30 August 2007
A three-part CNN documentary on fanatics in Judaism, Christianity and Islam has been met with criticism. The Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA) published an attack on the two-hour television program entitled "God's Jewish Warriors” produced by CNN’s chief international correspondent Christiane Amanpour. The film on Jews was the "most poisonously biased and factually shoddy feature to air on mainstream American television in recent memory," CAMERA's executive director Andrea Levin said.
It was "deeply false," she writes, to equate "Jewish [and Christian] religious fervency with that of Muslims heard endorsing 'martyrdom,' or suicide-killing. There is, of course, no counterpart among Jews and Christians to the violent Jihadist Muslim campaigns underway across the globe... To demonstrate the supposed threat of Jewish fundamentalism, the few cases of Jewish terrorism – a handful spanning decades with each one overwhelmingly denounced by Israeli society and with those involved arrested, tried and jailed – are elaborated on at length and cast as a profound peril,” Levin wrote.
The general manager of the American network MSNBC also attacked the CNN series for defending “Islamic fundamentalism and the worst type of moral relativism" and for its "shameful advocacy masked as journalism." Abrams quipped that Amanpour "avoided getting bogged down in objectivity." He also criticized her for comparing those who support Israel's defense strategy to Muslim terrorists: "Christians and Jews, for example, who support Israel's strategy for self-defense are just as much God's warriors, according to Amanpour, as the Islamic radicals who blow themselves and others up in an effort to destroy the world as we know it."
