.
Amanpour again returns to former President Jimmy Carter–this time to have him tell us that he had to break with evangelical Baptists over their sexist position on women in the church. Carter who believes that Israel is an “apartheid” state and whose library has been hugely funded by the Saudis is the new feminist in town.
Amanpour has a definite political agenda–no less so than the Christian conservatives whom she attacks for daring to conduct “stealth politics, under the radar” when they engage in Christian voter drives. Amanpour wants to put a Democrat in the White House. She wants someone there who will move against the so-called Israel Lobby and who will finally stop funding Israel. She wants our next Commander in Chief to engage in nicey-nice diplomacy with Iran. She wants Americans to stop fearing that every Muslim might be a terrorist and to start accepting a parallel Islamic/Islamist universe right here on our own soil.
Yes, our ethnically super-trendy, British-accented war correspondent really wants exactly this. And she wants us to see that such right-wing Christians are no different than Islamists, including Bin Laden, who want a world Caliphate. (We are all the same, all cultures are equal, remove the mote from your own eye before you judge anyone else, etc.)
To accomplish her goal, Amanpour presents Christian conservatives as truly scary, as mounting a Crusader-like Army against liberal secular America–but not necessarily a violent war against terrorist Islamism. Amanpour exploits America’s hottest domestic issues (abortion and gay marriage) in order to accomplish her own foreign policy aims.
By the end of her third and final segment we are meant to fear and loathe the Christian conservative right far more than we are meant to fear or loathe Amanpour’s Amadinejad whom –incredibly–she never accuses of funding Hezbollah’s terrorist work abroad. What she mainly shows us in Iran are Shi’a Muslims at prayer, engaged in theatrical-religious rituals. We do not see them funding and masterminding Hezbollah as it takes down civilian (and Christian) Lebanon, lays siege to Israel, blows up the Jewish Community Center in Argentina. She shows us the child-martyrs (one estimate has 850,000 dying in the Iran-Iraq war) as themselves true believers as opposed to victims of sadistic adult handlers.
Her third segment is one long running advertisement for a Democratic candidate for the next Presidency. She is electioneering as hard as she accuses the Christians of doing.
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