Robert MacNeil, the host of “America at a Crossroads,” calls the 11-part PBS series about challenges in the post-9/11 world a “clarifying experience.” Many viewers may find it terrifying as well.
In tonight’s two-hour opener, “Jihad: The Men and Ideas Behind al- Qaeda” (9 p.m. KRMA-Channel 6), MacNeil asks how terrorists manipulated “the peaceful and noble religion of Islam to justify the death cult they call jihad?” The answer is fascinating and disturbing.
The well-researched show focuses on al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, his chief deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri and Abu Musab al- Zarqawi, the former al-Qaeda leader in Iraq killed by U.S. forces last year.
While bin Laden’s story is increasingly familiar, the program includes interviews with people who have known him from childhood and ends with a sobering analysis of his plans for the U.S.
Bin Laden was never a slacker in the fanatic department. He attended mosque five times a day, a boyhood friend recalls, and wouldn’t listen to music, watch television, shake hands with women or even wear shorts while playing soccer.
More and more alienated from the mainstream, bin Laden ended up embracing a version of Islam whose ferocity allows the slaughter of innocents, including women and children.
While traditional Islam holds that only God can judge one’s faith, radicals concluded they personally could establish people’s religious bona fides, thus sniffing out infidels for extermination.
The first prominent victim of this philosophy was Anwar Sadat, whose 1981 assassination included a taunt from one of his assassins: “I have killed the Pharaoh!” We are again reminded that fanatics often have long memories.
Bin Laden fully embraced this deadly version of Islam. In one of many archived interviews in the show, he defends his extreme methods by comparing them to Hiroshima and Nagasaki: “These are the rules of engagement that you invented.” According to the show, bin Laden plans to become the leader of a revived Ottoman Empire around 2020.
In 2001, he spoke of dragging the U.S. into a war on Arab soil. While relatively few people flocked to his cause, he experienced a reversal of fortunes with the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq. Journalist Abdul Bari Atwan, who knows bin Laden, says the Iraq war created a “lifeline” for al-Qaeda by attracting thousands of young jihadists to the cause.
Ex-CIA operative Michael Scheuer notes that bin Laden has warned America six times of a possible attack, adhering to an Islamic law to give fair warning. He has made three offers to convert President George W. Bush to Islam, even offering to be his spiritual guide.
“I think they’re ready to attack us,” Scheuer concludes.
Other shows in the series focus on the lives of U.S. soldiers in combat, their homecoming experience, Iraqi “gangs,” terrorism in Europe and Indonesia, Muslim life in America and a defense of the Iraq invasion by former Assistant Secretary of Defense Richard Perle.
“America at a Crossroads” continues nightly through April 20.
