ABC's 'Holy War' and the Epic Battle for the Information Battlespace

If you ask me, and I don't claim any particular expertise on Islam, I'd say that Christiane Amanpour seems to have a crowd full of jihadi-enabling Muslims, and between Daisy Kahn and the Muslim cleric down front, all you're going get is the "we're moderate, were so American, blah, blah ..." No one's really digging down deep, which is that Imam Rauf has praised sharia and alleged that America deserved it on September 11. Frankly, Rauf is not much different than Anjem Choudary, the unapologetic jihadi and Islamist activist (at about 11:00 minutes). He says U.S. bombings of Sudan, etc., are to blame for 9/11, as well as American support for the "pariah state" of Israel. Daisy Kahn offers a half-hearted rebuttal. But that's the standard line among "moderate Muslims: Deny the radical agenda while simultaneously funnelling money to Hamas, global jihad, etc., through terrorist front organizations like Holy Land. And here's this from Choudary's Wikipedia page:

Choudary is a vocal critic of the UK's involvement in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and has praised the terrorists involved in the attacks of 11 September 2001, and 7 July 2005. He believes in the implementation of Sharia Law throughout the UK, and marched in protest at the Jyllands-Posten cartoons controversy, following which he was prosecuted for organising an unlawful demonstration. He was also investigated, but not charged, for his 2006 comments regarding Pope Benedict XVI. Choudary has received little support from the mainstream UK Muslim population, and has been largely criticised in the media.

The show's a setup. And as far as "moderate Islam" goes, I don't believe a word from Daisy's mouth. I've been busy over the weekend blogging the socialist rally in D.C., and I missed the Sunday morning screening of This Week. But Pamela's been all over this, here and here, for example. And she's got an interesting piece at Big Journalism as well: "My War Against the Mosquestream Media."

This is guerrilla warfare in the information battlespace, in the war of ideas. These media opportunities were hardly perfect, but they were something. Why make perfect the enemy of the good? They were better than the traditional blackout on our freedom- defense initiatives. It was a shot, and I was taking it and running with it, no matter how disgusting it all was.

From the media’s perspective, the Ground Zero mosque was an historical phenomenon. For the first time, a major news story became the most important national and international news story without the media. Think about that. Unlike the fringe pastor in Florida, who tweeted a Qur’an threat and the media descended like locusts to a Florida backwater to create a news story, a narrative, the Ground Zero mosque was not shaped by the media, not covered by the media — not at first anyway.