From: My Son, whose interview for this PBS series ended on the cutting room floorSubject: "America at a Crossroads" veers to the right
Date: Wed, 18 Apr 2007 13:24:45 +0000
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"America at a Crossroads" veers to the right
The highly touted PBS series on Islam and terrorism casts a cold eye on Bush's Iraq disaster -- but fails to
examine Mideast history or America's failed policies in the region.
By Gary Kamiya
Apr. 17, 2007 | If anyone still believes that PBS has a left-wing bias, "America at a Crossroads," the $20
million, 12-hour series about Islam, terrorism and the post-9/11 world that kicked off Sunday night,
should shut them up once and for all. "Crossroads" proves yet again that five years after the 9/11 attacks,
the mainstream American media still can't bring itself to talk about the real causes of Arab and Muslim
rage at the West.
"Crossroads" has its virtues, but it is fundamentally flawed. Several of its 11 independently produced films
are excellent, one is positively brilliant, and most are worth watching. But few of the films break any new
ground or represent an advance over the many excellent documentaries on the same subject made by
Frontline, Wide Angle and P.O.V. That isn't the real problem, though. The real problem is "Crossroads'"
almost complete failure to explore the history of the Middle East, the effect of Western policies on its
people, and the political and historical grievances that are largely responsible for Muslim and Arab rage at
the West.
Intellectually, historically and journalistically, this is inexcusable. It's outrageous to devote this much time
and money to a subject and never deal directly with one of the central issues. It's as if someone made a
12-hour series about the Civil War and decided to omit slavery.
By ignoring the political issues that drive Muslim rage at the West, "Crossroads" by default supports the
neoconservative analysis of Islam and the causes of Islamist terrorism. And this is far more insidious, and
injurious to the full national debate that the series' producers claim they want. For "Crossroads" comes
anointed as a kind of quasi-official statement about how Americans should think about 9/11, Islamist
terrorism, and America's relations with the Arab/Muslim world. As a result, it has the potential to pass its
intellectual blind spots on to the American people.
One episode, a virtual infomercial for Richard Perle, a leading neoconservative theorist and architect of
the Iraq war, is so laughably biased -- and so unbalanced by any film giving equal time to a
corresponding perspective on the left -- that it taints the entire series. Suffice it to say the Perle episode,
which airs Tuesday night, is almost worth viewing just to see the opening, in which Perle pays specious
karmic penance as he is confronted by angry antiwar protesters. In fact, the setup, like the entire film, is
completely canned -- the filmmakers obviously made Perle do it to make him a more sympathetic figure.
(If you think that Perle chose to leave his house in France to confront an antiwar demonstration while the
cameras just happened to be rolling, I have one of his old Chalabi-for-President-of-Iraq stickers I'd like to sell you.)
The episode does fashion a fig leaf of journalistic integrity by showing Perle arguing with figures like Pat Buchanan and Richard Holbrooke. But this cannot overcome the fact that Perle gets to essentially narrate
the film and gets the last word. Nor does it make up for disingenuous statements that go unchallenged.
Perle tells a war protester that he never heard the administration saying that Saddam Hussein was linked to
9/11, when he knows full well that Dick Cheney, his soul mate on all things war-on-terror-related, has
constantly implied that very thing.
Perle takes the high road throughout, claiming that if JFK were alive he'd be fighting the same noble,
all-American fight to spread freedom and piously proclaiming that he's a Democrat and simply motivated
by the do-gooder desire to spread freedom. We see him driving through Afghanistan, smiling smarmily
and waxing poetic about how much he loves the Afghan people and how wonderful it is that Afghan
women have more freedom now.
You would never know, listening to this grandfatherly figure, that he is a radical ideologue who, in the
whack-job book he wrote with David Frum absurdly titled "An End to Evil," advocated attacking North
Korea, argued that the Palestinians should not get a state of their own, and maintained that we should be
ready to invade Iran and Syria. Nor would you know that he ardently subscribes to the beliefs of the
Israeli right wing. Along with other prominent neocons, Perle wrote a notorious 1996 policy paper for
incoming Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that advocated, among other things, "rolling back"
Syria, smashing the Palestinians into submission and toppling Saddam Hussein's regime and replacing it
with (here the neocon drugs really kicked in) a Hashemite king. In their wisdom, the producers of
"Crossroads" decided that viewers did not need to know any of these minor details.
Why did this embarrassing film make the cut? In the eyes of our media gatekeepers, taking their cue from
Congress and their equally cowed or ignorant media brethren, even a discredited right-wing thinker like
Perle is ready for prime time, while a left-wing thinker like Robert Fisk is not. After all, Perle's ideas are
enshrined in the White House, while Fisk is a dangerous bomb-thrower whose opinions about the Middle
East are too uncomfortable to be given wide circulation. Forget the fact that Perle and Bush's lovely little
war has turned out to be an unmitigated disaster, or that Fisk, who actually knows something about the
Middle East, has been proven right time and again. The media bureaucracy plods dutifully on, playing by
the same old rules.
Series host Robert MacNeil, presumably trying to justify the Perle film, told Current magazine, "By the
time ["Crossroads"] gets to Perle, you have a very negative view of what's happening in Iraq." Never
mind that "Crossroads" might have presented a negative view of what's happening in Iraq because that's
the truth about what's happening in Iraq. If the series has been so unforgivably biased to the left as to
show Bush's Iraq adventure in a negative light, its creators must immediately run a love letter to some
neocon from the American Enterprise Institute. After all, we've had no opportunity to hear neocon ideas
except on every network, every cable channel, the Op-Ed pages of the New York Times, Fox News, all
the major newsweeklies, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, the Weekly Standard, the New
Republic, Slate and just about every other media outlet. This intolerable censorship of failed right-wing
ideas must cease!
"Crossroads" came to the air as a result of right-wing pressure and intellectual timidity. The project began
during the tenures of Ken Tomlinson and Michael Pack, two conservatives who held top positions at the
Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the government-run nonprofit that oversees PBS and its more than
300 local affiliates. Tomlinson was a Bush hack whose mandate as CPB board chairman was to tilt PBS's
programming to the right. To do that, Tomlinson paid a consultant $14,000 to vet the Bill Moyers
program "Now" for liberal bias, and hired two ombudsmen to monitor PBS news programming. Outrage
over these practices and a damning internal report forced Tomlinson to resign in 2005. Pack, a
conservative documentarian -- his résumé includes a sympathetic doc about Newt Gingrich and a film
called "Hollywood vs. Religion" narrated by Michael Medved -- was brought in as CPB's executive vice
president to make PBS's programming more conservative.
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"Crossroads" was Pack's brainchild. In 2004, CPB put out a call for proposals about films dealing with
terrorism, Islam and the post-9/11 world. It received 440 proposals, awarding full production funding to
21. But the series immediately became engulfed in controversy. Critics charged that the Perle episode and
one called "Warriors," about U.S. troops in Iraq, were biased toward the Bush administration. These
charges grew even louder when it was revealed that the original producer of the Perle episode, British
filmmaker Brian Lapping, was a friend of Perle's. (Lapping eventually recused himself from the film.
Karl Zinsmeister, a co-producer of "Warriors," also left the project after he took a job as Bush's chief
domestic-policy advisor.)
Trying to overcome the perception that the series was biased, CPB turned the project over to WETA,
Washington's public television station, which hired former PBS NewsHour anchor MacNeil, and shot
down "Islam vs. Islamists," an episode co-produced by neocon pundit Frank Gaffney, alleging that
moderate Muslims are intimidated by radical Islamists. The final result isn't terrible (I give its 11 episodes
2 A's, 3 B's, 5 C's and one F), but its failure to delve deeply into the crucial political and historical issues
means that even the strongest films in the series end up being decontextualized and superficial.
This is particularly true of the solid two-hour film that kicked off the series Sunday night, "The Men
Behind Jihad." "The Men Behind Jihad" offers an excellent introduction to the ideological fathers of
Islamist terrorism -- and a withering critique of Bush's war on Iraq. It traces the origins of radical
Islamism from Sayyid Qutb through Ayman al-Zawahiri and Osama bin Laden. Its first-rate group of
commentators include Malise Ruthven, Michael Scheuer and Lawrence Wright, author of "The Looming
Tower" (which just won this year's Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction). The material on Qutb's surreal
sojourn in Greeley, Colo., where Americans' fixations with their lawns and Qutb's fateful observation of a
slow dance drove him into a pious frenzy of revulsion, is strikingly filmed. Scheuer, the former CIA
analyst responsible for the bin Laden file, makes the most arresting political point, pointing out that
Bush's war against Iraq greatly swelled the jihadists' cause. "The unexpected gift of the invasion of Iraq is
more than Osama bin Laden ever hoped for," Scheuer says.
The film is one of the only ones in the series to touch, however briefly, on the political grievances that
play a role in jihadist terror, and have led many Muslims to accept it. It notes in passing that Zawahiri
became radicalized after Egyptian President Anwar Sadat signed the Camp David peace treaty with Israel,
and acknowledges at the end that "many Muslims see events in Lebanon, Gaza and Iraq as oppression,
justifying more terrorism." But we are told nothing else about the Camp David treaty, or the events in
Gaza or Lebanon, or indeed almost anything about Middle Eastern history. The complex dialectic
between legitimate grievance and religious fanaticism as causes of jihadism is hinted at, but never
explored. And since no other film in the series ever returns to this subject except in even more passing
and superficial ways, the references remain almost meaningless.
There are two episodes of "Crossroads" that stand head and shoulders above the rest. The first and best,
which airs Monday night, is a truly extraordinary film called "Operation Homecoming: Writing the
Wartime Experience." Featuring unforgettable writing about Iraq, including the brilliant poetry of Brian
Turner and extraordinary pieces by ordinary soldiers, and searing appearances by older-generation
war-lit giants like Tim O'Brien and James Salter, this film brings the dreadful reality of Iraq home more
than anything else I've seen.
The second standout episode, which runs Friday, is titled "Security versus Liberty: The Other War." It's a
well-reported, chilling look at how Bush administration policies after 9/11 have eroded civil liberties and
led to hideous perversions of justice. The film's closing report, about an FBI sting "terrorist-catching"
operation that ruined an obviously harmless Arab-American pizza-shop owner's life, is searing. As the
man's wife sobs, recounting how her little boy asked her what his father had done and why he couldn't
see him anymore, many viewers will feel deeply ashamed of what Bush has done to America.
Not quite as outstanding, but also excellent, are three more episodes: "Struggle for the Soul of Islam:
Inside Indonesia," "Gangs of Iraq" and the aforementioned opener about the origins of jihad. "Inside
Indonesia," which airs Thursday, is an important and solidly reported look at the difficult balancing act
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the world's most populous Muslim nation must engage in as it contends with Islamists empowered by
Indonesia's newly born democracy. "Gangs of Iraq," which airs Tuesday night, examines the enormous
hurdles the U.S. faces as it tries to train Iraqi security forces.
Then there is "Faith Without Fear," airing Thursday, about Irshad Manji, an outspoken Canadian critic of
Islam. This film is riveting to watch, but it's about a figure too eccentric to speak for anyone except
herself, and its inclusion in the series is highly dubious. Manji is a peculiar figure. She makes some good
points about the need for Islam to once again embrace ijtihad, or intellectual openness -- a position also
espoused by the religious scholar Karen Armstrong. But Manji's attitude toward her religion seems so
perversely critical that it's hard to believe she really believes either in Islam or any institutional religion at
all.
Her attacks on Islam seem oddly gratuitous. As an atheist, I can't argue with what seems to be her
corrosive view of religion. But she shows no understanding of the historical reasons why Islam has not
yet had an Enlightenment and fully reconciled itself with the modern, secular world. I believe that it can
and will, and I believe when it does it will more closely resemble the kind of religion Manji says she
wants -- but the change is not going to be produced by someone as far out of the Arab and Muslim
mainstream as she is. (Just how far out is revealed not only by her views on Islam, but by a New York
Times Op-Ed piece she wrote about Israel's separation barrier, titled "How I Learned to Love the Wall.")
Her appearance in "Crossroads," unbalanced by a corresponding film about, say, Hanan Ashrawi or Sari
Nusseibeh or Tarik Ramadan or some Arab or Muslim whose views are actually representative, is all too
predictable: The American media just loves Muslims like her.
Three other episodes are workmanlike: "Warriors," "Europe's 9/11" and "The Muslim Americans."
"Warriors," which also airs Monday, about U.S. soldiers in Iraq, is vivid and at times touching but feels
pretty familiar. And it sheds no light at all on the larger issues: It seems to function in the series like that
traditional, patriotic statue placed next to the Vietnam Wall Memorial. "Europe's 9/11," which airs
Wednesday, spends too much time on cops-and-robbers tales of chasing down the jihadists who blew up
the train in Madrid and not enough examining the sociological roots of jihadist rage in Europe. "The
Muslim Americans," which also airs Wednesday, is standard feel-good multiculturalism, perfectly decent
but not offering much original insight.
"The Brotherhood," which airs Friday, is the show's second-weakest episode, and its problems highlight
the entire series' shortcomings. It investigates the founding Islamist group the Muslim Brotherhood,
asking ominously whether it is a covert radical organization that plans to secretly establish an Islamic
reign or is a moderate and trustworthy group. Focusing on a wealthy financier suspected of funding
al-Qaida, it has some decent reporting, but it's marred by an embarrassing narrative shtick in which
Newsweek reporters Michael Isikoff and Mark Hosenball are constantly shown asking each other canned
setup questions and being filmed in working-Joe-reporter poses. More substantively, its sensationalist,
breaking-news approach gets in the way of a substantive analysis of the ambiguous position of the
Muslim Brotherhood. There are indeed many questions about the multifaceted and evolving nature of this
organization, but the film's either-or approach does not illuminate them.
Worse, the episode indulges in traditional, misleading U.S. media clichés that tacitly echo problematic
neoconservative claims about Muslim terrorism. One of its segments deals with a prominent American
Muslim, Abdurahman Alamoudi, who in 2004 was sentenced to 23 years for plotting to kill Saudi Crown
Prince Abdullah. Alamoudi is a favorite subject of neocon pundits because he was highly connected (he
met with Presidents Clinton and Bush), made moderate statements -- and turned out to be plotting an
outlandish murder.
Obviously, the film is justified in condemning him. But in the course of doing that, it shows a clip of him
praising the militant groups Hamas and Hezbollah, and ominously implies that this is grounds for
suspecting that he may be linked to al-Qaida. The episode does show an academic, Peter Mandaville, who
says, "For him, Hamas is primarily a national liberation struggle of the Palestinian people against the
foreign occupation of the state of Israel. It isn't terrorism for him." But as always with "Crossroads," this
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statement is never placed in any larger context, leaving the average viewer to come away with the
impression that Mandaville is probably just a pointy-headed apologist for terrorists. The producers do not
point out the fact that the overwhelming majority of people in the Middle East, while they may
disapprove of terrorism as a tactic and of the austere version of Islam preached by Hamas and Hezbollah,
support them as resistance fighters. (Not nearly as many support al-Qaida or its ilk, although the Iraq war
increased the popular support for these international terrorist organizations.)
Americans may not like to admit it, but ignoring the truth about what people in the Middle East actually
think is a big part of the reason we're bogged down in Iraq. Collapsing distinctions between groups like
Hamas and Hezbollah, on the one hand, and ones like al-Qaida, on the other, is a key part of the neocon
agenda. It underlies Bush's whole approach to the Middle East in general and the Israeli-Palestinian
conflict in particular. It allowed Bush to paint Israel's war against Lebanon, which further eroded
America's already dismal standing in the region, as part of his "war on terror." And it has gone
unchallenged in Congress and the American media, in large part because to challenge it is to venture into
the political minefield surrounding anything having to do with Israel. But it simply does not jibe with the
realities or beliefs of the Middle East. Documentary films that uncritically repeat these conventional
pieties reveal themselves to be either ignorant or biased. They shed no light on their subjects and tacitly
support the neoconservative approach to the "war on terror" -- the very issue that they are supposedly
examining.
"Crossroads" fails not because it doesn't adopt critics' views of neoconservative ideas, but because it
doesn't even present them. It fails because it lacks intellectual honesty and journalistic rigor. Anyone who
has studied the war of ideas over the causes of 9/11, Bush's response to it, and his "war on terror" knows
that there are essentially two opposed sides in the debate. On the one hand, there are the "essentialists,"
who argue that Arab/Muslim rage against the West is pathological and peculiar to Islam. It is driven not
by real political grievances, which they see as trumped up, but by humiliation at the failure of Islam to
keep up with the West, the sickness of Arab civil society, a festering hatred of Western liberalism,
democracy and secularism, and the desire to establish a universal Muslim state throughout the world, one
that would surpass the glorious days of the Caliphate. Islamist terrorism is simply evil, full stop, and must
be destroyed. Any attempts to ameliorate it by political or economic moves are naive at best and
appeasement at worst.
The intellectual father of this position is the eminent Princeton Arabist Bernard Lewis, and some of its
prominent advocates include Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, William Kristol and (with some differences) Thomas
Friedman. Usually combined with Wilsonian rhetoric about bringing freedom and democracy to
benighted Arab states, this is the neoconservative view of Islam and the "war on terror." It dominated the
Bush administration and was shared by virtually every public intellectual who supported Bush's war on
Iraq. Many of those who hold it are strongly pro-Israel.
The opposing side could be called the "historical analysts." Those who hold it -- virtually all of whom
opposed Bush's war against Iraq -- argue that Arab/Muslim rage against the West is in large part driven by
specific historic injustices, most of which originated in the Western colonialist carving-up of the former
Ottoman Empire after World War I. The West, in particular England, France and the United States, raised
and then betrayed Arab hopes for independence, undermined fledgling democratic movements, and
mouthed hypocritical pieties about "freedom," while it installed or supported dictators to protect Western
political, military and economic interests. The overriding grievance, not just for Arabs but for Muslims
throughout the world, remains Palestine. Arabs and Muslims throughout the world view the settling of
Palestinian land by European Jews, the expulsion of 750,000 Palestinians after Israel's 1948 war of
independence and Israel's subsequent refusal to allow the refugees to return to their native land, as the
West's ur-sin against the Arab and Muslim people. The U.S.'s one-sided support for Israel has poisoned
the attitudes of the Arab/Muslim world against it.
Those who hold this position do not claim that Osama bin Laden was justified in launching his jihad
against the West, or even that the Palestinian issue was his foremost grievance. (The presence of infidel
Americans on holy Saudi soil was.) And they are prepared to agree with the essentialists that the Arab and
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Muslim world is plagued by corruption, despotism, stasis and desperately needs to reform to move into
the modern world. However, they insist that jihadist rage must be understood in a broad historical
context, and that Bush's "war on terror" is simplistic and counterproductive. Above all, they argue that
until we drain the swamp by addressing root causes, terrorism will continue to bubble upward like a
poison gas. To fight Islamist terror, it is necessary for the West in general and America in particular to win
Arab hearts and minds by resolving historical grievances, of which the most pressing is the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict. There is nothing particularly radical about this position -- it is held by virtually
every country in the world, and was recently espoused by the ultra-establishment Iraq Study Group.
My point here is not to argue for one position or the other, although I obviously subscribe to the latter.
My point is that these two positions are the two inescapable poles of the debate, and that any serious
attempt to deal with the post-9/11 world must directly engage with them. By failing to do so, "Crossroads"
doomed itself to intellectual mediocrity and a quick ticket to oblivion.
Here's what "Crossroads" should have included. First, it should have devoted one film to this war of ideas,
giving each side its due. Then it should have commissioned another film offering a historical survey of
the Middle East starting in 1798, when Napoleon invaded Egypt, and ending today. This film would have
looked at French and British colonialism and its effects on the development of Arab democracies. It
would have talked about the Sykes-Picot Agreement that betrayed Arab nationalist hopes after WWI, and
Great Britain's imperialist misadventures in Iraq, which so closely resemble our own. The Palestinian
naqba, or catastrophe, would be covered. The film would examine the U.S.-backed coup in 1953 that
removed Iranian leader Muhammad Mossadegh. The Suez crisis, the failure of Arab nationalism,
America's long proxy war with the USSR in the Middle East, the Six-Day War and 1973 October war, and
U.S. hypocrisy in dealing with Saddam Hussein would all be discussed. The Algerian government's
fateful decision in 1991 to suspend elections when it became clear Islamists were going to win -- a
decision followed by an appalling civil war that killed 200,000 people -- would be covered. And it would
have looked at Israel's 2006 war against Lebanon.
In a perfect world, "Crossroads" would then have devoted a third film dealing with the Arab media and
Arab/Muslim public opinion about the U.S. The fact is that few Americans know anything about what
ordinary Arabs and Muslims think of our foreign policy. Yet this information is vital as America wages a
war of ideas with radical Islam.
In an even more perfect world, there would have been a fourth film devoted exclusively to the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict. And a fifth about Iran.
Finally, "Crossroads" should have included a sixth film examining why the Bush administration went to
war against Iraq, and assessing whether it was wise to do so. (The Perle perspective could have been
included here, balanced not by Newsweek reporters but by figures like Fisk, Edward Said, Noam
Chomsky or Juan Cole.) The war on Iraq is the overriding issue of our time, and a national debate on it is
necessary.
These new films would have been challenging, controversial, uncomfortable and inevitably critical both
of Bush administration policies and of America's Middle East policies in general. Sacred cows like
America's own dirty hands in the Middle East, and Israel, would have been put on the table.
Conservatives would have screamed that the series blamed the U.S., endangered Israel and appeased
terrorists. It would have taken guts to take these subjects on -- but the result would have been far more
useful and stimulating to national debate than the ho-hum product CPB came up with.
PBS honchos are making a lot of noise about how this series proves that public TV is relevant again.
Unfortunately, all it proves is that even five years after 9/11, the mainstream media in this country are still
unwilling or unable to talk frankly about the Middle East. And until that changes, we'll be fighting the
"war on terror" in the dark.
-- By Gary Kamiya
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"America at a Crossroads" veers to the right
The highly touted PBS series on Islam and terrorism casts a cold eye on Bush's Iraq disaster -- but fails to
examine Mideast history or America's failed policies in the region.
By Gary Kamiya
Apr. 17, 2007 | If anyone still believes that PBS has a left-wing bias, "America at a Crossroads," the $20
million, 12-hour series about Islam, terrorism and the post-9/11 world that kicked off Sunday night,
should shut them up once and for all. "Crossroads" proves yet again that five years after the 9/11 attacks,
the mainstream American media still can't bring itself to talk about the real causes of Arab and Muslim
rage at the West.
"Crossroads" has its virtues, but it is fundamentally flawed. Several of its 11 independently produced films
are excellent, one is positively brilliant, and most are worth watching. But few of the films break any new
ground or represent an advance over the many excellent documentaries on the same subject made by
Frontline, Wide Angle and P.O.V. That isn't the real problem, though. The real problem is "Crossroads'"
almost complete failure to explore the history of the Middle East, the effect of Western policies on its
people, and the political and historical grievances that are largely responsible for Muslim and Arab rage at
the West.
Intellectually, historically and journalistically, this is inexcusable. It's outrageous to devote this much time
and money to a subject and never deal directly with one of the central issues. It's as if someone made a
12-hour series about the Civil War and decided to omit slavery.
By ignoring the political issues that drive Muslim rage at the West, "Crossroads" by default supports the
neoconservative analysis of Islam and the causes of Islamist terrorism. And this is far more insidious, and
injurious to the full national debate that the series' producers claim they want. For "Crossroads" comes
anointed as a kind of quasi-official statement about how Americans should think about 9/11, Islamist
terrorism, and America's relations with the Arab/Muslim world. As a result, it has the potential to pass its
intellectual blind spots on to the American people.
One episode, a virtual infomercial for Richard Perle, a leading neoconservative theorist and architect of
the Iraq war, is so laughably biased -- and so unbalanced by any film giving equal time to a
corresponding perspective on the left -- that it taints the entire series. Suffice it to say the Perle episode,
which airs Tuesday night, is almost worth viewing just to see the opening, in which Perle pays specious
karmic penance as he is confronted by angry antiwar protesters. In fact, the setup, like the entire film, is
completely canned -- the filmmakers obviously made Perle do it to make him a more sympathetic figure.
(If you think that Perle chose to leave his house in France to confront an antiwar demonstration while the
cameras just happened to be rolling, I have one of his old Chalabi-for-President-of-Iraq stickers I'd like to sell you.)
The episode does fashion a fig leaf of journalistic integrity by showing Perle arguing with figures like Pat Buchanan and Richard Holbrooke. But this cannot overcome the fact that Perle gets to essentially narrate
the film and gets the last word. Nor does it make up for disingenuous statements that go unchallenged.
Perle tells a war protester that he never heard the administration saying that Saddam Hussein was linked to
9/11, when he knows full well that Dick Cheney, his soul mate on all things war-on-terror-related, has
constantly implied that very thing.
Perle takes the high road throughout, claiming that if JFK were alive he'd be fighting the same noble,
all-American fight to spread freedom and piously proclaiming that he's a Democrat and simply motivated
by the do-gooder desire to spread freedom. We see him driving through Afghanistan, smiling smarmily
and waxing poetic about how much he loves the Afghan people and how wonderful it is that Afghan
women have more freedom now.
You would never know, listening to this grandfatherly figure, that he is a radical ideologue who, in the
whack-job book he wrote with David Frum absurdly titled "An End to Evil," advocated attacking North
Korea, argued that the Palestinians should not get a state of their own, and maintained that we should be
ready to invade Iran and Syria. Nor would you know that he ardently subscribes to the beliefs of the
Israeli right wing. Along with other prominent neocons, Perle wrote a notorious 1996 policy paper for
incoming Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that advocated, among other things, "rolling back"
Syria, smashing the Palestinians into submission and toppling Saddam Hussein's regime and replacing it
with (here the neocon drugs really kicked in) a Hashemite king. In their wisdom, the producers of
"Crossroads" decided that viewers did not need to know any of these minor details.
Why did this embarrassing film make the cut? In the eyes of our media gatekeepers, taking their cue from
Congress and their equally cowed or ignorant media brethren, even a discredited right-wing thinker like
Perle is ready for prime time, while a left-wing thinker like Robert Fisk is not. After all, Perle's ideas are
enshrined in the White House, while Fisk is a dangerous bomb-thrower whose opinions about the Middle
East are too uncomfortable to be given wide circulation. Forget the fact that Perle and Bush's lovely little
war has turned out to be an unmitigated disaster, or that Fisk, who actually knows something about the
Middle East, has been proven right time and again. The media bureaucracy plods dutifully on, playing by
the same old rules.
Series host Robert MacNeil, presumably trying to justify the Perle film, told Current magazine, "By the
time ["Crossroads"] gets to Perle, you have a very negative view of what's happening in Iraq." Never
mind that "Crossroads" might have presented a negative view of what's happening in Iraq because that's
the truth about what's happening in Iraq. If the series has been so unforgivably biased to the left as to
show Bush's Iraq adventure in a negative light, its creators must immediately run a love letter to some
neocon from the American Enterprise Institute. After all, we've had no opportunity to hear neocon ideas
except on every network, every cable channel, the Op-Ed pages of the New York Times, Fox News, all
the major newsweeklies, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, the Weekly Standard, the New
Republic, Slate and just about every other media outlet. This intolerable censorship of failed right-wing
ideas must cease!
"Crossroads" came to the air as a result of right-wing pressure and intellectual timidity. The project began
during the tenures of Ken Tomlinson and Michael Pack, two conservatives who held top positions at the
Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the government-run nonprofit that oversees PBS and its more than
300 local affiliates. Tomlinson was a Bush hack whose mandate as CPB board chairman was to tilt PBS's
programming to the right. To do that, Tomlinson paid a consultant $14,000 to vet the Bill Moyers
program "Now" for liberal bias, and hired two ombudsmen to monitor PBS news programming. Outrage
over these practices and a damning internal report forced Tomlinson to resign in 2005. Pack, a
conservative documentarian -- his résumé includes a sympathetic doc about Newt Gingrich and a film
called "Hollywood vs. Religion" narrated by Michael Medved -- was brought in as CPB's executive vice
president to make PBS's programming more conservative.
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"Crossroads" was Pack's brainchild. In 2004, CPB put out a call for proposals about films dealing with
terrorism, Islam and the post-9/11 world. It received 440 proposals, awarding full production funding to
21. But the series immediately became engulfed in controversy. Critics charged that the Perle episode and
one called "Warriors," about U.S. troops in Iraq, were biased toward the Bush administration. These
charges grew even louder when it was revealed that the original producer of the Perle episode, British
filmmaker Brian Lapping, was a friend of Perle's. (Lapping eventually recused himself from the film.
Karl Zinsmeister, a co-producer of "Warriors," also left the project after he took a job as Bush's chief
domestic-policy advisor.)
Trying to overcome the perception that the series was biased, CPB turned the project over to WETA,
Washington's public television station, which hired former PBS NewsHour anchor MacNeil, and shot
down "Islam vs. Islamists," an episode co-produced by neocon pundit Frank Gaffney, alleging that
moderate Muslims are intimidated by radical Islamists. The final result isn't terrible (I give its 11 episodes
2 A's, 3 B's, 5 C's and one F), but its failure to delve deeply into the crucial political and historical issues
means that even the strongest films in the series end up being decontextualized and superficial.
This is particularly true of the solid two-hour film that kicked off the series Sunday night, "The Men
Behind Jihad." "The Men Behind Jihad" offers an excellent introduction to the ideological fathers of
Islamist terrorism -- and a withering critique of Bush's war on Iraq. It traces the origins of radical
Islamism from Sayyid Qutb through Ayman al-Zawahiri and Osama bin Laden. Its first-rate group of
commentators include Malise Ruthven, Michael Scheuer and Lawrence Wright, author of "The Looming
Tower" (which just won this year's Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction). The material on Qutb's surreal
sojourn in Greeley, Colo., where Americans' fixations with their lawns and Qutb's fateful observation of a
slow dance drove him into a pious frenzy of revulsion, is strikingly filmed. Scheuer, the former CIA
analyst responsible for the bin Laden file, makes the most arresting political point, pointing out that
Bush's war against Iraq greatly swelled the jihadists' cause. "The unexpected gift of the invasion of Iraq is
more than Osama bin Laden ever hoped for," Scheuer says.
The film is one of the only ones in the series to touch, however briefly, on the political grievances that
play a role in jihadist terror, and have led many Muslims to accept it. It notes in passing that Zawahiri
became radicalized after Egyptian President Anwar Sadat signed the Camp David peace treaty with Israel,
and acknowledges at the end that "many Muslims see events in Lebanon, Gaza and Iraq as oppression,
justifying more terrorism." But we are told nothing else about the Camp David treaty, or the events in
Gaza or Lebanon, or indeed almost anything about Middle Eastern history. The complex dialectic
between legitimate grievance and religious fanaticism as causes of jihadism is hinted at, but never
explored. And since no other film in the series ever returns to this subject except in even more passing
and superficial ways, the references remain almost meaningless.
There are two episodes of "Crossroads" that stand head and shoulders above the rest. The first and best,
which airs Monday night, is a truly extraordinary film called "Operation Homecoming: Writing the
Wartime Experience." Featuring unforgettable writing about Iraq, including the brilliant poetry of Brian
Turner and extraordinary pieces by ordinary soldiers, and searing appearances by older-generation
war-lit giants like Tim O'Brien and James Salter, this film brings the dreadful reality of Iraq home more
than anything else I've seen.
The second standout episode, which runs Friday, is titled "Security versus Liberty: The Other War." It's a
well-reported, chilling look at how Bush administration policies after 9/11 have eroded civil liberties and
led to hideous perversions of justice. The film's closing report, about an FBI sting "terrorist-catching"
operation that ruined an obviously harmless Arab-American pizza-shop owner's life, is searing. As the
man's wife sobs, recounting how her little boy asked her what his father had done and why he couldn't
see him anymore, many viewers will feel deeply ashamed of what Bush has done to America.
Not quite as outstanding, but also excellent, are three more episodes: "Struggle for the Soul of Islam:
Inside Indonesia," "Gangs of Iraq" and the aforementioned opener about the origins of jihad. "Inside
Indonesia," which airs Thursday, is an important and solidly reported look at the difficult balancing act
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the world's most populous Muslim nation must engage in as it contends with Islamists empowered by
Indonesia's newly born democracy. "Gangs of Iraq," which airs Tuesday night, examines the enormous
hurdles the U.S. faces as it tries to train Iraqi security forces.
Then there is "Faith Without Fear," airing Thursday, about Irshad Manji, an outspoken Canadian critic of
Islam. This film is riveting to watch, but it's about a figure too eccentric to speak for anyone except
herself, and its inclusion in the series is highly dubious. Manji is a peculiar figure. She makes some good
points about the need for Islam to once again embrace ijtihad, or intellectual openness -- a position also
espoused by the religious scholar Karen Armstrong. But Manji's attitude toward her religion seems so
perversely critical that it's hard to believe she really believes either in Islam or any institutional religion at
all.
Her attacks on Islam seem oddly gratuitous. As an atheist, I can't argue with what seems to be her
corrosive view of religion. But she shows no understanding of the historical reasons why Islam has not
yet had an Enlightenment and fully reconciled itself with the modern, secular world. I believe that it can
and will, and I believe when it does it will more closely resemble the kind of religion Manji says she
wants -- but the change is not going to be produced by someone as far out of the Arab and Muslim
mainstream as she is. (Just how far out is revealed not only by her views on Islam, but by a New York
Times Op-Ed piece she wrote about Israel's separation barrier, titled "How I Learned to Love the Wall.")
Her appearance in "Crossroads," unbalanced by a corresponding film about, say, Hanan Ashrawi or Sari
Nusseibeh or Tarik Ramadan or some Arab or Muslim whose views are actually representative, is all too
predictable: The American media just loves Muslims like her.
Three other episodes are workmanlike: "Warriors," "Europe's 9/11" and "The Muslim Americans."
"Warriors," which also airs Monday, about U.S. soldiers in Iraq, is vivid and at times touching but feels
pretty familiar. And it sheds no light at all on the larger issues: It seems to function in the series like that
traditional, patriotic statue placed next to the Vietnam Wall Memorial. "Europe's 9/11," which airs
Wednesday, spends too much time on cops-and-robbers tales of chasing down the jihadists who blew up
the train in Madrid and not enough examining the sociological roots of jihadist rage in Europe. "The
Muslim Americans," which also airs Wednesday, is standard feel-good multiculturalism, perfectly decent
but not offering much original insight.
"The Brotherhood," which airs Friday, is the show's second-weakest episode, and its problems highlight
the entire series' shortcomings. It investigates the founding Islamist group the Muslim Brotherhood,
asking ominously whether it is a covert radical organization that plans to secretly establish an Islamic
reign or is a moderate and trustworthy group. Focusing on a wealthy financier suspected of funding
al-Qaida, it has some decent reporting, but it's marred by an embarrassing narrative shtick in which
Newsweek reporters Michael Isikoff and Mark Hosenball are constantly shown asking each other canned
setup questions and being filmed in working-Joe-reporter poses. More substantively, its sensationalist,
breaking-news approach gets in the way of a substantive analysis of the ambiguous position of the
Muslim Brotherhood. There are indeed many questions about the multifaceted and evolving nature of this
organization, but the film's either-or approach does not illuminate them.
Worse, the episode indulges in traditional, misleading U.S. media clichés that tacitly echo problematic
neoconservative claims about Muslim terrorism. One of its segments deals with a prominent American
Muslim, Abdurahman Alamoudi, who in 2004 was sentenced to 23 years for plotting to kill Saudi Crown
Prince Abdullah. Alamoudi is a favorite subject of neocon pundits because he was highly connected (he
met with Presidents Clinton and Bush), made moderate statements -- and turned out to be plotting an
outlandish murder.
Obviously, the film is justified in condemning him. But in the course of doing that, it shows a clip of him
praising the militant groups Hamas and Hezbollah, and ominously implies that this is grounds for
suspecting that he may be linked to al-Qaida. The episode does show an academic, Peter Mandaville, who
says, "For him, Hamas is primarily a national liberation struggle of the Palestinian people against the
foreign occupation of the state of Israel. It isn't terrorism for him." But as always with "Crossroads," this
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statement is never placed in any larger context, leaving the average viewer to come away with the
impression that Mandaville is probably just a pointy-headed apologist for terrorists. The producers do not
point out the fact that the overwhelming majority of people in the Middle East, while they may
disapprove of terrorism as a tactic and of the austere version of Islam preached by Hamas and Hezbollah,
support them as resistance fighters. (Not nearly as many support al-Qaida or its ilk, although the Iraq war
increased the popular support for these international terrorist organizations.)
Americans may not like to admit it, but ignoring the truth about what people in the Middle East actually
think is a big part of the reason we're bogged down in Iraq. Collapsing distinctions between groups like
Hamas and Hezbollah, on the one hand, and ones like al-Qaida, on the other, is a key part of the neocon
agenda. It underlies Bush's whole approach to the Middle East in general and the Israeli-Palestinian
conflict in particular. It allowed Bush to paint Israel's war against Lebanon, which further eroded
America's already dismal standing in the region, as part of his "war on terror." And it has gone
unchallenged in Congress and the American media, in large part because to challenge it is to venture into
the political minefield surrounding anything having to do with Israel. But it simply does not jibe with the
realities or beliefs of the Middle East. Documentary films that uncritically repeat these conventional
pieties reveal themselves to be either ignorant or biased. They shed no light on their subjects and tacitly
support the neoconservative approach to the "war on terror" -- the very issue that they are supposedly
examining.
"Crossroads" fails not because it doesn't adopt critics' views of neoconservative ideas, but because it
doesn't even present them. It fails because it lacks intellectual honesty and journalistic rigor. Anyone who
has studied the war of ideas over the causes of 9/11, Bush's response to it, and his "war on terror" knows
that there are essentially two opposed sides in the debate. On the one hand, there are the "essentialists,"
who argue that Arab/Muslim rage against the West is pathological and peculiar to Islam. It is driven not
by real political grievances, which they see as trumped up, but by humiliation at the failure of Islam to
keep up with the West, the sickness of Arab civil society, a festering hatred of Western liberalism,
democracy and secularism, and the desire to establish a universal Muslim state throughout the world, one
that would surpass the glorious days of the Caliphate. Islamist terrorism is simply evil, full stop, and must
be destroyed. Any attempts to ameliorate it by political or economic moves are naive at best and
appeasement at worst.
The intellectual father of this position is the eminent Princeton Arabist Bernard Lewis, and some of its
prominent advocates include Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, William Kristol and (with some differences) Thomas
Friedman. Usually combined with Wilsonian rhetoric about bringing freedom and democracy to
benighted Arab states, this is the neoconservative view of Islam and the "war on terror." It dominated the
Bush administration and was shared by virtually every public intellectual who supported Bush's war on
Iraq. Many of those who hold it are strongly pro-Israel.
The opposing side could be called the "historical analysts." Those who hold it -- virtually all of whom
opposed Bush's war against Iraq -- argue that Arab/Muslim rage against the West is in large part driven by
specific historic injustices, most of which originated in the Western colonialist carving-up of the former
Ottoman Empire after World War I. The West, in particular England, France and the United States, raised
and then betrayed Arab hopes for independence, undermined fledgling democratic movements, and
mouthed hypocritical pieties about "freedom," while it installed or supported dictators to protect Western
political, military and economic interests. The overriding grievance, not just for Arabs but for Muslims
throughout the world, remains Palestine. Arabs and Muslims throughout the world view the settling of
Palestinian land by European Jews, the expulsion of 750,000 Palestinians after Israel's 1948 war of
independence and Israel's subsequent refusal to allow the refugees to return to their native land, as the
West's ur-sin against the Arab and Muslim people. The U.S.'s one-sided support for Israel has poisoned
the attitudes of the Arab/Muslim world against it.
Those who hold this position do not claim that Osama bin Laden was justified in launching his jihad
against the West, or even that the Palestinian issue was his foremost grievance. (The presence of infidel
Americans on holy Saudi soil was.) And they are prepared to agree with the essentialists that the Arab and
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Muslim world is plagued by corruption, despotism, stasis and desperately needs to reform to move into
the modern world. However, they insist that jihadist rage must be understood in a broad historical
context, and that Bush's "war on terror" is simplistic and counterproductive. Above all, they argue that
until we drain the swamp by addressing root causes, terrorism will continue to bubble upward like a
poison gas. To fight Islamist terror, it is necessary for the West in general and America in particular to win
Arab hearts and minds by resolving historical grievances, of which the most pressing is the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict. There is nothing particularly radical about this position -- it is held by virtually
every country in the world, and was recently espoused by the ultra-establishment Iraq Study Group.
My point here is not to argue for one position or the other, although I obviously subscribe to the latter.
My point is that these two positions are the two inescapable poles of the debate, and that any serious
attempt to deal with the post-9/11 world must directly engage with them. By failing to do so, "Crossroads"
doomed itself to intellectual mediocrity and a quick ticket to oblivion.
Here's what "Crossroads" should have included. First, it should have devoted one film to this war of ideas,
giving each side its due. Then it should have commissioned another film offering a historical survey of
the Middle East starting in 1798, when Napoleon invaded Egypt, and ending today. This film would have
looked at French and British colonialism and its effects on the development of Arab democracies. It
would have talked about the Sykes-Picot Agreement that betrayed Arab nationalist hopes after WWI, and
Great Britain's imperialist misadventures in Iraq, which so closely resemble our own. The Palestinian
naqba, or catastrophe, would be covered. The film would examine the U.S.-backed coup in 1953 that
removed Iranian leader Muhammad Mossadegh. The Suez crisis, the failure of Arab nationalism,
America's long proxy war with the USSR in the Middle East, the Six-Day War and 1973 October war, and
U.S. hypocrisy in dealing with Saddam Hussein would all be discussed. The Algerian government's
fateful decision in 1991 to suspend elections when it became clear Islamists were going to win -- a
decision followed by an appalling civil war that killed 200,000 people -- would be covered. And it would
have looked at Israel's 2006 war against Lebanon.
In a perfect world, "Crossroads" would then have devoted a third film dealing with the Arab media and
Arab/Muslim public opinion about the U.S. The fact is that few Americans know anything about what
ordinary Arabs and Muslims think of our foreign policy. Yet this information is vital as America wages a
war of ideas with radical Islam.
In an even more perfect world, there would have been a fourth film devoted exclusively to the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict. And a fifth about Iran.
Finally, "Crossroads" should have included a sixth film examining why the Bush administration went to
war against Iraq, and assessing whether it was wise to do so. (The Perle perspective could have been
included here, balanced not by Newsweek reporters but by figures like Fisk, Edward Said, Noam
Chomsky or Juan Cole.) The war on Iraq is the overriding issue of our time, and a national debate on it is
necessary.
These new films would have been challenging, controversial, uncomfortable and inevitably critical both
of Bush administration policies and of America's Middle East policies in general. Sacred cows like
America's own dirty hands in the Middle East, and Israel, would have been put on the table.
Conservatives would have screamed that the series blamed the U.S., endangered Israel and appeased
terrorists. It would have taken guts to take these subjects on -- but the result would have been far more
useful and stimulating to national debate than the ho-hum product CPB came up with.
PBS honchos are making a lot of noise about how this series proves that public TV is relevant again.
Unfortunately, all it proves is that even five years after 9/11, the mainstream media in this country are still
unwilling or unable to talk frankly about the Middle East. And until that changes, we'll be fighting the
"war on terror" in the dark.
-- By Gary Kamiya
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