Wednesday, August 22, 2007

CNN's anti-God squad

I caught some of the first episode of CNN's "God's Warriors" last night while waiting for a flight at a Detroit airport. It was odd to watch a program that so blatantly disparaged Jewish war heroes and elevated Muslim terrorists after I had passed through an elaborate and humiliating security system unofficially designed to root out Muslim terrorists.

The "God's Warriors" series, hosted by the ardently left-wing Christiane Amanpour, ostensibly covers modern-day blood-spillers of major world religions; Islam and Christianity are next. Newsbusters' Matthew Balan has reported that the Christian episode will liken a nonviolent Christian sect that favors modest dress to the Taliban. (Newsbusters has elsewhere covered a recent episode of CNN anti-Semitism; I'm waiting to see how the site will respond to the first "God's Warriors" episode.)

On last night's installment, Amanpour stressed that Jewish settlers in Palestinian-controlled territories were in violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention. Nowhere were the views of experts such as the late Eugene W. Rostow, dean of Yale Law School and U.S. Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs between 1966 and 1969, who wrote in The New Republic,

...The Palestine Mandate, recognizing "the historical connection of the Jewish people with Palestine and the grounds for reconstituting their national home in that country," is dedicated to "the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people," ...

...The State Department has never denied that under the Mandate "the Jewish people" have the right to settle in the area. Instead, it said that Jewish settlements in the West Bank violate Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949.....[which] provides that the occupying power "shall not deport or transfer part of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies."

...But the Jewish settlers in the West Bank are volunteers. They have not been "deported" or "transferred" by the government of Israel, and their movement involves none of the atrocious purposes or harmful effects on the existing population the Geneva Convention was designed to prevent. Furthermore, the Convention applies only to acts by one signatory "carried out on the territory of another." The West Bank is not the territory of a signatory power, but an unallocated part of the British Mandate...

...The controversy about Jewish settlements in the West Bank is not, therefore, about legal rights but about the political will to override legal rights ...
The American Thinker has more on last night's episode of "God's Warriors": "Amanpour utters not a word about how for 19 years, from 1948 to 1967, the Jordanians used Jewish graves on the Mount of Olives as latrines, or how they destroyed all the synagogues in the old city, and that they prohibited Jews from praying at their holiest sites."