There are many noteworthy elements to this little slideshow:
- The little girl in the title graphic represents a typical resident of Mumbai
- The events that transpired recently in that Indian city were a "catastrophe," not unlike a hurricane or an earthquake
- Apparently, only 6 people died, all of them Jews (the other 166 either didn't die or didn't count as people).
Also interesting is the lack of non-white faces. The only melanin-enriched person I was able to find was the guy with the gun under the words "If 10 people can do so much evil..."
Fascinating, and totally unsurprising given the source.
The purpose of the video on the group's website seems to be to prompt people to provide their contact information for further direct marketing efforts.
Jen'nan Read, professor of sociology at Duke University,said that not only did the whisper campaign about Obama being a closet Muslim fail, but that distribution in closely contested states of a video on Islamic extremism backfired.
CHICAGO (Reuters) - False rumors that Barack Obama was secretly a Muslim or had ties to Islamic extremism angered Muslim-Americans, who overwhelming supported him in Tuesday's presidential election, experts said on Thursday.
Unpublished polling data indicated that the Democratic President-elect got somewhere between 67 percent and 90 percent of the Muslim vote, probably nearer the higher end, Ahmed Younis of Gallup Center for Muslim Studies, said in a telephone briefing.
A "watershed" moment for U.S. Muslims occurred in mid-October, he said, when former Secretary of State Colin Powell, a Republican who endorsed Obama, addressed the Obama-is-a-Muslim rumors which had circulated for months, and condemned the idea that this would be a slur.
"Is there something wrong with being a Muslim in this country?" Powell asked on NBC's "Meet the Press." "The answer's no, that's not America ... Yet I have heard senior members of my own party drop the suggestion 'he's a Muslim and he might be associated with terrorists.'"
Younis said that for U.S. Muslims Powell's comment capped a decades-long search "to become part and parcel of the nation."
Muslims make up less than 1 percent of the U.S. population of 305 million, according to the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, though some believe that number is low.
Obama, whose father was Kenyan and whose mother was a white woman from Kansas, has the middle name Hussein, and lived for part of his childhood in predominantly Muslim Indonesia. He is a Christian.
Jen'nan Read, professor of sociology at Duke University, told the same briefing that not only did the whisper campaign about Obama being a closet Muslim fail, but that distribution in closely contested states of a video on Islamic extremism backfired.
Video backfired More than 20 million copies of a film called "Obsession: Radical Islam's War Against the West" were included as advertising supplements in newspapers, distributed by a private group unaffiliated with Republican John McCain's campaign. The film features suicide bombers, children being trained with guns, and a Christian church said to have been defiled by Muslims.
Read said the video was a subtle attempt to link Obama to Islamic extremists but many of the states where it was handed out "were strongholds of Muslim American voters" who were prompted to work for Obama.
"It may actually have brought out voters for Obama," she said.
But beyond that issue, she added, Muslim voters looked a lot like many other American voters. They moved away from the Republican party, which they had backed heavily in 2000 but less so in 2004 -- and voted their concerns for issues such as the economy and a desire for a change in leadership.
Mukit Hossain, executive director of the Muslim American Political Action Committee, said at the briefing that support for Obama among Muslims "changed dramatically" in the last three to four weeks of the campaign "when people started calling Obama a terrorist" in the crowds at Republican rallies.
He also said a concern for erosion of civil liberties since the attacks on the United States of September 11, 2001, has driven Muslims away from the Republican party in recent years.
Although hard numbers are difficult to find, Hossain said from 2 million to 3 million Muslims were probably registered to vote in this year's election.
Salaam writes: Sheldon Adelson is suspected of being a major funder of the anti-Muslim hatemongering 'Obsession'/'Third Jihad' campaign during the presidential campaign.
The casino company Las Vegas Sands, which is owned by right-wing billionaire Sheldon Adelson, has said it may default on debt and face bankruptcy, reports Bloomberg. In trading today, stocks in the company plunged.
The news wire adds:
Today's admission comes after Adelson, who holds a stake of more than 64 percent, invested an additional $475 million in September to avoid violating the terms of a loan, and hired an unidentified investment bank to raise more capital with his help.
But as recently as July, Adelson, who is said to still have considerable resources, had assured reporters on a conference call the company will not have liquidity problems."
Adelson, a Bush pioneer, last year worked with ex-Bush-administration officials to found the group Freedom's Watch, which advocates an open-ended commitment to the war in Iraq. As The New Yorker recently reported, he's fiercely opposed to a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian issue, and is a close ally of hawkish Israeli politician and ex-PM Benjamin Netanyahu. He has been a major contributor to AIPAC, and over the years has funded numerous congressional trips to Israel.
Salaam writes: I post about the issue of violent extremism among settler supporting groups because they and their US supporters were responsible for the campaign to demonize all US Muslims during the 2008 presidential election. The 'Obsession'/'Third Jihad' campaign showed that this group lacks ethical restraint or concern for how others regard them. The head of Israeli intelligence has also recently expressed concerns.
Richard Silverstein at Tikun Olam writes:
Agudath Israel blog links Obama to Haman
To those of you not attuned to the nuances of Jewish history, my headline may not mean terribly much. But when an Orthodox Jew links anyone to Haman it's the same as linking him to Hitler. After all, there are only a few nations or families that Jews are historically called upon to eradicate, and besides Amalek, Haman's is one of them. What's even more shocking is that David Kelsey reports that Cross-Currents, the blog which made this claim is the unofficial blog of Agudath Israel, one of the official representatives of U.S. Orthodox Judaism.
Here's a taste of the spew that Chava Willig Levy writes on behalf of her fellow Orthodox Jews:
Even Obama acknowledges his "spooky good fortune."
It certainly looks as if God is guiding Mr. Obama straight to the White House. But if God is guiding his history, and ours, aren't we mere spectators forced to watch passively - some might say helplessly - as it unfolds? Several of my coreligionists think so, fatalistically pointing to the fact that the secular date of Obama's breakthrough keynote address at the 2004 Democratic National Convention - July 27 - coincided with Tisha B'Av, a fast day commemorating the many seismic tragedies that have befallen the Jewish people.
I can understand their prediction of impending doom.
So to Levy's way of thinking, the day of Obama's triumph is inextricably linked to the day of Judaism's greatest cataclysm: the destruction of the Holy Temple. Which would make Obama a great enemy of the Jewish people on a par with the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar, who destroyed the First Temple.
Levy continues with her exegesis:
He is admired by untold numbers of American Jews, as well as millions of people who call for the destruction of not only Israel but of world Jewry as well
And here's the money quote:
Esther, heroine of the holiday of Purim, guides us to our answer.
...Things are looking pretty dismal for her fellow Jews. It looks as if the smooth-talking Haman, whose ambitions have been fulfilled at every turn, who has been blessed with "spooky good fortune," is destined to succeed. It looks as if God is guiding his history so that he will have his way. But Mordechai knows that, at this juncture, fatalism would be fatal. He beseeches Esther to intervene, to help halt history in its tracks.
...We have no Esther today. But over 2,400 years after she left the world's stage, her example remains. We must emulate her two-pronged strategy: politics and prayer.
To "politics and prayer" she should have added "incitement and hatred."
If you think Barack Obama is Haman, then you have license not just to hate him but to actively pursue his destruction by any means within your power. Such is the animus that Haman arouses in the Jewish people. The latter is not just an enemy, he is a would-be genocidaire, someone eager to exterminate all the Jews in his kingdom.
There is, alas a long history of such incitement both against U.S. and Israeli political figures among the Orthodox community. The dean of the Yeshiva University rabbinical school called for hanging Ehud Olmert if he divided Jerusalem. Yigal Amir, assassin of Yitzhak Rabin, is an Orthodox rightist. Is there no introspection within the Orthodox movement about the impact that such hate has in real terms? Words aren't just words after all. Words can easily lead to murder.
"If you want to get people to fight, you have to make them think there's a threat and they're in danger." Itamar Marcus, Obsession
Salaam writes: This is a 12-page unraveling of the claims in the movie by Jews on First, and is far too long to reprint in full here. Strangely enough, Aish Hatorah, the organization that produced and distributed the movie and is now marketing it, is unmentioned in the report. I've chosen to excerpt here the portion of the report that deals with the direct propaganda attack on Muslims in the US. Follow the link after excerpt for the complete report.
Rabbi Haim Dov Beliak, Eli Clifton, Jane Hunter and Robin Podolsky write: The part of that section of Obsession called "Jihad in the West," depicting what it calls a threat of "infiltration" in the United States, might be the film's most blatant appeal to the American viewer's fear. Continuing the motif of simultaneous accusation and reassurance, we are warned by the pundits of Obsession that enemies walk among us. Says Nonie Darwish, "Of course, not all Muslims are like that, but America has to wake up. We have been infiltrated ... and we are strangling ourselves with our political correctness." More than once, the twin demons of the "the media" and "political correctness" are invoked to warn against any namby-pamby liberal tendencies toward excessive respect for the sensibilities of shady minority populations.
This shibboleth of "political correctness" has come to stand for a tangle of constructs according to which any critical thinking or provision of unflattering information about our government's conduct, or even any search for a complex analysis, is at once egg-headed, "elitist," actively disloyal and contemptuous of "ordinary" American folk. This dismissal of the demands on civic life incumbent on citizens of a constitutional republic founded by immigrants is, of course, as contemptuous in its assumptions about the capacity for thought of "ordinary" Americans as it is possible to be.
The internal enemy is portrayed through a spectrum of images, ranging from footage of flag desecrations by men from the Islamic Thinkers Society (a New York-based fringe group that wishes to establish an international Muslim caliphate and whose website depicts John McCain and Barack Obama as sinners), to European-born violent extremists, and the late Palestinian national leader Yassir Arafat (who was in the United States to conduct peace negotiations with the late Yitzhak Rabin, subsequently murdered by a violent fundamentalist of the Jewish, not Muslim, variety). Pundits such as Darwish and Steven Emerson of The Investigation Project indicate that the "deception" is so far advanced that "we are losing the battle."
Far more frightening than images of overt European radicals, such as Abu Hamza al-Masri, are the repeated hints by militarist pundits, such as Caroline Glick of the Center for Security Policy, who warns of a growing underground of "minorities," and "immigrants" who may dress and act "like Americans" but are plotting our destruction. How the rest of us are to distinguish such people from the "good" Muslims is not made clear - although an article by Zeyno Baran posted to the Clarion Fund's site, RadicalIslam.org, indicates that all major Muslim civil rights organizations in the United States have been infiltrated and that the good Muslims don't need to "organize politically" anyway. This is an extravagant claim. Members of anti-bias organizations such the Anti-Defamation League might be surprised to hear that their work, for respectable Jews, was never necessary.
Any demurral this picture of the "Fifth Column" might stir is condemned preemptively as "denial." The film ends with the implication that it is up to the "good" Muslims to prove themselves. As a positive example, we are shown a clip of Muslims marching and chanting, "Death to terrorists."
'Shin Bet sees in the group we're talking about on the extreme right a willingness to use firearms in order to halt diplomatic processes and harm political leaders.'
Salaam writes: Diskin is warning about the same movement that has made an unprecedented effort to influence the US presidential election. I have a large amount of posts on this site covering that effort. Just use the search function on this website and type in 'Aish Hatorah'.
JERUSALEM - The head of Israel's internal security service said Sunday he is "very concerned" that Jewish extremists could assassinate an Israeli leader in an attempt to foil peace moves with the Palestinians.
There has been a recent increase in violence by hardline Jewish settlers in the West Bank, and this week, Israel marks the 13th anniversary of the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin by an Israeli opponent of his negotiations.
"Just ahead of the anniversary of Rabin's murder, the Shin Bet sees in the group we're talking about on the extreme right a willingness to use firearms in order to halt diplomatic processes and harm political leaders," Shin Bet chief Yuval Diskin said. "The Shin Bet is very concerned about this."
Diskin spoke at the weekly meeting of the Israeli Cabinet, and his statement was released by another meeting participant who spoke on condition of anonymity because the session was closed.
Opening the meeting, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert warned of growing lawlessness among West Bank settlers. Groups of settlers have clashed repeatedly with Israeli police, soldiers and Palestinians in the past week over the evacuation of an unauthorized outpost they set up in the West Bank city of Hebron.
Alongside law-abiding settlers, Olmert said, "there is also a significant group of people that has cast off all authority and behave in a way that threatens the correctness of the rule of law, not only in the area they live in, but in the overall atmosphere of the state of Israel, and that is unacceptable and we are not willing to live with it."
Movie 'undermines the very foundations of a multi-religious democracy.'
Salaam writes: The NCC is a superpower among religious organizations. This is a stunning public repudiation of the extremist individuals and organizations behind the 'Obsession' campaign by a substantial portion of the US Christian religious community. Here's the NCC's Wikipedia writeup:
The National Council of the Churches of Christ in the USA (usually identified as National Council of Churches, or NCC) is an association of 35 Christian faith groups in the United States with 100,000 local congregations and 45,000,000 adherents. Its member communions (also variously called denominations, churches, conventions, or archdioceses) currently (2008) include a wide variety of Mainline Protestant, Orthodox, African-American, Evangelical and historic Peace churches.
The NCC has long been a leading force in the Christian ecumenical movement in the United States. It is related fraternally to hundreds of local and state councils of churches, interfaith organizations, and to the World Council of Churches. Even though these councils may include many of the same member churches, they have no fiscal or administrative connections to each other.
Here's the preamble and statement:
NCC Issues Statement on "Obsession" DVD NEW YORK CITY, NY (10/29/2008) -- In light of the massive effort to distribute a documentary that largely equates Islam with terrorism, the National Council of Churches of Christ in the USA (NCC) Interfaith Relations Commission has issued a statement condemning all forms of ethnic, racial, and religious hatred, including "the Islamophobia typified in this film." "Obsession: Racial Islam's War Against the West" was originally released in 2006, but 28 million free DVDs have been sent to homes in newspapers or via direct mail this September.
Despite a disclaimer at the film's beginning that "most Muslims are peaceful and do not support terror," a number of critics and organizations have said that the combination violent images and discussion of Islam conflate the entire religion with terrorism. "Although the film took pains to say that most Muslims are not violent," wrote Ted Vaden of the Rahleigh, NC, News and Observer, "that disclaimer was buried in the avalanche of anti-Islamic images, slogans and interviews with experts of dubious credentials."
Official statement:
NCC Interfaith Relations Commission Statement on the DVD "Obsession: Radical Islam's War Against the West"
In recent weeks many Americans have found in their mailboxes and morning papers a DVD called "Obsession: Radical Islam's War Against the West." As the Interfaith Relations Commission of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the USA, we are alarmed by the massive distribution of some 28 million copies of this DVD through paid advertisement by the Clarion Fund in more than seventy newspapers. While this film purports to educate and offers, at the outset, a disclaimer that it is not about the majority of peaceful Muslims, we see its content as serving only the aims of distorting truth and misleading viewers, fanning the sparks of mistrust, bigotry, and hatred that undermine the very foundations of a multi-religious democracy.
The National Council of Churches, bringing together thirty-five national Protestant and Orthodox churches, is concerned not only with relations among Christian churches, but also with our relations with neighbors of other faiths. Toward that end, we participate in a national dialogue between Christians and Muslims. We believe that deep relationship as neighbors calls us to common moral engagement and leadership in a world plagued by violence, poverty, atrocities, and environmental degradation.
We are deeply troubled by the apparent intent of a film that presents a barrage of violent images, pieced together with the voices of commentators who move from speaking of "radical Islam" to impugning Islam and Muslims more generally and presenting fear-mongering parallels between today's extremist terrorists and the Nazis. The National Council of Churches and its member churches consistently and adamantly denounce anti-Semitism in all its forms and condemn all forms of ethnic, racial, and religious hatred, including the Islamophobia typified in this film.
The stated aim of this film is to alert and educate the public about the dangers of terrorism perpetrated in the name of Islam. We recognize that in all our traditions, extremists and radicals have forged the weaponry of violence. The National Council of Churches condemns extremism, terrorism, and religiously motivated violence, as do our Muslim dialogue partners here in the United States and globally. We stand firmly against terrorism in all its manifestations. However, the content of this film has no useful analysis of terrorism beyond a shallow, monolithic, clash-of-civilizations theme that suggests that the only two responses to "radical Islam" are war or appeasement. Such a false choice serves only to incite the fear of Islam and aggression against Muslims.
As an alternative to the message of this DVD, we lift up the current and unprecedented worldwide exchange between Christians and Muslims. The Muslim initiative, "A Common Word Between Us and You," has gained wide response from the churches, including the National Council of Churches, and has generated an ongoing process of dialogue. Building constructively on the foundations that unite us in fractured world provides a far more hopeful way ahead for Muslims, Christians, and Jews alike.
In the National Council of Churches, we stand with our Muslim colleagues and fellow citizens who have experienced the de-humanizing effects of stereotyping and bigotry. As Christians, we are mandated to uphold the values of the Gospel. As Americans, we stand with all who are determined to create just and fair democracy.
'If there is any negativity or negative feelings in the community (about Islam), we feel that's because moderate Muslims aren't vocal enough.'
In an article in Saint Louis Today: Gregory Ross, a spokesman for the Clarion Fund, said his organization goes to great lengths to focus only on what he called "radical Islam."
"If there is any negativity or negative feelings in the community (about Islam), we feel that's because moderate Muslims aren't vocal enough," Ross said. "We would sincerely invite all moderate Muslims to join with us in the fight against radical Islam. We're helping Muslims reclaim their religion and show America how peaceful the majority of Muslims are."
The Clarion Fund is affiliated with Aish HaTorah, an orthodox Jewish education network based in Jerusalem. It is listed as a "foreign not-for-profit" organization by the New York secretary of state's office.
The Clarion Fund recently released a follow-up to "Obsession" called "The Third Jihad," which - based on its trailer - claims that terrorists have infiltrated the United States with the intent of "eliminating western civilization from within."
The Rev. O'Neal Dozier, pastor of the Worldwide Christian Center in Pompano Beach, Fla., said he mailed 325,000 copies of "Obsession" three weeks ago along with another video "on same-sex marriage and child sacrifice" in the first issue of "The Judeo-Christian View."
Dozier said he was the "general publisher" but did not pay for the mailing. He refused to name the funder but said that person had been in touch with officials from Aish HaTorah.
"I do not believe all Muslims are terrorists," Dozier said. "But I do believe that the religion of Islam, according to the teachings of the Q'uran and Hadith, is a very dangerous and evil cult."
Whatever was left of Aish Hatorah's reputation in the Jewish community seems to have disappeared completely, except among like-minded extremists. Richard Silverstein writes:
I want every Jew within the sound of my voice to know that Aish HaTorah can no longer, if it ever could, be considered a group devoted to studying Torah and bringing Jews back to their religion. Forever more, we must see Aish as a militant group which uses Clarion Fund as a political front since for various reasons, it feels it cannot wear its partisan politics on its sleeve.
Let no Jew be fooled by Aish or Clarion or these films. Just as Clarion is fake, so are its films fraudulent misrepresentations of Islam. All this makes Aish a group of fraudsters and dissemblers. And hey, lest anyone reading this dismiss it as the words of a partisan, I suggest you read Jeffrey Goldberg's "take down" of Aish and Obsession in the current Atlantic:
Aish HaTorah...is just about the most fundamentalist movement in Judaism today. Its operatives flourish in the radical belt of Jewish settlements just south of Nablus, in the northern West Bank, and their outposts across the world propagandize on behalf of a particularly sterile, sexist and revanchist brand of Judaism. Which is amusing, of course, because "Obsession" is meant to expose a particularly sterile, sexist and racist brand of Islam. Story here.
Salaam writes: With apologies for my adverbial creation 'Orwellianly.' Earlier this year, the 'Museum of Tolerance' jumped on the Muslim-bashing bandwagon and hosted a showing of the 'Obsession' DVD.
A Frank Gehry-designed museum can rise in Jerusalem on a site that was once a Muslim cemetery, Israel's Supreme Court ruled Wednesday, clearing the way for Los Angeles' Simon Wiesenthal Center to build a Holy Land counterpart to its Museum of Tolerance.
The $250 million Jerusalem project had been delayed since early 2006, when builders unearthed bones. Arab leaders in Israel sued to stop the project and were supported in an unusual alliance by some ultra-Orthodox Jews with firm beliefs against disturbing graves.
The Supreme Court's ruling requires museum builders to consult with Israel's Antiquities Authority on how to rebury any remains unearthed during construction and on creating a barrier between graves and the building's foundation.
Lewis predicted that on August 22, 2006, Iran would attack Israel 'to commemorate the night flight of the prophet Muhammad on the winged horse Buraq' thereby prompting 'the apocalyptic ending of Israel and if necessary of the world.'
Salaam writes: Jim Lobe is to be commended for his initial reporting in 2007 that established the link between the cult group Aish Hatorah and the 'Obsession' DVD. In the excerpt below, he provides some new detail about the individuals who make up the 'lunatic fringe' brain trust that produced the two movies.
The Washington Post also reports that Aish Hatorah had planned a major distribution of 'Third Jihad' last month, but that the movie 'was held up in post-production delays.' More likely, the movie funders and producers realized that the campaign was backfiring and generating animosity to themselves and their ally John McCain. It's also unlikely that very many newspapers would have chosen to participate in another DVD mailing after the outcry that arose from the first. Public reports of the failure of their efforts to distribute the second movie would have underlined that the Islamophobic narrative they were trying to push had been completely rejected in the American 'marketplace of ideas.' Hence the likely reason for the lie about 'post-production delays.'
Jim Lobe writes: The producer/distributor of "Obsession" was the still-mysterious Clarion Fund, which has just released a sequel, "The Third Jihad" about which my colleague Eli Clifton posted earlier this month. The new video, originally intended for distribution before next week's election, according to the Post's article, suffered production delays (hence, the distribution of "Obsession" instead).
While I haven't yet seen it, I understand that it features commentary by Clifford May of the Likudnik Foundation for the Defense of Democracy and, more prominently, Princeton historian and neo-con icon Bernard Lewis, who, according to various accounts, helped persuade Dick Cheney, among others, that the Iraq invasion would be a very good thing for all concerned. It was also Lewis who on August 8, 2006, predicted on the editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad would very possibly launch an attack on Israel exactly two weeks later, on August 22, to mark "the night when many Muslims commemorate the night flight of the prophet Muhammad on the winged horse Buraq, first to 'the farthest mosque,' usually identified with Jerusalem, and then to heaven and back. This [date]," he went on, "might well be deemed an appropriate date for the apocalyptic ending of Israel and if necessary of the world." Goldberg's words about "hysterics" and "the lunatic fringe" come to mind.
Nonetheless, it was just six months later that, with Cheney in attendance, Lewis delivered the American Enterprise Institute's (AEI) annual Irving Kristol Lecture - in which he warned that militant Islam was launching its third attempt to conquer Europe and the West through "terror and migration." And it was presumably after that that he sat down for a long interview with the Islamophobic makers of "Obsession" and "The Third Jihad."
Aish HaTorah denies any direct connection to the film, which is designed to make naive Americans believe that B-52s filled with radical jihadists are about to carpet-bomb their churches, and are only awaiting Barack Obama's ascension to launch the attack.
Salaam writes: I say 'postmortem' in the headline because the presidential campaign is almost over and it doesn't look like the Aish Hatorah movement is going to try an extensive distribution with 'Third Jihad' the way they did with 'Obsession.' Having said that, we know the 'Obsession'/'Third Jihad' campaign will continue at a slow burn as it is shown to small groups in small venues throughout the country in what will likely be a longterm effort to instigate a generalized Islamophobia throughout the US.
I've covered Aish Hatorah and the 'Obsession'/'Third Jihad' campaign extensively on this blog. Just use the search function here to access information and rich links to other sources.
Jeffrey Goldberg writes: I've only watched the 12-minute version of "Obsession," the film sent to more than 28 million people in various swing states, apparently by associates and partisans of the Jewish movement known as Aish HaTorah, or "Fire of the Torah," but it was enough to understand that it is the work of hysterics. One of my favorite hysterics, the Jerusalem Post's Caroline Glick, is featured prominently, pieces of the sky falling about her head as she rants about the End of Days.
Aish HaTorah denies any direct connection to the film, which is designed to make naive Americans believe that B-52s filled with radical jihadists are about to carpet-bomb their churches, and are only awaiting Barack Obama's ascension to launch the attack. But the manifold connections, as laid out in this article, among others, make it clear that high-level officials of Aish are up to their chins in this project. The most disreputable flack in New York, Ronn Torossian, who represents Aish, makes an appearance in this story, which was to be expected: Torossian last made the news when he employed sock-puppetry in defense of one of his many indefensible clients, Agriprocessors, Inc., the Luvavitch-owned kosher slaughterhouse that treats its employees nearly as badly as it treats its animals, which is saying something, because Agriprocessor slaughterers have been filmed ripping out the tracheas of living cattle.
But I digress. It's said of Ronn Torossian that he represents "right-wing" Israeli politicians, but this description does not do his clients justice. "Right-wing" is Bibi Netanyahu. Torossian represents the lunatic fringe. Several years ago, in one of my only encounters with him, he introduced me to Benny Elon, a rabbi and settler leader who was then Israel's tourism minister, and who, at various points in his career, has more or less advocated the ethnic cleansing of Israel of its Arab citizens. At one point, when Elon had gone to take a telephone call, Torossian and I started talking about Israel's right to reprisal for terrorist attacks. I was arguing in favor of some sort of proportionality (this was after Jenin, in which the Israeli army chose to root out terrorism block by block rather than bomb the city from the air) but Torossian interrupted: "I think we should kill a hundred Arabs or a thousand Arabs for every one Jew they kill." I was somewhat taken aback, of course, because this is a Nazi idea, rather than a Jewish idea. I asked him to explicate: "If someone from a town blows himself up and kills Jews, we should wipe out the town he's from, kill them all. The Israelis are suckers. They should have destroyed Jenin." He went on like this for some time. I would only note that Torossian, to the best of my knowledge, never volunteered for the Israeli army, so he seemed to me by definition a chickenhawk.
Torossian's attitude toward Arabs and toward the peace process are echoed in the approach of Aish HaTorah, which is just about the most fundamentalist movement in Judaism today. Its operatives flourish in the radical belt of Jewish settlements just south of Nablus, in the northern West Bank, and their outposts across the world propagandize on behalf of a particularly sterile, sexist and revanchist brand of Judaism. Which is amusing, of course, because "Obsession" is meant to expose a particularly sterile, sexist and racist brand of Islam.
The tragedy of "Obsession" is not that it is wrong; the tragedy is that it takes a serious issue, and a serious threat -- that of Islamism -- and makes it into a cartoon. Its central argument is that the "Islamofascism" of today is not only the equivalent of Nazism, but worse than Nazism. This is quite a thing for a Jewish organization to argue. One of the featured speakers in "Obsession" is a self-described "former PLO terrorist" named Walid Shoebat, who argues on film that a "secular dogma like Nazism is less dangerous than Islamofascism is today."
This is lunacy, of course. Islamism isn't Nazism. It's bad enough without being labeled Nazism. Martin Gilbert, the biographer of Churchill, shows up in the film as well, and doesn't cover himself in glory: "History has an unfortunate habit of always repeating itself," he says. Always? Does this mean that the Arabs are right now constructing death camps for the Jewish citizens of Israel?
Just unbelievable, but the most unbelievable part of the "Obsession" campaign is its timing: What does this film have to do with Barack Obama? The film is meant to suggest that Obama will provide aid and comfort to Islamism, or is an Islamist himself. There is not one shred of proof on this planet that Barack Obama is anything other than an Israel-supporting Christian. Yes, he went to party with Rashid Khalidi. So did I. Does that make me a member of Hezbollah?
I actually have another idea for a film: I would call it "Obsession" as well, but it would be about the poor souls who believe that Obama is a radical Muslim, that Israel has a right to expel Arabs from its lands, and that America should declare war on all of Islam.
It contributes to 'a mutual sense of incomprehension that is meant to control the discourse and reinforce the Manichean world-view of each side and leave us resigned to a future of hopelessness, fear and perpetual war.'
Salaam writes: David Shasha is the director of the Center for Sephardic Heritage in Brooklyn, N.Y. It's hard to do justice to Shasha's in-depth and extensive treatment of the subject with an excerpt, but a coherent piece of the larger whole will have to do. There are many posts in the archive at this blog if this is the first article you are reading about the "Obsession" movie. Just use the search function.
David Shasha writes: We cannot forget while watching this execrable piece of propaganda, a work that is as unhelpful pedagogically as it is dangerous, that the dual logic of contradiction is continually at play: we are TOLD that Islam is not like what is being shown on the screen and yet this is what is being SHOWN to us with a relentlessness that puts the rhetoric of Islam as a peaceful religion to the lie. After a steady diet of one solid hour of seeing images of Muslims juxtaposed - LITERALLY - with those of Hitler and other Nazis, I am not sure if it takes a genius to figure out that we are being browbeaten into capitulation to hate all Muslims.
And to make sure that we do not forget this fact, we are treated to an extensive set of interview clips with an old man named Alfons Heck - a now-reformed former member of the Hitler Youth!
The "obsession" of this film is to turn the current situation with what are admittedly some very dangerous people - all of whom it must be honestly stated are religious Muslim fanatics who twist the words of their traditions and promote ideas of hate and violence that have continually been spread throughout the world over the course of the past century - and make it into a primordial battle being waged between absolute good and absolute evil.
Now it is not at all necessary for us to demand that "Obsession" be fair, or that it present the socio-political and historical contexts that have created this mess. Having said this, it does seem more than curious that the producers of "Obsession" make this demand of the Muslims themselves. And indeed, the visual techniques used in the film are eerily similar to those used by the Muslim fanatics themselves: the endless repetitive barrage of flashy and shocking images presented in a de-contextualized atmosphere smacks of what we might best call hypocrisy. But I think we would more accurately understand the rhetorical mechanisms of "Obsession" as a form of PILPUL; the attempt to speak out of both sides of one's mouth while not-so-subtly railroading home a single, obsessive mono-causal point.
In essence, this is the very rhetorical means that is used against Israel and the US by the Arab media which often inflames the masses to hate Israel and the US. When Israeli and American acts of violence are stripped of their socio-political context, the Arab viewer's feelings are inflamed and the individual is left with a passionate hatred bordering on the pathological.
So the way in which the producers of "Obsession" juxtapose images of victims of Islamic terror with those of Nazi slaughter can easily be transposed into an anti-Western frame of reference by cross-cutting the same Nazi images with images of Israeli or American brutalities - of which there are of course many. In fact, the film does indeed show the ways in which the Arab media applies Nazi imagery to Jewish figures and contexts.
In this sense, the rhetorical means that "Obsession" utilizes to construct its arguments lead us nowhere. The viewer is taught absolutely nothing about the roots of this Islamic mentality or its historical connection to Western politics. The viewer is not told about Daniel Pipes' Zionist proclivities and the way in which he has reframed Middle Eastern history along the lines of those beliefs to disfigure and transform that history. We are not told of Caroline Glick's own sympathies for the messianist Settler movement and its belief in the sacred nature of the land of Israel.
And while I do not mean to imply or state that Pipes and Glick are not entitled to their own fanaticism which is often made more extreme when put to the uses of the apocalyptic Jews themselves, I find it more than a bit curious that the whole point of the film is to reject fanaticism and to reject propaganda. I am not sure how this is to be done when the film itself is constructed along the lines of a classic propaganda tract filled with stirring emotional manipulation of the basest variety. It would appear that propaganda itself is not the real issue, only Arab propaganda.
And to quickly short-circuit the nature of the PILPUL-dialectic, a trap that is often used by the practitioners of PIPLUL to mark their own irrational hermeneutics, we are not rejecting the rhetoric of people like Pipes, Dershowitz and Glick in order to lift up the debased discourse of the Muslim fanatics. And often this is seen as a sort of lock in winning the debate on the Jewish side - either you support us or you are supporting them. It is something that has become a crucial part of the Bush discourse - a discourse that has been strongly informed by an Ashkenazi Jewish influence from people like David Frum and Bill Kristol who have tapped into the Ashkenazi PILPUL tradition and made that tradition a formative part of the new thinking in Bushworld.
It is altogether possible in rational terms to decry the fanatic Muslims and to reject the arguments of "Obsession" and its own particular brand of Jewish fanaticism.
I would add to that last point that it is also altogether possible to denounce Jewish fanaticism without validating, supporting or accepting the arguments and positions of extremists in the Islamic world.
Oct 25th, 2008 | PHILADELPHIA -- Pennsylvania Republicans are disavowing an e-mail sent to Jewish voters that likens a vote for Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama to events that led up to the Holocaust.
"Jewish Americans cannot afford to make the wrong decision on Tuesday, November 4th, 2008," the e-mail reads. "Many of our ancestors ignored the warning signs in the 1930s and 1940s and made a tragic mistake. Let's not make a similar one this year!"
A copy of the e-mail, provided by Democratic officials, says it was "Paid for by the Republican Federal Committee of PA - Victory 2008."
It warns "Fellow Jewish Voters" of the danger of a second Holocaust due to the threats to Israel from its neighbors and touts Republican presidential candidate John McCain's qualifications over those of Obama.
State GOP officials disavowed the e-mail and said the strategist who helped draft it had been fired.
"The Republican Party of Pennsylvania did not authorize that e-mail," Michael Barley, communications director for the state party, told The Associated Press on Saturday evening.
Barley said a "correction" would be sent out to everyone who received it.
The e-mail was sent Thursday morning to 75,000 Jewish voters.
The McCain campaign also repudiated the e-mail. Spokesman Peter Feldman said Saturday night that McCain "rejects politics that degrade our civics."
Political consultant Bryan Rudnick was identified as the person responsible for it. Rudnick, reached Saturday night, confirmed that he no longer works for the party, which employed him a few weeks ago as a consultant to do outreach to Jewish voters.
"I had authorization from party officials" to send the e-mail, Rudnick said, but he declined to say who had signed off on it. "I'm not looking to drag anyone else through the mud, so I'm not naming names right now," he said.
Richard Silverstein writes: I'm pleased to report that Snag Films, the free online distribution service for indie documentaries that was featuring Third Jihad at its site, has removed the film supposedly at the request of the filmmakers. That's laughable since the exposure and credibility Clarion would've received via Snag made the producers salivate. One of my readers, Robin, wrote to Steve Case (yes, of AOL fame) and his wife Jean, who are backers of the site, and warned them of the hateful nature of the film. I too wrote to the site owners via their feedback form. It was gone within a day.
CNN finally goes after 'Obsession' CNN, which earlier had aired portions of Obsession, has finally gotten religion. What took 'em so long. Most of the rest of the media has covered the story of the distribution of the 28 million DVDs in swing states long ago. Journalist Ali Gharib informs me that CNN has finally gotten with the program and aired its own segment critical of the film. Naturally, the reporters don't note that CNN had previously been a willing promoter of the film. A reader notes that Hunter Thompson described the TV industry as a bunch of "thieves and pimps." Though my guess is that the reporters probably didn't even know of CNN's previous role (though they should have).
In the story, Clarion's PR flack, Gregory Ross, refuses to reveal who's financing all the garbage, but pointedly denies that it comes from "foreign" (i.e. Israeli) money. Which ignores the obvious conclusion that the funding is coming from an American Jew who supports Aish HaTorah, Clarion, the Republican Party, and anti-Muslim hysteria. Wonder who that could be?
This blog has no relation to the 'Cheerleaders' group who have referred to this blog on their website as their own. The claim is an attempt at identity theft, one of several unethical or illegal acts they have engaged in.
