"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.
"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 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 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.)
Next page: What "Crossroads" should have included
