Before I get shrill about Christiane Amanpour’s “God’s Warriors” let me just put a few things on the table: I am vehemently opposed to the continuation of the Israeli settler project. I find those Jews who live in Hebron to be detrimental to Israel’s security and moral stature. In general I like Christine Amanpour reporting. She is both interesting and engaging. I have very little tolerance for any kind of fundamentalism. That said, the edition of “God’s Warriors” that dealt with Judaism was worse than misleading, it was disingenuous and borderline anti-Semitic. Rabbi Grossman and Robert Eisenman have already raised a number of concerns and I agree with every one of them.
To me the most infuriating part of the program was that between 15-30 minutes of the show was spent on AIPAC, the major American-Israel lobby group. AIPAC is group that supports the will of the Israeli government (i.e. pro- every peace deal, disengagement and pullout that Israel has ever made). The group is one hundred percent secular making no religious claims whatsoever. AIPAC has about as much to do with God as McDonald’s does with health. Identifying AIPAC with “God’s warriors” shows the absurdity of the program. The fact that a program focusing on God would spend so much time interviewing and describing the role of AIPAC–an organization in which almost every American president, senator and leading official in the last 25 years have spoken to–was symbolic of a much larger problem. Namely, instead of actually investigating God’s Jewish warriors Amanpour decided she needed to go the conspiratorial route. The show ended up just becoming a guise for a flat out attack on Israel.