Christiane Amanpour: An Accomplice to Lies

By Michael Devolin, B'nai Elim Canada
directorcanada@bnaielim.org

As a rebuttal to those who questioned her professionalism after witnessing her emotional outbursts during her coverage of the siege of Sarajevo, Christiane Amanpour replied, "There are some situations one cannot be neutral about, because when you are neutral you are an accomplice." Apparently Christiane Amanpour feels less emotional and more neutral about Jews and their religious connection to Israel than she does for the Muslims of Sarajevo.

In her latest documentary, God's Warriors, Amanpour vilifies Jews simply by equating religious Jews with religious Muslims. Of course, not everyone will see it this way. Not everyone these days is willing (or brave enough) to critique Islam and its adherents, both for the violence and anti-Jewish hatred this religion and its attendant culture advocates, and the advocates of this religion and its culture, for how they are all too willing to accommodate such violence and anti-Jewish hatred. Obviously, the journalist Amanpour is not brave enough. An Oriana Fallaci she is not.

Anyone who has studied the history of Islam will know that Jews and Judaism do not deserve to be in any way compared as imitations of Muslims and their Islam. Anyone as knowledgeable as Christiane Amanpour should be, who makes such a comparison in her documentary God's Warriors, can do so only wilfully, with laboured effort and with malefic intent. A religious Jewish friend, a directing member of the right-wing B'nai Elim intoned to me after watching the film, "I fear that she has awakened more sleeping anti-Semites and empowered the rest of the Jew-haters in the world. The attacks on Jews and Jewish establishments will no doubt increase as a result."

I'm sure CNN is so very proud of Amanpour's anti-Israel, anti-Judaism diatribe. Of course, her "moral equivalency" is standard for CNN and their self-aggrandizing, cowardly journalists. Heaven forbid they should point out that Jews do not blow themselves up in German and Austrian restaurants for the sins of the Holocaust and the Crusades. Heaven forbid they should reveal, as did Ayaan Hirsi Ali in her book Infidel, that "Violent jihad is a historical constant in Islam." Heaven forbid they should expose the fact that Muslim zealots in the 21st century behead journalists and aid-workers simply because those journalists and aid-workers are Christians and Jews and therefore do not measure up to the Prophet Mohammed and the glory of the Koran. CNN and their effete journalists like Christiane Amanpour (all her war correspondence notwithstanding) are incapable of making such veridical contradistinctions simply because they have long ago made the obsequious choice to feed the masses with palatable slander, even though the masses, as history has so often exposed, often howl for anti-Jewish slander.

In Sarajevo, at the height of her fame, Amanpour boasted to the world, "Objectivity doesn't mean treating all sides equally." Apparently this axiom does not apply when one of those sides are the Jews and the State of Israel. The warped logic of her documentary purports that Jewish terrorists are numerous, as active, and as determined to destroy the "goyim" (non-Jew) as are the Muslim terrorists to destroy not only Israel and her Jews, but also the entire Western world. This is one time when I'm sure the Jewish people would insist on being regarded as not equal to Muslims and their sequent, religiously inspired terrorism, not because such equivalence is so unattractive and out of character for Jews, but simply because it's an outrageous lie. Christiane Amanpour, as a result of her evident disdain for objectivity, is now become an accomplice to that lie.