"Only one of the films comes off as a kind of infomercial for the war on terrorism, the Iraq war and the Bush administration. The rest are generally informative without necessarily adding much new information. Put them altogether, however, and the "Crossroads" documentaries will make you very afraid of the world we live in and perhaps grateful that the government has your back. "America at a Crossroads" is the 11-part documentary series supposedly designed to prove that the Public Broadcasting System isn't a teeming nest of lily-livered, anti-war, Bush-bashing liberals, so please don't cut off our funding." (What do you expect from a series the first part of which featured Fouad Ajami, Abdallah Schleifer, and Jamal Khashuqji (former Bin Ladenite turned Saudi "liberal" (who worked as official spokesperson of Prince Turki) as the in-house experts? The section on Sayyid Qutb was quite silly (now you should read what Qutb himself wrote about his stay in Colorado. Some of it is funny, especially when he complained about women making passes at him. Now Qutb is a repugnant character for somebody like me--in more ways than one, but his take on the US was caricatured in the show. I have written about it in this blog before: search the site. But the series said that Qutb hated Americans' attention to their lawns. Well, Qutb also complained about white racism against blacks in the US. That was left out by the experts of the series), and the calligrapher is not very good. The narrator, Robert MacNeil (formerly of the PBS Newshour) once banned me from the Newshour (according to what a producer then told me) because I said on the air in one show in 1992 that his questions carry "more than a tinge of racism". But watching his made me wonder the irony: nobody was as good and as effective in discrediting, mocking, and undermining Islamic fundamentalism than Nasser. And yet Nasser was also the enemy, as far as the US is concerned. Nasser was quite effective in turning the entire Islamic fundamentalist movement into an unpopular and marginalized movement with no credibility on the question of Palestine.