Pages

Thursday, August 23, 2007

Amanpour and CNN on Islamic terror

Again, I didn't watch the show, so I cannot comment on editing and music and such. From the transcript it appears to be much better than I hoped, and it seems to be properly eschew justifications and rationalizations for the most part.

A couple of points:

Karen Armstrong, "religious historian," comes off consistently as an apologist for Islamic terror and as the true voice of moral equivalence between Islam and other religions. Christiane Amanpour is much more critical of Islam than Armstrong.

Amanpour is injecting more of her own editorializing, far more explicitly, than she did in the Jewish episode. She seems more offended by Islamic misogyny and discrimination against women than by the terrorists murdering thousands of innocents. The section on women in Islam takes up too much time given that there are so many real topics about Islamic terror that can be covered.

It is nice to see that the final segment was about Palestinian Arab jihadist terror, but that section again seemed short compared to the feminist sections.

In the end, what Amanpour seems to be saying with this series is that all religion is bad, which is the wrong message.

And while this episode for the most part seems to have been properly critical (it did pull some punches when interviewing an American Muslim woman who did the usual apologetic definition of "jihad") the very fact that it is only one of three shows about religious violence ends up diluting the message unacceptably.

According to one website that keeps statistics, the number of people killed by Islamic terror has been 4134 - in just the past two months. The total this year is over 15,000. In other words, the equivalent of a 9/11 occurs every couple of months.

To compare the terrorism done by Jews and Christians in the name of religion to that of Muslims, even implicitly, is obscene.