Like other newspapers across the country, this Sunday’s News-Leader contained a glossy insert and DVD of the film “Obsession: Radical Islam’s War Against the West.”
Ordinarily, such a blatant piece of anti-Muslim propaganda wouldn’t merit much attention, but this “advertisement” was sent to about 28 million newspaper subscribers in key electoral swing states. It was paid for by The Clarion Fund, an opaque nonprofit organization that doesn’t list its directors or staff or sources of funding on its Web site.
Whatever the mystery behind The Clarion Fund, the timing in distributing the film now isn’t hard to discern: Fan the flames of fear to influence the November elections.
Despite its opening line that “most Muslims are peaceful and do not support terror,” the film makes use of all the standard tools of propaganda to create an image of Muslims as terrorists.
It juxtaposes scenes of Muslims praying in mosques with ominous music and images of militants brandishing weapons and burning flags. It uses the Muslim call to prayer alongside scenes of bombings and selected radical clerics ranting about the West.
The main flaw with the film isn’t primarily its facts, although there are some factual errors. For example, Daniel Pipes proclaims that “there was a general response of delight to 9/11 across the Muslim world.” This is a gross misstatement.
Leaders across the Islamic world condemned the 9/11 attacks, and the overwhelming sentiment of Muslims was sympathy for the victims. In Iran, for example, tens of thousands of people joined candlelight vigils in the days following the 9/11 attacks. Instead, the film’s biggest problem is with its main argument: that radical Islam is a monolithic, undifferentiated ideology connected everywhere by similar goals and strategies. From Palestine to Pakistan to Peoria, Islamists apparently all want the same thing and are all working together.
No one can deny, of course, that there are violent groups acting in the name of Islam. And of course there are those in Muslim-majority countries who preach hatred and violence. But it is entirely unhelpful to paint with such a broad brush.
It is just wrong to argue, as the film does, that the goal of all Islamists (even radical ones) is to destroy the West. This is the case with Al-Qaida, but one doesn’t need to accept the ambitions of militant Islamists in Palestine and Chechnya and Indonesia to recognize that they are different from those of Osama bin Laden. Most Islamism is focused on local rather than global goals.
The film is relentless in its comparisons of Islamism with Nazi Germany.
Its message is clear: Islamism wants total world domination and anyone who questions this is an appeaser (the film blames Hollywood for the “political correctness” that blinds America to the threat).
Even more troubling is its McCarthy-esque warnings about a vast conspiracy of militant Islamic infiltrators into western societies. Just like during the Red Scare, the idea is to use fear to exaggerate the threat from within and create pressures for military solutions abroad.
If America is going to deal with the real challenges of extremism and terrorism around the world, it needs to do it with a careful understanding of its complex causes and varying manifestations.
The film “Obsession” plays to the crudest stereotypes and promotes the simplest solutions. In the end, this kind of thinking will do far more to harm American security than it will to help it.
Jeff VanDenBerg is director of Middle East Studies at Drury University.
