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‘Jihad: The Men and Ideas Behind Al Qaeda’

Jan 13, 2008  •  Post A Comment

The series “America at a Crossroads” was an ambitious initiative for PBS last spring: six consecutive nights of programming examining tough questions surrounding the war on terrorism and the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. It cost the network a reported $20 million.
The two-hour program leading off the series, “Jihad: The Men and Ideas Behind Al Qaeda,” was awarded the duPont for being what the judges called “a lucid, insightful, intellectual tour de force for television. The narrative and historical footage are flawlessly drawn together.”
The documentary traces the intellectual birth of Al Qaeda, from the Muslim Brotherhood founded in Egypt in the 1920s through the radicalization of Osama bin Laden as a result of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, through Sept. 11, 2001, to the present day.
Producer Bill Cran and his team spent 11 months traveling throughout the Middle East, Sudan, Pakistan, Great Britain and the U.S. They interviewed numerous insiders and eyewitnesses to dissect the beliefs that incite Islamic terrorist attacks.
“It’s the smartest thing I’ve ever seen,” said Jeff Bieber, VP of news and public affairs at WETA-TV in Washington. “Bill’s directing style is incredibly engaging. Originally I wanted an hour produced, but as we started working on it, and seeing cuts and scripts, it was really clear it had to be two hours.”
“I’ve always been drawn to subjects that are not visual, that are about ideas—in this case, Islamo-fascism,” said Mr. Cran. “My rule of thumb was to talk to people who had met bin Laden or Ayman al-Zawahiri, his No. 2, and to weave in stories of the ideas that influenced them.”
He said many former jihadists living in the West or in Egypt were afraid to talk, fearing they would draw the attention of police or intelligence services. They also were suspicious of the non-Arabic program makers.
The production team had to prove its commitment to getting at the truth, sometimes meeting with subjects numerous times before they agreed to be interviewed on camera. More than 20 interviewees appear in the documentary. The producers even were scheduled to interview bin Laden’s brother-in-law, who was on the FBI’s most wanted list, but he was murdered in Madagascar before that could happen.
In many countries they kept a low profile, opting not to get film permits and using lightweight equipment. They were not allowed into Saudi Arabia.
“I was quite apprehensive about going to some of these countries, but the overwhelming feeling is one of normalcy,” said Mr. Cran. “In most of the places I didn’t feel personal danger. You read in the papers about this part of the world, but when you actually go, you find people are people, which gave me a little hope for the future.”
In one of its most resonant chapters, the film relates how the CIA covertly funded and armed the Mujahedeen fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan in the last gasps of the Cold War in the early 1980s. The arms and money were funneled through Pakistan, which favored the most fundamentalist groups in Afghanistan—whose members would later morph into the Taliban.
It traces the actual birth of Al Qaeda to 1988 in Peshawar, Pakistan, two years after bin Laden met Zawahiri, the founder of Egyptian Islamic Jihad.
The terrorist group incorporated the ideas of warring against Western powers rather than focusing on toppling the dynastic regimes of the Middle East—to devastating results.
Credits: William Cran, writer-producer-director; Adam Lively, co-producer/co-writer; Robert MacNeil, narrator; Allen Charlton, Joe Frost, editors; Sue Temple, production executive; Catharine Alen-Buckley, line producer; Clive Syddall, executive producer, Paladin Invision; Leo Eaton, series producer; Jeff Bieber, Dalton Delan, executive producers; Sharon Rockefeller, president, WETA-TV

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