Like, apparently, 27 million other Americans, last week I received an unsolicited copy of the DVD “Obsession” in my mailbox. The original movie from which it is taken was made in 2006 and has the sub-title “Radical Islam’s War Against the West”.
It’s a crude piece of anti-Muslim hate propaganda. (I tossed my copy straight in the trash.)
Why is someone mailing out 27 million copies now? Who is funding and organizing that huge operation?
Kudos to NPR’s Peter Overby and Will Evans who’ve been following up that story, and to Richard Silverstein who’s taken the investigation into the people who did the distribution even further (1, 2, and 3.)
Silverstein’s very well-documented bottom line: that the organizations Clarion Fund, which made the movie, and Front Line Strategies, which apparently organized the $50-million or so DVD distribution effort, both have extensive ties to the Republican Jewish Committee and to a rightwing Jewish group headquartered in New York called Aish HaTorah.
Consumers of the big MSM here in the US have all seen numerous disturbing signs of the anti-Muslim, anti-Arab (and sometimes only thinly veiled anti-Black) hatred that is roiling around in some of the lower echelons of the McCain-Palin campaign, and that often bursts to the surface during their public appearances. Particularly those of Sarah Palin, who seems happier to whip up those ugly feelings than McCain does.
One interesting window into what’s been happening in some of the grassroots parts of the McCain-Palin campaign is provided by this video interview (plus transcript) from Uptake.org, conducted with the 75-year-old woman who on Friday night asked that question at a McCain rally about how scared should we be of Obama, given that he’s an Arab (in some versions, “Arab terrorist”, though I didn’t hear the word “terrorist” when I listened to it.)
First of all, McCain’s answer to that was quite insufficient. He grabbed the mic from the woman and said “No, Ma’am, he’s a decent family man… ”
Like, an Arab can’t be a decent family man???
In the Uptake interview (HT: Josh Marshall) the reporters, who include Noah Kunin, Senior Political Correspondent from The UpTake, Adam Aigner of NBC News and Dana Bash of CNN, ask the woman, whose name is Gayle Quinnell, where she got the information about Obama being “an Arab.”
She said, “I went to the library in Shakopee and I got lots of … three pages of information about Obama.”
She also said she volunteers at the main Republican headquarters in Burnsville–
- And all the people agree with what I’m saying to you about Obama.
Aigner :Then do you feel there are a lot of volunteers for McCain who feel that way?
Quinnell: Yes. A lot of them. In fact I got a letter from another woman that goes over there to Burnsville and she sent me more things about Obama.
Aigner:What was on the letter?
Quinnell Oh all kinds of bad things about him and how, I mean I have to tell you to call me. It’s all bad.
Reporter: Are a lot of people getting this letter and are a lot of people believeing it and is that turning a lot of votes or support for McCain?
Quinnell Yeah I sent out 400 letters. I went to Kinkos and I got them all printed out. And I sent about 400 letters. I went in the telephone book and sent them out to people. So they can decide if they would want Obama.
If you read on down in the transcript you can see how confused Quinnell is about whether Obama is or is not actually an “Arab.”
Sadly, though, no-one asks for her evidence that Obama’s a “terrorist,” though she does claim that is what she had said there to McCain. (Is there an assumption from the reporters that the two words “Arab” and “terrorist” just “naturally” go together, I wonder?)
Anyway, Ms. Quinnell’s few minutes of fame on the world stage give us a disturbing view of the kind of rampant hate-mongering that’s going on in at least one McCain campaign office.
Is it happening in others? I expect so. In the current time of great economic uncertainty it’s clear that many people are fearful and may well be vulnerable to hate-based scapegoating of the crudest sort. (Some of the scapegoating reportedly has an anti-Jewish tinge; but most of it seems to be anti-Muslim, anti-Arab, and anti-Black.) But what we also know about at least some big-bucks Republicans– like those who’ve bankrolled the distribution of the Obsession DVD– is that they are prepared to put a huge amount of money into fanning the flames of hate.
Expect a lot more of it in the coming 23 days. And maybe after that too– especially if Obama wins?
Right now, we should all demand a lot more from McCain, Palin, and other GOP leaders in terms of loudly and credibly setting a “leadership” tone that says that:
- * neither Obama’s ethnicity nor his skin color is an issue;
* there is no cause whatsoever to accuse Obama of being a “terrorist”; and
* the Republican Party is proud to be part of a political system in which people of all ethnicities, skin colors, and religions can be equally valued and respected.
If we don’t hear such clear leadership coming from them them– through deeds as well as words– then we should consider them complicit in fanning the flames of hate. Such flames, if left to spread unchecked, would inflict far deeper and more long-lasting harms on American society than any economic downturn can on its own.
One account I have come across says that a separate video of the “Arab” question was captured on cell phone. McCain pulls the microphone away as the woman says “terrorist.” I haven’t seen the actual video.
Khaled Hosseini, the author of The Kite Runner, writes an excellent editorial today in the WashPost asking McCain if he is a “pariah” b/c he is a Muslim. James Zogby on the Huffington Post also asserts that he, as an Arab, is a decent person, not a terrorist, and condemns this hate-mongering eloquently.
It’s good to hear Muslim voices speaking up and confronting this vile bigotry, actively egged on by McCain and Palin.
Glen Greenwald of Salon quotes a Time article to demonstrate the _organized_ lying by McCain campaign officials:
[Time’s] Tumulty reports on a speech she heard delivered to gathered McCain volunteers by the Chairman of the Virginia Republican Party, Jeffrey M. Frederick — no “low-level party activist” he:
With so much at stake, and time running short, Frederick did not feel he had the luxury of subtlety. He climbed atop a folding chair to give 30 campaign volunteers who were about to go canvassing door to door their talking points — for instance, the connection between Barack Obama and Osama bin Laden: “Both have friends that bombed the Pentagon,” he said. “That is scary.”
After noting that this is “not exactly true,” Tumulty described how that accusation was nonetheless “enough to get the volunteers stoked”:
“And he won’t salute the flag,” one woman added, repeating another myth about Obama. She was quickly topped by a man who called out, “We don’t even know where Senator Obama was really born.” Actually, we do; it’s Hawaii.
Some reporter have dismissed the outrageously racist statements of Bobby May, McCain campaign chairman in Buchanan Co., VA, as the rantings of a rural low-level rube, more or less.
But you can’t explain away the blatant propagation of known lies the by the head of the Virginia GOP, no less!
The mother of one of my colleagues is constantly sending him absolutely crazy-ignorant, and often very crude, anti-Obama e-mails. And she really believes the nonsense in them. A recent one claimed that 1) Obama is a Muslim (that, of course, is standard for these e-mails), 2) Islam forbids pets of all kinds, 3) Muslims hate pets of all kinds. Therefore, if Obama wins, pets will be outlawed in the United States, and all Americans will be forced to give up their precious pets.
This is the level of mentality we are looking at here.
This is not first and last Arab/Muslim hatred thing. When I left Iraq in 1994 there was a TV ad. for Mercedes cars on the TV showing latest Model with Arab in his usual dress driving Mercedes Car a long road in the desert with different views of the car while been driven that ad. ended by the car parked in front of Badwen Tent in the desert showing few Camels nearby while the man stepping from the car.
These are some sort of ad’s in 1994 and beyond as in most of US movies in regards to Arabs which deliberately made and to show the negative singes of a society/ culture this will not stop as son as there is blood run in hatred veins.
One day my neighbor in new home country we talking about Arab / Iraq that was in 1995 he said go here (in some poor places) and make photos and put on TV and tell the viewers this is in country ……?
So if you go to New York City to those corners where drags and criminal gangs living even the police can not step in, make the a documentary and put it of TV see the real US, its remind me to the Afghanistan documentary before and during the invasion of that country were TV media full of documentaries of drugs gangs front streets and corners in Afghanistan and the famous pictures of Afghani woman lashed with sticks because here dress short showing of high heel shoe so on and so forth. I wonder now what those places showed in early 2003 how much “developed” under Karzai government and 90% of world drugs comes from Afghanistan!!
Yes there are many things bad with Arab (But not Islam as Faith) which need to be changes because it’s cultural and customs not faith related practice bad for Arab. they should recognizes these bad to be changed for their society and for their faith which interest those Rabbis who fishing for it.
“McCain pulls the microphone away as the woman says “terrorist.”
I have watched several different versions of that video very carefully, and in none of them can I detect any hint of the word terrorist from that woman’s mouth. She says, very clearly “he is not…he is not…he’s uh…uh…he’s an Arab. He is not….” then there is a pause, McCain begins shaking his head, and she says “no?”, and at that point McCain takes the microphone away from her and says “no ma’am, no ma’am, no ma’am…”. At no time does she utter or begin to utter the word terrorist.
Liberal and progressive and Democratic Party stinkfruit pickers may be getting these things slightly wrong.
Slumming for myself, I find much less anti-towelhead agitation than is suggested here, but an immense amount of hostility to Spanish-speakers (“crimmigrants”) that our pro pickers overlook almost entirely.
Happy days.
The hate-fest that McCain and his girl sidekick Sarah have been engaged in this last week has not been against Spanish speakers.
FASCISM. PLAIN AND SIMPLE.
I AM SENDING MORE MONEY OBAMA-even though I _highly_ disagree with some of his shifts in policy vis-a-vis the perceived need to be elected by particular lobbying outlets.
Good for you Helena for this piece.
KDJ
FASCISM. PLAIN AND SIMPLE.
I AM SENDING MORE MONEY OBAMA-even though I _highly_ disagree with some of his shifts in policy vis-a-vis the perceived need to be elected by particular lobbying outlets.
Good for you Helena for this piece.
KDJ
FASCISM. PLAIN AND SIMPLE.
I AM SENDING MORE MONEY OBAMA-even though I _highly_ disagree with some of his shifts in policy vis-a-vis the perceived need to be elected by particular lobbying outlets.
Good for you Helena for writing this piece.
KDJ
Helena: Thanks so much for the prominent links to my posts about Clarion Fund & Obsession. I did want to correct one small pt. though. Front Line Stragegies, as far as I know, is promoting Third Jihad, which premiered last week, by organizing screenings in various locations. I don’t know for a fact that it has organized the mailing of the 28 million DVDs. In fact, what I’m dying to find out is who specifically funded this project & the production of both films. We’re talking tens of millions of dollars for all this. And it all appears to have been done via tax deductible non profits. There must be a rich Jewish Republican like Sheldon Adelson or someone of that ilk who’s behind this.
Front Line are just the paid flacks for this venture. They’re not the “villains” behind it all.
“There must be a rich Jewish Republican like Sheldon Adelson or someone of that ilk who’s behind this.”
I wish I could remember where I heard this, but last week I heard someone posit in a very linearly logical way that Sheldon Adelson is the prime suspect. They basically followed the money connections, starting with The Clarion Fund and working downward.