I found the Cable News Network’s documentary “God’s Warriors” disappointing.
In six hours, it didn’t make any new points about Jewish, Islamic or Christian fundamentalist politics, and didn’t connect or compare the three except to say that they’re all fanatical.
I think Christiane Amanpour’s narration — although not the footage — understated the magnitude of the problem of Muslim terrorism. She said it was limited to the “extreme fringe” of the world’s Muslims, “a tiny minority.” If only this were true.
These are my main criticisms. I could raise a couple of other objections, but they’re niggling.
Yet if I think of “God’s Warriors” as a whole, I wouldn’t say it’s an unfair or distorted documentary by any means.
It’s not anti-Jewish and pro-Muslim as the Jewish Right is claiming. It’s not an “abomination,” as the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America calls it, or a “brazen lie,” as Jonathan Tobin wrote.
These reactions say a lot more about the Jewish Right than they do about CNN or Christiane Amanpour. Self-declared advocates for Israel say they want objectivity in journalism, yet their idea of objectivity is what more genuinely objective observers would call “pro-Israel spin.”
Jewish victims heard
Reading the right-wing Jewish reactions to “God’s Warriors,” you would never imagine that the Jewish segment opens with a Hebron settler, Tsipi Schissel, describing tearfully and graphically how a Palestinian terrorist stabbed her father to death, or that Schissel’s story was illustrated with photos of her as a little girl with her father.
The point, made at the beginning, was to humanize her for the viewers, and to show that the settlers’ fanaticism is fueled by Palestinian terror.
This latter point was made even in the documentary’s passage about Baruch Goldstein. This featured his friend Meir Lapid recounting how, a few months before Goldstein committed the Hebron massacre, Goldstein, a physician, had tried vainly to save the lives of Lapid’s father and brother, who had been shot by Palestinians.
In all, “God’s Warriors” gives much more attention to Israeli victims of Palestinian terror than to Palestinian victims of Israeli occupation.
There is one scene that humanizes a Palestinian terrorist with his mother’s recollection of how he cradled a Palestinian girl shot dead by Israeli soldiers, and how he “stopped laughing” afterward.
But the segment also shows photos of the four Israeli women the young terrorist killed, and Amanpour described the victims as “a nurse, a woman returning home from the dentist, and two mothers of young children.”
There’s only fleeting footage of Palestinians and other Muslims crying over their dead at the hands of Israel or the U.S., while the screen is filled with the wreckage and bloody bodies from suicide bombings and the smoke-engulfed World Trade Center on Sept. 11.
Although here and there in her narration Amanpour tried to diminish the scale of Muslim terrorism, the pictures she was showing told the true, and much more powerful, story.
For all the right-wing Jewish complaints that “God’s Warriors” sets up a “moral equivalency” between Muslim terror and Jewish terror, anyone who’s been awake for the last six years cannot watch this documentary and come away thinking there’s no difference between the two.
CNN’s audience, or at least the great majority of its members, knows very well which warriors are the global threat and which aren’t.
One of the reasons it knows is because CNN has been telling them for the last six years. For CNN and every other mainstream news medium, militant Islam has been one of the leading stories of the post-9/11 world.
‘Wild weed’ theory?
Since 9/11, CNN has not given anything like equal time to Jewish, Islamic and Christian fanaticism, but has given a giant majority of time to the Islamic strain.
And after I searched YouTube, I found that Amanpour did a two-hour documentary titled “In the Footsteps of Bin Laden,” which I seriously doubt was anti-Jewish or pro-Muslim.
I also came across a 10-minute CNN news segment on “Obsession,” a documentary that compares modern Islamism with Nazism, and I saw the CNN anchorwoman telling the filmmakers, “I can’t thank you enough…The movie left many of us speechless. We appreciate what you’ve done.”
What more do CAMERA, Honest Reporting and the rest of the “Israel advocates” want? I’ll tell you what they want. They want no criticism of Israel whatsoever.
This is their main beef against “God’s Warriors” — that it didn’t make clear that in Israel, unlike in the Muslim world, religious terrorists are the exception rather than the rule, that Israel, unlike the Muslim world, cracks down on its extremists.
This is the “wild weed” theory that the Jewish Right has been promulgating for decades, and will promulgate for decades to come as instances of violence by Israeli fanatics continue.
The “wild weed” theory is the brazen lie. If Israel was as intolerant of radical Jewish violence as the Jewish Right claims, why does such violence keep happening — against Palestinians, Israeli soldiers, leftist demonstrators who dare approach the settlements?
Why does the threat of settler violence hang over any consideration of a future Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank?
Amanpour should have said that the Muslim warriors are an incomparably greater menace to the world than their Jewish counterparts, but within Israel and the West Bank, the Jewish warriors are one awful menace.
That would have given the documentary some perspective.
Unfortunately, I don’t think it would have reduced the amount of right-wing Jewish hate mail she’s getting by one bit.
Larry Derfner writes about Israeli society for U.S. Jewish newspapers and the Jerusalem Post.
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