All God's Warriors

Ever since CNN's "God's Warriors" series was announced, I expected someone to complain about it. By devoting equal segments to Jewish and Christian extremists as well as Muslim extremists, the network was just asking for someone to accuse them of "moral equivalence" or something along those lines. Well, Dan Abrams is on MSNBC right now, as I write, to make that charge, and here's an article (http://hnn.us/articles/42197.html) along the same lines. The complaint is predicatable: Christians and Jews are not committing acts of mass terrorism, the critics say (not counting military bombings, of course), so how can you discuss them in the same breath as the Muslims? This complaint misses the point of the series, which was that Muslims are not the only people on earth driven by what they take to be God's command. The author of the article notes that Christians in the US seek legal redress rather than resort to terrorism. Besides noting bombings of abortion clinics to correct his view, we might note that legal redress is often not available to Islamist dissidents. Americans like to imagine that they could never be driven to terrorism, but that only shows their failure of imagination, which in turn explains their stubborness in the face of Muslim opposition. But keeping the topic to religion, part of the complaint against Islamists (or jihadis, or caliphists if I can coin a term) is that theirs is a totalitarian worldview. To the extent that "totalitarian" is a valid term, I concede the point, if only to note that Christians, at least, must also be termed totalitarian if they hope to have the whole world governed by the Gospels. Totalitarianism is about ends, not means. The Christian and Jewish "warriors" on CNN may not be terrorists, but in their totalitarian aspirations they belong in the same category as their Muslim cousins.

Abrams says that CNN was "defending" Islamic terrorists by equating them with Jewish and Christian extremists. He accuses Christiane Amanpour of a "pro-Muslim bias" and moral relativism, and takes offense that any Jews or Christians might be called "God's Warriors." He objects to her efforts to explain why Muslims feel aggrieved, and takes umbrage at her apprarent skepticism toward Christian grievances. Abrams apparently wants us to believe that Islamic terrorism is a unique, incomparable force of evil, as if that alone were the source of all the world's trouble. He brings on noted Islamophobe Steve Emerson to second his objections. Emerson says that to call a Christian lawyer group "God's Warriors" is to demonize them, but I would think devout monotheists of any persuasion would be proud of such a label. Now there's nothing wrong with Islamophobia unless you're irrationally exclusive about it. Monotheism everywhere is a thing to be feared and fought against, and if Islam seems more extreme, that's only because they're the most extremely monotheist or "totalitarian" of the three groups at this moment in history. Monotheism itself, however, is totalitarianism in its original form.