A Reader writes:
Saw a great report last night [14 Aug] about Islam. “Generation Islam” by Christiane Amanpour [CNN]. Backs my thoughts that it is about education and tolerance..
Tolerance. Exactly. But it doesn’t work if one religion is intolerant of others and claims supremacy over mankind, as does Islam.
Generation Islam is not yet on YouTube, at least in full. There’s only snippets on the CNN site. Amanpour visits a Taliban madrassa for young boys, which is pretty scary (“you will find my body in little pieces” sing the 10-year-olds, rocking as they chant from the Koran). Eboo Patel, a “moderate Muslim” from the US talks of the need for good schools for the youth of Afghanistan. Agree fully. But he ends by saying that the education should include education on Islam; and here the circle squares, because if they’re being educated in Islam, they are being taught that Islam is supreme and “the best of religions”, for that’s in the heart of Islam.
Another of the contributors to the documentary is the Holy Land Trust, which in the US is an idicted co-conspirator charged with funding Hamas through its charity. (It is a requirement of Islamic charity, zakat, that it not go to non-Muslims, a distasteful enough requirement, worse when it goes to suicide killers).
Christiane Amanpour made a three-part 6-hour documentary called God’s Warriors which aired on CNN in August 2007. I saw it and was startled by her moral equivalence. She says there are terrorists in all religions (Timothy McVeigh, the bombers of an abortion clinic). Quite true. But there’s no real equivalence. The sheer number of Islamic terrorist acts dwarfs the few Christian or Hindu terrorist acts, by a factor of thousands. And in the west, any terrorist acts are universally condemned and abhorred, pursued by law enforcement, and brought to account. Whereas the thousands-fold more committing Islamic acts of terror are praised as martyrs, supported by the public.
Rabbi Marvin Hier, founder of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, notes that while there are about 200 Jews in Israel prone to violence there are literally thousands in Palestine. And while the Israeli fanatics are hunted down and the whole of Israel speaks out against them, Hamas honours and applauds their “martyrs”.
There is simply no counterpart in any other religion for the radicalism of Islam. It’s rather like saying “in Japan, there are not only Japanese; there are foreigners too”. Right. But 99% of the population is Japanese. There are non-Islamic terrorists. Right. But 99% are Islamic. Amanpour’s bias is in the very structure of the series: equal time to all three religions, even though the “warriors” today are almost all Islamic. Even granting that she had to give this equal time, there is within the series the same sort of moral equivalence. For example: “Jewish warriors” mentioned 22 times; “Moslem warriors” only 5.
There’s this same morally relativistic view in Generation Islam. A report by John Blake, part of the documentary, says
Terrorism is not confined to any faith or any culture. Terrorists are driven by varying impulses. Yet since the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on America, terrorism has often been associated with young Muslim men.
Now why would that be? Could it be because almost all terrorist attacks before and after 9/11 have been by “young Muslim men”. Could that be it? Nah…. That’d be “islamophobic”.
Post-post: long discussion of Blake's article here.
