Thanks to the Internet, television borders, like national ones, have grown blurry. A program broadcast in one country can now be seen the same night in another, at least in YouTube-size segments. A good case in point is "Dispatches: Undercover Mosque," a secret investigation by Britain's Channel Four into anti-democratic, anti-Western preaching in reputedly moderate British mosques. The documentary, which was shown in Britain on Monday, was linked via YouTube on the Drudge Report the following day.
Radical Islam in Britain will also be featured tomorrow night on "CNN: Special Investigations Unit," a new series which sounds like something involving David Caruso, designer sunglasses, and murdered fashion models. In fact, this episode, "The War Within," stars Christiane Amanpour, and while it would be going too far to call it an unflinching look at Muslim extremism, it does at least look at it. But let's not give Ms. Amanpour, arguably the most famous female journalist in the world, too much credit. Oriana Fallaci lamented before her death last year that she had come so late to the most important story of her lifetime. She was talking about the growth of Islamic radicalism in Europe, and she was referring to its beginnings in the 1970s.
Now in 2007, we have Ms. Amanpour, chicly turned out in dark glasses and a long dark coat, announcing at the outset that London, which has been not only her home but also her "refuge" from conflicts overseas, is itself embattled, a site of conflict and suicide bombings and fear. Unfortunately, little history or context for the eruption of this problem is provided. A massive, highly politicized Muslim population is just suddenly there, in Britain. There is no reference to the fatwa against author Salman Rushdie in 1989, when there was widespread rioting by British Muslims, let alone to the notorious 1968 "Rivers of Blood" speech by the maverick Conservative politician Enoch Powell, in which the issue of immigration was placed dramatically on the front burner of English politics before being swiftly removed for the next three decades.
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