Amanpour of CNN sympathises with jihadists, blackens Christians

Friday's earlier post on CNN's "God's Warriors" hinted that CNN and Christiane Amanpour gave Muslim "fundamentalists" in the U.S. sympathetic treatment, while they showed discomfort towards Christian conservatives. The original intention was to give examples of each in that post, but the distinction is so clear and important that it deserves its own separate post.

Bob Knight of MRC's Culture and Media Institute detailed some examples of Amanpour's biased treatment of Christian conservatives in his latest column. She spent the last 20 minutes of "God's Christian Warriors" profiling the Battlecry Campaign of Ron Luce, an evangelical Christian who runs a larger organization called Teen Mania Ministries.

As Knight pointed out, Amanpour "couldn't quite conceal her hostility" towards Luce. A partial transcript from this segment showing the full context of her rather-pointed questions clearly demonstrated this hostility.

Video (1:39): Real (1.21 MB) or Windows (1.03 MB), plus MP3 audio (759 kB).

AMANPOUR (voice-over): His [Luce's] ministry is located on 472 acres in rural east Texas.... Here, he trains teenagers how to spread his message.... They are the foot soldiers in Ron Luce's army for God.... They also serve as the backbone for BattleCry. They plan the events, act in them and even create their own media to combat today's mass media.... On campus, students must follow a strict set of rules.... No secular music or television. No "R"-rated movies. No alcohol. No drugs. No dating.

AMANPOUR (on camera): When I, you know, read that women have to wear skirts of a certain length, and guys aren't allowed to, you know, go on the Internet, unsupervised. And I think, you know, totalitarian regimes.

LUCE: No. It's about learning to have disciplines that communicate purity. You know? The skirts' length are to keep guys from -- you know, any man on the planet can be distracted, and we don't want to unintentionally create distraction.

AMANPOUR: But, Ron, that's what the Taliban said. They kept women in their house, because men couldn't be trusted around them.

LUCE: Well, there's extremists. You came to our campus. They did, your team did. They can see that we're not extremists. The kids are normal, and they have fun, and they wear normal clothes. It's just not -- it's not -- they've not adapted. We haven't adapted the dress code to the sexualization that's happened in our culture.

Amanpour is being more than a bit hyperbolic concerning how Luce and his organization treats his young female students. In the video accompanying her voice-over detailing Luce's east-Texas campus, there are more than a few women visible who are wearing pants instead of skirts. The young woman featured immediately after Luce's answer to Amanpour's "Taliban" comment wore blue jeans during all of the time she appeared on-camera. She also obviously couldn't tell the difference between the Taliban, who, as she said, "kept their women in their house," and the students on Luce's campus, who are free to come and leave as they please.

It should also be pointed out that all of the people and groups detailed in "God's Christian Warriors" belonged to conservative evangelical/Protestant Christianity. Other than Amanpour's passing reference to "Catholic, Mormons, and social conservatives" joining Jerry Falwell in his Moral Majority, and stock footage of the annual pro-life March for Life in Washington, DC in which a protester praying the Rosary is prominent, there is no significant mention of other conservatives in the program. The evangelicals are clearly a bigger "boogeyman" for CNN and Amanpour.

By contrast, Amanpour spent a whole segment detailing the plight of Muslims in the U.S. The six-and-a-half minute segment, titled "A Personal Jihad," profiled Rehan Seyam, an American-born Muslim of Egyptian descent who, in Amanpour's words, is a "jihadist, just not the sort you're thinking of."

The following partial transcript demonstrates the clear sympathetic treatment Seyam and her fellow American Muslims received from Amanpour.

Video (2:07): Real (1.54 MB) or Windows (1.29 MB), plus MP3 audio (965 kB)

AMANPOUR (voice-over): She's a lifelong American.... Born and raised in Islip, Long Island.... But Rehan Seyam is a jihadist, just not the sort you're thinking of.

SEYAM: The word jihad means struggle. I treat me wearing hijab in the United States as a struggle, jihad itself, struggle. That's my jihad. I mean, holy war, really? Who made that up? That's really a very bad translation. It's a self-struggle. Living in a secular society, where you have to work to maintain your Islamic values, that's jihad.

AMANPOUR: Rehan Seyam's parents came here from Egypt. They were devout. But, like so many immigrant children, she was a typically Americanized teenager.

SEYAM: So, when I would be called to pray by my parents, I would just run between commercial breaks, and wash up and pray, and run back, and hopefully I didn't miss my TV show.

AMANPOUR: But, as she grew up and went to college in what was now a post-9/11 world, she began to get closer to Islam. And, one morning, she made a decision that would change her life, to wear the hijab, the traditional Muslim head scarf.

SEYAM: It was very dramatic for me. And I remember how -- like, even now, thinking about it, it really does make my heart beat a little bit faster, because I was making a decision I knew was permanent. You put on hijab, you don't take it off. So, I said, that's it.

AMANPOUR: Rehan's jihad isn't violence, not even close, but it is public. It is a deliberate display of faith, not just covering her head, but swearing off alcohol, praying five times a day, which isn't easy in a typically busy American life.... For Rehan and her husband, Rahmi... and most practicing Muslims, Islam is their identity. It s

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