On fundamentalism

Maybe its because I'm sad, maybe its because I currently live in the tropical Milton Keynes that is Abuja - but I faithfully watched all three episodes of Christiane Amanpour's God's Warriors series on CNN this week. As the days wore on, the irritation bubbled up under a bunsen burner of inanity. This was a Disney-lite take on fundamentalism. The first episode, on Jewish fundamentalism, completely failed to provide a historical context to extreme right-wing Jewish thought, said nothing about the origins of Zionism, sephardism vs hasidism etc., and focused on interviews with a tiny group of opinioneers. It didn't touch on the real Israeli terrorists - Mossad and its bloody history (see the film Munich for a sampler of what they've been up to all these years). All we got was some random settlers wailing on about how much they loved the particular isthmus of Abraham's land they'd parked their trailer. If only they could see it was also Ibrahim's land they were emoting excessively over..

Day two, on Islamic fundamentalism, was arguably even more superficial and ahistorical. Rather than look at the origins of Wahabism (with Ibn Abd al-Wahab in the C18th), Amanpour informed us imperiously that Year Zero of Islamic extremism began with the travails of Sayyid Qutb, shocked at all that America was in the 1950s. By this episode, it was clear that CNN's highest paid journalist's target audience was really the US (narcissus and the ad industry making whoopee). It was easy to spot the 5 minute chunks each show had been broken into for the caffeinated goldfish attention-span of a US audience - which had been glued back together somewhat clunkily for us, the non-goldfish-consciousness world.

The final show (aired this evening), on Christian fundamenalism, descended into farce. There was no mention of the Crusades - the original Christian fundamentalism - arguably far more violent than today's Islamism. Instead, we had Christiane jetting from one corner of the States to the next, interviewing various evangelical fruitcakes of one confection or another, including Jerry Falwell (who is probably sitting on a mini-throne right now, giving God advice about 2008). If only she'd dared traipse all the way to Nigeria, to see the biggest purveyors of evangelical magic on the planet...

Lest we forget: one doesn't watch CNN to be informed or enlightened. It's more like snooping in on a circus, with tight-rope walkers balancing fiction in one hand with non-truth in the other, following (historical reality) contortionists, in Ted Turner's phantasmagorical Big Top. Yeehaa!