CNN’s Christiane Amanpour believes “we can all afford to be human” regarding the Syrian refugees. Recently, she condemned the U.S. and other countries for not letting them enter the homeland, despite FBI Director James Comey’s testimony explaining that vetting this population is literally impossible.
Apparently, “discerning” does not qualify as a human trait to Amanpour. Because soon after she offered her ill-considered, slanderous logic equating “responsible” with “heartless,” she employed this advice in her own decision-making — and she was taken.
Amanpour demonstrated exactly how Islamic radicals have learned to take advantage of those bearing her viewpoint.
Last Thursday, Amanpour invited Dalil Boubakeur, chairman of the Grand Mosque of Paris, to a sit-down interview. During the interview, Boubakeur strongly denounced the Islamic State (ISIS) and called for military action against it. He then declared that the barbarous terror group behind the Paris attacks had nothing to do with Islam:
Our religion is not one of violence, of jihadism, of terrorism, of women who kill. In what page of Qur’an is that written that a woman must take bombs inside her body to explode and kill other people? In what part of Qur’an is that said? In what page of Qur’an is it said that we shall kill innocent people? Young people?
Boubakeur then lamented that “little by little,” the Islamic State had won over the young Muslims of Europe. He declared that it was a “great error … not only of Muslims, but of the world to accept this.”
Then, Boubakeur called on Muslims in France to assimilate:
[It is] very important [for] French Muslim people to express their French nationality, their French taste, their French values, their French [rejection] of what is the danger for them, France, and for our religion also.
Had Amanpour recognized vetting as rational behavior — and understood her own viewpoint as reckless and irresponsible — then she would have known that Boubakeur’s insistence on “assimilation” could be nothing but a preposterous, exploitative lie considering his past behavior.
Homeland security expert Patrick Poole reported on Boubakeur’s rejection of Islamic “assimilation” with Western values in PJ Media last January. Boubakeur certainly does not oppose ISIS’s — or, in general, Islam’s — embrace of violence when he isn’t on Amanpour’s set:
[I]n 2006 at the height of the Danish Cartoon crisis, Boubakeur had published an article denouncing the cartoons and concluded by issuing a warning to all those — including Charlie Hebdo — who would publish caricatures of Mohammed, saying: “He who sows the whirlwind shall reap the whirlwind.”
Stop drawing Muhammad, and start abiding by Sharia blasphemy laws … or else.
Boubakeur, rather than being the assimilation-supporting, violence-spurning moderate Amanpour wanted him to be, is guilty of fanning the violence that resulted in deadly riots across the globe and ended in the horrific slaughter at Charlie Hebdo’s offices.
Boubakeur’s interview answers were no doubt music to the ears of Amanpour, as they matched the narrative she pushed in her September op-ed published by CNN wherein she castigated the U.S. for not taking more Syrian refugees. In the op-ed, Amanpour described the following as “heartwarming”:
… ordinary citizens, the responsible media, and generous governments all opening their arms to welcome a modern, yet biblical tide of humanity, fleeing war and persecution to safety here in Europe.
She scolded the U.S. and Canada:
… countries with big hearts, deep pockets and a habit of projecting their humanitarian values [are] unwilling to actually help end the war that would stop this exodus.
The U.S., she lamented:
… has only accepted fewer than 1,500 Syrian asylum seekers over the course of the war.
Amanpour did not address in her piece the real reason why many in the U.S. and elsewhere are reluctant to take in large numbers of these refugees: the prospect of Islamic jihadis being among them.
The Islamic State boasted last February that they would soon inundate Europe with 500,000 refugees. The Lebanese education minister recently warned that there were 20,000 active jihadis among the Syrian refugees in camps in his country. An Islamic State operative boasted in September, shortly after the migrant influx into Europe began, that among the flood of refugees, 4,000 terrorists had already entered Europe.
None of that information made it into Amanpour’s piece. She likely is confident that Obama administration officials will be able to “vet” the refugees they admit into the U.S., as they have repeatedly promised to do.
Will Amanpour learn her lesson if she reads this?
Will she realize her carelessness just allowed a man who demands non-Muslim French citizens adhere to Sharia law and who rejects freedom of speech to exploit her — and her trusting audience?
Likely, Boubakeur’s stated opposition to ISIS was enough for Amanpour to assume him worthy of being held up as an exemplar for Muslims in the West. But she then obliterated her own argument; her carelessness regarding Boubakeur rendered hollow her emotional call for taking in Syrian refugees.
She must understand now that to heed her call, to bring in those refugees in large numbers, might make her temporarily feel good about how tolerant and multicultural she is, but will be cold comfort to the rest of us when the bombs start exploding.
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