[R-G] The Market Value of Islam Going Up?

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

At any other time at least since 11 September 2001 (if not 4 November
1979), well-financed propaganda like Obsession ("a documentary about
'radical Islam's war against the West'"*), combined with general
hatred of immigrants, would have become big news and a not
insignificant factor in not just elections but politics in general in
the USA.  But I take comfort in the thought that even the dimmest
bulbs in the middle of Middle America must be too appalled by the
financial crisis to obsess over Muslims.  As a matter of fact, the
market value of Islam might even be going up just now among the
financially insecure: "Islamic Banking Restrains Bankruptcy"
<http://www.rgemonitor.com/us-monitor/253790/islamic_banking_restrains_bankruptcy>;
"Islamic Banks Unaffected by Global Financial Crisis"
<http://aawsat.com/english/news.asp?section=6&id=14245>; "Non-Muslims
Turn to Islamic Bank as a Safe Option"
<http://www.birminghampost.net/birmingham-business/birmingham-business-news/other-uk-business/2008/10/03/non-muslims-turn-to-islamic-bank-as-a-safe-option-65233-21962049/>.
-- Yoshie

* <http://www.lrb.co.uk/v30/n19/shtz01_.html>
Short Cuts
Adam Shatz

If you live in an American swing state you may have received a copy of
'Obsession' in your Sunday paper. 'Obsession' isn't a perfume: it's a
documentary about 'radical Islam's war against the West'. In the last
two weeks of September, 28 million copies of the film were enclosed as
an advertising supplement in 74 newspapers, including the New York
Times and the Chronicle of Higher Education. 'The threat of Radical
Islam is the most important issue facing us today,' the sleeve
announces. 'It's our responsibility to ensure we can make an informed
vote in November.' The Clarion Fund, the supplement's sponsor, doesn't
explicitly endorse McCain, so as not to jeopardise its tax-exempt
status, but the message is clear enough, and its circulation just
happened to coincide with Obama's leap in the polls.

The Clarion Fund is a front for neoconservative and Israeli pressure
groups. It has an office, or at least an address, in Manhattan at
Grace Corporate Park Executive Suites, which rents out 'virtual office
identity packages' for $75 a month. Its website, clarionfund.org,
provides neither a list of staff nor a board of directors, and the
group still hasn't disclosed where it gets its money, as required by
the IRS. Who paid to make 'Obsession' isn't clear – it cost $400,000.
According to Rabbi Raphael Shore, the film's Canadian-Israeli
producer, 80 per cent of the money came from the executive producer
'Peter Mier', but that's just an alias, as is the name of the film's
production manager, 'Brett Halperin'. Shore claims 'Mier' and
'Halperin', whoever they are, are simply taking precautions, though it
isn't clear against what. The danger (whatever it is) hasn't stopped
Shore – or the director, Wayne Kopping, a South African neocon – from
going on television to promote their work.

The 60-minute film was first released in 2006 and shown during the
mid-term elections on Fox News. Since then it has received top billing
at 'Islamo-Fascism Awareness' week on American campuses, at
Christian-Zionist conferences and at events organised by Republican
politicians in Florida. It has found a powerful backer in the real
estate magnate Sheldon Adelson, who describes himself as 'the world's
richest Jew'. The Endowment for Middle East Truth, a neoconservative
think tank in Washington DC which recently hosted a series of seminars
named after Adelson and his wife, arranged distribution of
'Obsession', at a cost in the tens of millions.

The makers of the film, like their subjects, are soldiers of God.
Almost everyone associated with it or with Clarion has worked for Aish
HaTorah, an 'education' group with offices in East Jerusalem and
strong links to the settler movement. Clarion was incorporated in
Delaware to the New York offices of Aish HaTorah and Rabbi Shore was
the director, as well as the founder of its media organisation, Honest
Reporting, which campaigns against a two-state solution in
Israel/Palestine. It's illegal in the US for nonprofit organisations,
or for foreign nationals, to try to influence the outcome of an
election.

The film's chief claim is that 2008 is like 1938, only worse, since
there are more Muslims than Germans and they're more spread out
geographically: 'They're not outside our borders, they are here.'
Violent raptures and spectacular carnage unfold in slick montages set
to throbbing Middle Eastern music: Pakistanis deliriously burning the
American flag, Palestinians celebrating the 9/11 attacks, Hizbullah
chanting 'death to America', clerics praising the 'magnificent 19' and
the murder of unbelievers, children training to become suicide
bombers, the planes crashing into the towers. These images are
interspersed with footage of Nazi rallies and Hitler's speeches. A
chapter – narrated by Martin Gilbert, Churchill's biographer – is
devoted to the Mufti's collaboration with Hitler.

Scary Muslims are everywhere, and the umma stands more united than
ever, driven by hatred of infidels and Jews and determined to conquer
the West, a civilisation gone soft, weakened by self-doubt, political
correctness bordering on treason, and, worst of all, a 'culture of
denial'. Gilbert spells it out:

In the 1930s, the danger of Nazism was there . . . but people thought,
well, this is a German problem, it's a limited problem . . . And I
think the same is true today . . . They don't see that Islamic
fundamentalism is a global network and a global problem . . .because
if you come to that conclusion – and I'm sure it's the true conclusion
– then you have to do something about it.

'Obsession' doesn't say what we should do – except steer well clear of
dialogue and negotiation.

Although there are interviews with the usual 'terrorism experts' –
Daniel Pipes, Alan Dershowitz et al – the film's portrayal of the
region is mostly left to native informants like Nonie Darwish (a
leader of Arabs for Israel and the daughter of a slain fighter from
Gaza), Brigitte Gabriel (the Lebanese-Christian author of They Must Be
Stopped) and Walid Shoebat, a 'former PLO terrorist' who operates
under a pseudonym – for security reasons, of course. Shoebat runs the
Walid Shoebat Foundation, described on its website as an 'organisation
that cries out for the Justice of Israel and the Jewish people'. He's
made a career of recounting his journey from Islamic terror to
Christian Zionism before audiences at Evangelical gatherings and the
US Air Force Academy. It's not clear, though, that he ever laid a hand
on anyone. According to a relative, 'the biggest act of terror he ever
committed was to glue Palestinian flags on street posts.' What is very
clear is that, for the makers of 'Obsession', having once hated Jews
gives you privileged access to the Muslim mind, and not only if you're
an ex-Muslim. Among the film's authorities on radical Islam is a
former leader of the Hitler Youth, Alfons Heck, who says that 'what
the Muslims do to their own children is even worse' than the things
the Nazis did to young Germans – as only a Nazi could know.

If you didn't receive 'Obsession' with your paper, you can watch it on
YouTube. It's been posted by a former Muslim whose screen identity is
'fuckmohammad'.

Adam Shatz is an editor at the London Review.