“I’m not interested in drumming up false fears, or falsely allaying fear,” said Christiane Amanpour. Well, that’s commendable. “I just want people to know what’s going on,” she told AP. Christiane was promoting her latest CNN spectacular, God’s Warriors, six hours of unrelenting moral equivalency. Is there any difference between the Taliban and Battle Cry a religious conservative evangelical youth movement that just may be threatening America’s civil liberties? Ask Christiane.

If only Ms Amanpour had been advising George W. Bush instead of Condoleezza Rice. Christiane was the last person to interview the late Jerry Falwell. She has spent more time in Iran than the Texas Gunslinger, his pappy, Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter combined. She knows more about religion and the Middle East than Lynn Redgrave and Rosie O’Donnell—to name just two. She attended two Roman Catholic all-girls schools in Great Britain. She has a BA in Journalism from the University of Rhode Island. She covered the wars in Bosnia and Ruanda. She has interviewed Jacques Chirac, Mikhail Gorbachev, Mohammed Khatami and Pervez Musharraf—among others. If you are nobody, don’t apply. She has won two Emmies, two Peabodies, two Polks. She is a CNN treasure. Recent successes include In the Footsteps of bin Laden and The War Within. God’s Warriors will be much talked about. She has done The Daily Show with Jon Steward and Real Time with Bill Maher. Maybe some of the intellectual obsolescence rubbed off on Christiane. She was not at her best trying to explain martyrdom.

“To the West, martyrdom has a really bad connotation because of suicide bombers who call themselves martyrs,” she said. “Really, martyrdom is actually something that historically was quite noble, because it was about standing up and rejecting tyranny, rejecting injustice and rejecting oppression and, if necessary, dying for that.”`

Abe Lincoln and Martin Luther King were martyrs; Horst Wessel and Leon Czolgosz were not. Lincoln and King rejected tyranny; Wessel and Czolgosz, in their dimwitted ways, supported the establishment of tyrannies. Nor was Mohammed rejecting a tyranny, he was in fact the only tyranny in his neck of the woods. Martyrs do not die in attempts to impose their religion on others.  Early warriors of Allah were men of arms swashbuckling about the countryside forcibly converting the heathen masses at the pain of death. Successful in tyrannical conquests since early days, Islam produced no martyrs for opposing tyranny and oppression. Allah’s heroes were those who managed to get themselves killed while senselessly hacking their way through hordes of infidels. Smite them at the neck! Mohammed Atta and Hanadi Jaradat were not martyrs. They committed crimes against humanity.

Most Muslim martyrs—some would call them heretics—appear to have been victims of sectarian violence, a violence that continues to this day with the bombing of Shia and Sunni mosques. Yet it is the likes of Hanadi Jaradat who are called martyrs.

Others who should know better—others like Bill Maher and Kurt Vonnegut consider suicide bombers to be, if not martyrs, at least heroes. Maher said American servicemen were cowardly because they fired missiles from 2,000 miles away instead of flying passenger planes loaded with innocent civilians into tall building. Maher did not hit the beach at Tarawa or Normandy and if he ever took a tumble into a drainage ditch it was not to escape a sniper. The Playboy Mansion is a long way from the streets of Fallujah.

Vonnegut publicly admired the suicide bombers. “I regard them as brave people,” he said. For them death “was sweet and honorable. They are dying for their own self-respect. It’s terrible to deprive someone of their self-respect.” This brings to mind John Wayne Gacy, Richard Speck and Count Vlad. Poor deprived wretches! Were they striving for self-respect or were they just plain crazy? Intellectual arrogance can lead to a philosophical Auschwitz.

While Vonnegut and Maher sympathize with the suicide bomber, Christiane is groping in the same direction. How does the Christian group, Battle Cry, differ from the Taliban she asks? Well, gosh—that’s a silly question! Isn’t it obvious? Battle Cry’s dance routines are much better orchestrated than the Taliban’s; they have Krystal Meyers; they sell cool T-shirts, they don’t carry AK-47s and RPGs; and they appear a lot happier than the cowardly wretches that huddle around Robert Edgar at those distressing stuffed-shirt Abrahamist camp meetings.

Last year, more than 25,000 evangelical Christian youths gathered at AT&T Park in San Francisco for a Battle Cry rally. Everyone had a great time. The City Fathers took fright. It was a ‘fascist mega-pep rally,” croaked a councilman. One would have thought San Francisco was Nuremberg and it was 1935. The Mayor wouldn’t know a fascist from a Camp Fire Girl—or Hanadi Jaradat from Sister Boom-Boom. The rally ended; Battle Cry left; the Golden Gate Bridge was still standing. How is it different from the Taliban?

Ms Amanpour, like most Liberals, would never say anything negative about Islam. But drawing a comparison between 'Battle Cry' and 'Taliban'? It defies reason and sanity, doesn't it?