Amanpour's Apologia

We are again reminded of the number of people who have gained influential positions in academia, in politics and in the media who hate America, who hate Christians and Jews and who despise the Western culture that provided them with everything that makes their lives and our lives worth while. I did learn long ago not to pay any attention to CNN, so I only learned of Amanpour’s disgraceful reports by reading about them. They disgust me.

Amanpour's Apologia
By INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY | Posted Monday, August 27, 2007

Global Jihad: CNN's chief apologist for Islam, Christiane Amanpour, has gone too far this time. Not content to just whitewash jihad, she says Jews and Christians are terrorists, too.

According to her new three-part series, "God's Warriors," militant Islamists are really no different than right-wing Christians or Jews. So who are we in the West to judge?

Of course, it's cultural relativism — and journalism — at its worst. What's stunning is the lack of evidence Amanpour provides to support her case.

Amanpour: Building bridges.
That CNN would give her six prime-time hours to peddle such tendentious trash to a public still under real threat from Islamic terror speaks volumes about the network's agenda.

The Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America slammed the series as "one of the most grossly distorted programs" ever aired on mainstream American TV.

CAMERA was being kind. Amanpour's premise that Christianity and Judaism have spawned just as many terrorists as Islam is absurd on its face.

To be sure, not all Muslims are terrorists. But the vast majority of terrorists are Muslim, or at least claim to be Muslim. Almost all international terror is carried out, falsely or not, in the name of Islam. The data are simply overwhelming.

In contrast, history has produced only a handful of fanatics who commit violence in the name of Christianity or Judaism. Those who do are summarily arrested and punished.

They aren't held up as martyrs. There are no U.S. posters celebrating abortion clinic bombers, or Israeli history books canonizing Jewish settlers who attack Palestinians.

But Amanpour, an Iranian immigrant whose father is a Muslim, wants to change that reality.

She and her Islamic apologist pal Karen Armstrong — a "scholar" she returns to throughout her "documentary" — sugar-coat jihad as inner struggle against sin and not warfare. If you want militancy, they argue, look no further than fundamentalist Christians.

Amanpour demonizes Jerry Falwell. After all, she points out, he suggested after 9/11 that America was paying for moral depravity. Must be in league with the Islamic terrorists.

She also compares his Liberty University, which has separate dorms for boys and girls, to a madrassa.

Then she accuses Ron Luce, a Christian minister to teenagers, as being like the Taliban for "fighting the evils of pop culture."

"They are God's warriors for Jesus," she intones. Yep, beheading and stoning every nonbeliever in their path, those crazy Jesus-loving teens.

During the segments on Jews and Christians, we lost count of the number of times Amanpour intoned the phrase, "God's Jewish warriors" or "God's Christian warriors," as sinister musical strings play in the background.

In contrast, she cast Muslims in the best possible light during the segment on Islam. Readily available file footage of Palestinian terrorists attacks on Jewish pizza parlors and buses are missing.

She neglects to mention that Hamas was officially designated a terrorist organization by the U.S. in 1995 — during the Clinton administration. If she wasn't paying attention then, certainly her husband, a top Clinton appointee at the State Department, was.

Amanpour's agenda comes in clear view at the end of the show when she solemnly intones: "I hope that we have provided a bridge to Islam."

But as hard as she may try to stretch it, Christianity and Judaism are not morally equivalent to Islam when it comes to militancy and the promotion of violence. CNN should be ashamed for airing such a shameless apologia.