Salon: "America at a Crossroads" veers to the right

http://www.salon.com/opinion/kamiya/2007/04/17/crossroads/

"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
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April 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.

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It is sad when you learn more about a subject from the review of a documentary than you do from the documentary itself.

and most DU'ers and other out there on the Fair Net know is way beyond what this series portrays.

Maybe it will cause some to ask further questions but I wonder how many inquiring minds really will view it.

judgment until I have seen the rest of the series. So far, I've been impressed with what I've seen and have learned a lot from seeing so much information in one place and tied together. Perle didn't exactly prove his point on last night's showing. Most of the people he spoke to in an attempt to clarify his position disagreed with him. I must say, it certainly sparked some good discussion here on DU.

went into great detail about the genesis of Islamism, its proponents, Sy Kutb and Ayman Zawahiri and how western culture influenced its rise.

While I was repulsed by the arguments of Richard Perle, I was glad that his views were included as an insight into the thinking that propelled us into this nightmare. It's sad that hearing someone's side of an argument constitutes an "infomercial".

My 13 y.o. has beeneating the series up, and the writings by the veterans which aired Monday night brought us both to tears.