Octobre 24 , 2008
Maligning Muslims and Electing McCain
Twenty-eight million DVDs comparing Islam to Nazism distributed in the swing states across America is a classic representation of “killing two birds with one stone”. Sleepy suburban America collected Obsession: Radical Islam’s War against the West packaged in its Sunday paper. With so much sprawled across the DVD packaging, many an average-Joe trashed it as junk mail. And here the pun is indeed intended.
Concerned Muslim communities in Ohio and other swing states such as Florida, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, South Carolina etc put up a spirited protest, and what had been trashed may now be viewed, out of sheer curiosity, in the second salvo that is being mailed to households in these states which either do not get the newspaper or where the newspapers refused to pad their bottom-lines to disseminate yellow journalism.
Obsession was originally made in 2005 by a Canadian-Israeli Raphael Shore and shown on CNN and Fox News, protested at the time mainly in college campuses. Raphael Shore is part of a missionary Israeli group called Aish HaTorah (“Fire of the Torah”) whose mission has been to call “assimilated Jews back to Jerusalem”.
The resurgence of the DVD at this particular time is so entirely obvious. The DVD begins at a subliminally innocuous level, putting a disclaimer that it was not about the many “moderate Muslims” but about radical Islam. It shows these “moderate” Muslims walking in suburbia and driving yellow cabs. This subliminal stimulation is important for the next hate-filled DVD that is coming along in October is called “The Third Jihad” and focuses on the enemy within, namely the American Muslim. And those that have seen clips of The Third Jihad say that Obsession appears rather mild.
Obsession has been distributed by a shadowy group called the Clarion Fund, a 501(c) (3) organization which makes it a not-for-profit organization and with that status prohibited to engage in political activity. But it is flagrantly bending the rules. The stated and tacit message has been the promotion of McCain and smearing of Obama. When protests rose, the web endorsement of McCain disappeared but the rest continues unabated.
With the most objective dispassionate, non-Muslim critique, the DVD is disingenuous, vile propaganda. Every religion has its fanatical fringe. To encompass all of Islam and equate it to Nazism is horrifying at worst and dizzying at best. And in the sordid cleverness of these outfits, the viewer very soon loses the distinction between radical Islam and Islam.
It consists of out-of-context clips of speeches by various Muslim figures strung along with interviews of former Muslims, now converted to evangelical Christianity with a Zionist bent. The DVD producers and the interviewees do not have the journalistic ethic and integrity to reveal that they are Muslim no more, and in fact the only qualification that they do have is their passionate hatred for all things Islamic. Steve Emerson and Daniel Pipes, avowed Islamophobes make several appearances as well.
If the speeches of the icon of peace, Martin Luther King, were to be cut and spliced, and interspersed with hate-filled interviewees one could create a DVD that had no resemblance to reality, but you certainly would have a rankling DVD in your hand.
The Obsession DVD has been bankrolled by the 3rd richest man in America, Jewish right-wing billionaire Sheldon Adelson; spending $100 million to distribute the 28 million DVDs to homes across America and vilifying not just Muslims but Obama is money well spent.
Sheldon Adelson has been at odds with AIPAC, American-Israeli Public Affairs Committee for being too soft on the Palestinians! Now there’s a concept! If Muslims are painted in the DVD as being neo-Nazi, one wonders what his broad-brush fanaticism should be labeled.
Muslims in the swing states whose peace was shattered with this plastic trash that Sunday could have left it all go unnoticed. But we did not. There is a firestorm of protest across the country. CAIR, Council of American Islamic Relations has protested to the FEC or the Federal Election Commission that the Clarion Fund has violated its 501(C) (3) status by endorsing Senator McCain. The sad part is that by the time the FEC investigates this complaint the elections would have come and gone.
The 9/11 backlash against Muslims took a violent form initially. Over the years it has tempered to being more of raised eyebrows and at times overt disgust. It is true that the economy in the US is teetering and newspapers are suffering inordinately, what with the explosion of the Internet and the numerous ways to access free news. That many newspapers, even some of repute, stooped low enough to allow the DVD to reach homes in their Sunday editions, opens a new chapter of intense security concerns for American Muslims. And now Muslim and non-Muslim protests have filled the op-ed pages and brought more attention to this sordid DVD.
The entire idea of the DVD is to whip up Islamophobia to a frenzy; electing McCain is a desirable side-effect. One would think that the victims of the Holocaust, one of the most heinous crimes in history, would not actively work to generate one on another religious group. The only sadder item is that public memory can be so short.
(Mahjabeen Islam is a physician and free-lance columnist residing in Toledo Ohio. Her email is mahjabeenislam@hotmail.com)
