Critics of religion like to claim that the source of most of the world’s ills can be traced to believers who wage wars in the name of their distorted fanatic faiths.
This thesis inspired a spate of new books advocating atheism and deriding religion in the past year.
Needless to say, critics responded that fanatical followers of the non-religious Communist, Maoist and Nazi faiths actually committed most of the murders in history’s bloodiest century — the 20th.
But it must be admitted that violent religious extremists are, at this time, the primary threat to the peace of the world. The problem is that the opprobrium rightly aimed at the perpetrators of this faith-based violence cannot be neatly distributed across the board to practitioners of the three major monotheistic religions.
Though present-day Jews and Christians are not all saints, neither of those religions has sprouted a contemporary movement aimed at world domination to be achieved by terror and war.
That honor is reserved for the Muslim faith, among whose adherents Islamist terror movements have found a home in its cultural mainstream.
Not all Muslims are Islamists. Most U.S. Muslims are nothing of the kind.
Nevertheless, it is a delusion to think that supporters of Al Qaida, Hezbollah, Hamas, Islamic Jihad and other assorted anti-Western and anti-Jewish terror movements are a tiny minority in the Arab and Muslim world.
But in this age of political correctness, to single out one group for the sins of a large number of its members is considered unfair and perhaps racist. Instead, we are asked to pretend that an intrinsic connection or even symmetry exists between Christian, Jewish and Muslim extremists.
That was the premise of a widely heralded three-part series recently broadcast on the Cable News Network.
A brazen lie
Titled “God’s Warriors,” and fronted by famed international correspondent Christiane Amanpour, it highlighted danger from Jewish, Muslim and Christian extremists who were all given the same treatment and air-time in the guise of even-handedness.
By its very structure of equating the three different situations, the series was a brazen lie.
All parts of the series were problematic. But the first episode, devoted to extremist Israeli Jewish settlers and the network of support for the State of Israel in this country, was as dishonest a piece of biased programming as anything that has been broadcast on a major network.
Though a tiny fraction of the settlement movement, which itself commands the support of a fraction of Israelis, has committed isolated acts of violence, the notion that this group is in any way analogous to Al Qaida is nothing short of bizarre.
If anything, Jewish settlers and ordinary Israelis living inside the pre-1967 borders have themselves been the victims of the intolerance, fanaticism and violence of their Muslim neighbors.
The broadcasts’ view of international law on the question of the legality of the Jewish presence in the territories is one-sided. A strong case can be made that the Jews living in those places have every right to do so.
Moreover the idea that their living in these places constitutes the primary obstacle to peace in the Middle East is nothing short of fantastic, given the events of the last several years which have shown how disinterested the Palestinians are in peace with Israel no matter where its borders are.
Even worse, the show seemingly accepts the discredited canard of Israeli and American Jewish control of American foreign policy put forth by risible figures like former president Jimmy Carter and academic John Mearsheimer whose views were treated with respect rather than journalistic skepticism.
As such the worldwide news network lent itself to a line of argument that has rightly been termed a modern intellectual justification for anti-Semitism.
But the main problem with the series remains. Extremist Muslims are a threat to peace and the West. A few right-wing Jews are no threat to anyone and are, if anything, among the primary victims of Muslim terror.
As for Evangelical Christians, the targets of the third episode, most American Jews may disagree with most of their political positions, but, to date, they have launched no terror attacks nor do they plan any.
Any analogy between them and Islamists is a figment of Amanpour’s imagination. If anything, their main sin seems to be their support of Jewish victims of Arab terror.
CNN cannot be allowed to get away with this despicable bias. Decent persons of all faiths need to speak against this network and to make sure that it, and its arrogant star Amanpour, are made to hear of our outrage at every opportunity and in every way possible, including the use of economic leverage by both sponsors and viewers.
Jonathan S. Tobin is executive editor of the Jewish Exponent in Philadelphia.
Loading ...