The old crap about "moral equivalency" again.
It's amusing that, in my dotage, a militant atheist like me is spending time defending the religious. In this case, one of the guys at powerline does a better job of deconstructing this piece.
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Fundamentally Flawed
POWERLINE
On Tuesday evening, CNN will debut a three-part series called God's Warriors. The series, devoted to an examination of "religious fundamentalism," is created and hosted by Christiane Amanpour; the first segment, to be aired Tuesday, is called "Jewish Warriors;" Wednesday's show is "Muslim Warriors," followed by "Christian Warriors" on Thursday.
While these three topics are treated as though they were on a par, there are some obvious distinctions. Like, the Christian "warriors" are home-schooling their children, while the Muslim "warriors" are blowing people up. If this Associated Press account is accurate, CNN's series is devoted to obfuscating such obvious differences rather than elucidating them.
For example:
"Another segment tried to explain why so many devout Muslims are willing to give their lives to a cause.
"To the West, martyrdom has a really bad connotation because of suicide bombers who call themselves martyrs," [Amanpour] said. "Really, martyrdom is actually something that historically was quite noble, because it was about standing up and rejecting tyranny, rejecting injustice and rejecting oppression and, if necessary, dying for that."
Actually, though, the problem with today's Islamic "martyrs" is not that its adherents are "willing to give their lives," it is that they want to kill non-Muslims. It isn't really a mystery why martyrdom was once considered noble; Christian martyrs like Saints Stephen and Sebastian didn't kill anyone. Whereas today, "martyrdom" in much of the Islamic world is a euphemism for mass murder. Hence the "really bad connotation."
Of course, everyone knows this. It's hardly worth the trouble to point out the stupidity of confounding Christian "fundamentalism"--the most commonly accepted definition of which is a belief in the literal truth of the Bible--with Islamic "fundamentalism," whose distinguishing characteristic is a desire to impose Sharia on the world, and kill everyone who resists.
We do get, though, a glimmer of illumination from the AP's interview with Ms. Amanpour:
"Finishing the project didn't leave [Amanpour] with a sense of fear over the implications of stronger fundamentalist movements.
"I did come away with a sense that we—or those people who don't want to see religion in politics and culture—if we don't look into it and see what is going on, we're in danger of missing it and not be able to react to it properly," she said."
Ms. Amanpour identifies herself as one of those who "don't want to see religion in politics and culture." Which is to say, they don't want to see religion at all. I think we can diagnose her perception of "fundamentalism" as follows: "fundamentalism" means religion-based beliefs that are antithetical to her own liberal views. Islamic "fundamentalism" is a serious danger in that it encourages terrorist violence that could kill her. The likelihood of that, however, is relatively remote. Christian (and Jewish) fundamentalism doesn't pose any such hazard, but the danger that it does pose is much more immediate: most such "fundamentalists" vote for and support political candidates with whom Amanpour disagrees. So, on balance, Amanpour is as concerned about opposing the immediate "threat" of Christian fundamentalism, as she is about opposing the potentially fatal threat of Islam extremism.
This is not necessarily an irrational point of view. But it is the perspective of a political partisan, not the perspective of a journalist.
powerlineblog.com |
