Obsession: Radical Islam's War Against the West

A promotional image for Obsession

Obsession is an anti-islamic film featuring interviews with a selection of 'counter-terror' activists, including controversial figures such as Daniel Pipes, Steven Emerson and UK operative Glen Jenvey. An Interpress Service investigation revealed that:

"Obsession" features interviews with Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz, investigative journalist Steve Emerson, Itimar Marcus of Israel-based Palestinian Media Watch, and Daniel Pipes, a controversial scholar of medieval Islamic history whose website campus-watch.org sparked criticism in 2002 for its alleged McCarthyesque attacks on Middle East studies professors.

Its production credits include the Middle East Media Research Institute, or MEMRI, a translation service founded in 1998 by Col. Yigal Carmon, who spent more than 20 years in Israeli intelligence and later advised two Israeli prime ministers; and the Palestinian Media Watch, an Israeli group founded by Marcus, that monitors Palestinian news organizations for alleged anti-Zionist and anti-Semitic propaganda.

IPS also reported that:

A group of hard-line United States neo-conservatives and former Israeli diplomats, among others, are behind the mass distribution, ahead of the November US presidential election, of a controversial DVD that critics have denounced as Islamophobic. The group, the Endowment for Middle East Truth (EMET), is working with another organization called the Clarion Fund, which produced the 60-minute video and is itself tied closely to an Israeli organization called Aish Hatorah.

Other zionist groups including Honest Reporting supporting John McCain in his campaign for president in 2008 were involved in mass distribution reportedly of 28 million copies of the film in swing states.

According to Democracy Now: 'The film features graphic, violent images and makes comparisons of Islam to Nazism. The DVD comes amidst concerns of increasing levels of ethnic and religious bias in US politics and the stoking of Islamophobia.'

Islamophobia?

According to an InterPress Service report:

Critics allege that the movie Obsession is "hate propaganda" which paints Muslims as violent extremists and, among other things, explicitly compares the threat posed by radical Islam to that of Nazi Germany in the 1930s.

At least two major metropolitan newspapers solicited to insert the paid advertisement into their product have refused to do so because of a perceived bias in the film.

"Despite the perilous state of American newspapers, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch advertising department took an ethical stand and refused to distribute the DVD of a film that for two years has troubled American Muslims," wrote Tim Townsend, a reporter at Missouri's most influential newspaper earlier this month after it rejected the ad.

Republican campaign materials

In September 2008, groups connected or sympathetic to the Republican campaign to elect John McCain initiated a mass distribution of Obsession in key US swing states. A strong islamophobic message and "terrorist" fear mongering are the key message spread. On 13 September 2008 Erik Ose reported:

This week, 28 million copies of a right-wing, terror propaganda DVD are being mailed and bundled in newspaper deliveries to voters in swing states. The 60-minute DVDs, titled Obsession: Radical Islam's War Against the West, are landing on doorsteps in a campaign coinciding with the 7th anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks. Funding is coming from a New York-based group called the Clarion Fund, a shadowy outfit whose financial backers are unclear.
[...]
Here in North Carolina, another battleground state that John McCain must win to reach 270 electoral votes, 160,000 copies of the DVD are to be distributed tomorrow by the state's leading newspaper. The Raleigh News & Observer reported yesterday on its Under The Dome politics blog that the paper is preparing to bundle copies of the DVD with this Saturday's newspapers. Jim McClure, vice president of display advertising for the N&O, said the "ultimate decision" to distribute the DVDs had been made by publisher Orage Quarles, and compared the propaganda to harmless household samples.

New York Times spokesperson Diane McNulty told Inter Press Services that the paper had distributed about 145,000 copies of the DVD in American editions of the paper, and that it had been classified as opinion advertising.

Featured Speakers and "experts"

Nonie Darwish	Alan M. Dershowitz	Steven Emerson
Brigitte Gabriel	Martin John Gilbert	Martin Gilbert
Caroline Glick	Alfons Heck	Glen Jenvey
John Loftus	Salim Mansur	Itamar Marcus
Khaleel Mohammed	Daniel Pipes	Tashbih Sayyed
Walid Shoebat	Khaled Abu Toameh	Robert Wistrich

Principals

• Wayne Kopping – Director
• Rabbi Raphael Shore – Producer

Connections

• Hasbara Fellowship Speakers Bureau

Contact, Resources, Notes

Contact

Website: www.obsessionthemovie.com

External Resources

• Khody Akhavi, Film on "Radical Islam" Tied to Pro-Israel Groups, CommonDreams, 27 March 2007.
• Amy Goodman, Isabel Macdonald, Ibrahim Hooper, Smearcasting: How Islamophobes Spread Fear, Bigotry and Misinformation, Democracy Now, 17 October 2008.
• Official website of the film: www.obsessionthemovie.com
• Rebutting Obsession, Jews On First, accessed 9 January 2008.</ref>