First reviews of Amanpour's "God's Warriors" series are in, & it sounds just a bad as feared. Hugh at Dhimmi Watch doesn't like it, quelle surprise:
And why CNN so obviously insults us, in reducing the menace of Islam, the menace that only a fool could ignore, and the full scope of which, based on immutable texts, becomes clearer to the intelligent every day, to something like the non-existent menace from those wild-eyed Nurembergian Christians, with Amanpour as their recording Riefenstahl, or those crazy "West Bank" settlers, in their trailers, choosing to live among a million Arabs -- "Palestinians" -- who of course have every right to be there, because...well, isn't the Middle East the same thing as the Arab World, after all? Where do those pesky remnants of Jews, Chaldeans, Assyrians, Copts, Maronites, Mandeans, Yazidis, Armenians, and all the others come from? Why don't they go back where they came from? The "Arab World," the "Muslim Arab World" -- now that's more like it. That's just the ticket.
Because, you see, Every Group Has Its Crazies. And those crazies, you see, are exactly alike, in what they want, and how they act, and the size of the demands they make on the rest of us. But exactly.
That's the point of this series. You didn't think there was another point, did you?
The tone may be hyperbolic, but this show really set several commentators off. Well, it uses Jimmy Carter and Mearsheimer as main talking heads, and at one point Amanpour actually calls AIPAC more powerful than the State Department, so you don't need much imagination to get the drift.
It can fairly be pointed out that it is a basic given of all Israeli/Pal negotiations that a million Arabs can live in Israel and be citizens, but NOT ONE Jew can remain in Palestine and become a citizen. That option is simply not on the table and everybody knows it, and the Jew who tried it wouldn't stay alive for long.
Everybody knows it, but nobody can say it, because it would point out a basic assymetry between civilized restraint on the Israeli side and uncivilized barbarity on the Palestinian side, and that wouldn't be PC at all.
One of Hugh's commentators adds, in a well-written note:
I haven’t seen the show (and thanks to your comments I will happily take a rain check), but even the ads for the show made my skin crawl. The old saw, “its not just Muslims, but look every religion has its extremists, some of who are violent”. This flaccid argument has been refuted so many times and so well on these pages, that one more time seems unnecessary. But I recall talking to students after 9-11, some of whom were Muslims, stating the true, but disingenuous statement, that no one religion has a monopoly on extremism. What I didn’t say (didn’t want to ruffle feathers at such a delicate time), is that millions of Muslims applauded 9-11, millions support Bin Laden, etc. To ignore the percent of extremists in each religion renders the observation that each religion has extremists to be meaningless. It is akin to saying that there are hungry people in the United States and hungry people in Africa, so the food problem in both locations is similar. [my emphasis] |
