In the last few weeks, 28 million copies of a DVD titled Obsession: Radical Islam’s War Against the West have been distributed as an advertising supplement in newspapers in key battleground states. It was paid for by the Clarion Fund, a nonprofit group established by the film’s Israeli producer with the goal of exposing what it calls the threat of radical Islam. The hour-long film features graphic, violent images and makes comparisons of Islam to Nazism.
The arguments used to attack Islam and Muslims in America are the same arguments that anti-Semites used in pre-World War II Nazi Germany to attack the Jewish community, that all Muslims want to take over America, they want to impose their culture on us, they want to destroy the indigenous culture, they want even to lust after, women of other cultures. It’s the same argumentation that is used in anti-Semitism that’s used in Islamophobia.
You end up with a self-fulfilling prophecy. When you project to the rest of the world that somehow you’re in conflict with the faith of Islam, there are going to be those people in the Muslim world who say, well, I’ve got to stand up for Islam and do something. You know, so the whole idea of the conflict of civilizations is self-perpetuating.
And we need to get back to a situation where people talk to each other, they enter into dialogue. Even the King of Saudi Arabia recently held two sessions of interfaith dialogue, one in Mecca itself and another in Spain, brought in Christian, Muslim, Jewish leaders, Hindu leaders, Zoroastrian, all these religious leaders, to enter into dialogue to try and decrease this notion of the clash of civilizations.
The film Obsession was distributed to tens of millions of people. Although a few papers refused to put it in its pages, the DVD, about seventy, including the New York Times, distributed it on grounds that rejecting it would violate the sponsors’ right to free speech. we still don’t know who’s behind this. The Clarion Fund, that claimed to distribute this, is really just a virtual organization. It appears to be a front for a group based in Israel called Aish HaTorah. They share—they shared offices, they shared personnel, and they’re refusing to say who is paying for this, that’s got to be a minimum $50 million campaign.
– from democracynow
Isabel Macdonald and
Isabel Macdonald, communications director at FAIR (Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting), and the co-author of FAIR’s new report “Smearcasting: How Islamophobes Spread Fear, Bigotry and Misinformation.”
Ibrahim Hooper, National Communications Director for the Council on American-Islamic relations.