Fear-mongering in 2008 US presidential election

By Abdus Sattar Ghazali

ccun.org, September 29, 2008

 
The Wall Street tumbles as stocks plunge in a worst drop since 9/11.
 
Premier investment banks fail, with Leman Brothers filing bankruptcy and Merrill Lynch seeks refuge in the fold of Bank of America to avoid collapse.
 
Home foreclosures mount, with one in every 416 U.S. households entering the foreclosure process.
 
And gas price soars, food prices rise, unemployment graph climbs and real and nominal wages shrink.
 
But for the Republican election machine such trouble spots in the economy are no cause of concern. And with little to fall on nearly eight years of President Bush's misrule that landed the nation in the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, the desperate Republican Party has ratcheted up its campaign with half-truths and fear mongering which has been the hallmark of the Bush Administration.
 
As the 2008 presidential election campaign enters final seven weeks, the Republican Party - in a replay of the 2004 and 2006 elections - is playing its typical tactic, Scare America.
 
The most blatant use of fear mongering came on the final day of the Republican National Convention when John McCain delivered his GOP nomination acceptance speech and Rudy Giuliani and Mitt Romney hyped the threat of the so-called "Islamic terrorism."
 
Now, in a pathetic attempt to scare people into voting for John McCain, 28 million copies of a right-wing, terror propaganda DVD produced in Israel - "Obsession: Radical Islam's War Against the West" - are being mailed and bundled in newspaper deliveries to voters in swing states.
 
The New York Times last Sunday inserted 145,000 DVDs in its papers delivered in the following markets: Denver, Miami/Palm Beach, Tampa, Orlando, Detroit, Kansas City, St Louis, Cincinnati, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Milwaukee/Madison. These are all in swing states. Next, it was being distributed in many newspapers in the electoral battleground states of Ohio, Michigan, Florida, Pennsylvania and Colorado, in addition to North Carolina.
 
The Clarion Fund, founded by Israeli-Canadian Rabbi Raphael Shore, paid millions of dollars to get the DVD out. Not surprisingly, the shadowy Clarion Fund has refused to disclose its board of directors or donors.
 
Raphael Shore is listed as producer and Wayne Kopping as director of the propaganda film. According to Haaretz newspaper, "Shore and director Wayne Kopping of South Africa are the only figures associated with the film willing to release their real names. The executive producer is listed as Peter Mier, while the production manager is listed as Brett Halperin. But Mier and Halperin are just aliases, Shore says. He describes the real Mier as a Canadian Jewish businessman who wanted to do something significant, but asked to remain anonymous for fear of his safety. According to Shore, about 80 percent of the film's $400,000 budget was provided by Mier."
 
Who is Raphael Shore, the founder of the New York-based Clarion Fund? His biographic sketch on Wikipedia says little. In part it says: "Raphael Shore is an Israeli-Canadian film writer and producer.He is the founder of The Clarion Fund, a non-profit organization that seeks to advance the idea that the United States faces a threat of radical Islam. Shore is also a regular critic of the media coverage on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, coverage which he alleges is regularly anti-Israel."
 
 
Wikipedia bio doesn't say that Raphael Shore is a Rabbi and the program director of Jerusalem-based Aish HaTorah ("Fire of the Torah"), which is making common cause with Jewish anti-Muslim activists.
 
 
Tellingly, Clarion Fund director of communications, Gregory Ross, told Page magazine, a right-wing online publication: "We are just a few weeks from completely our next documentary, The Jihad. This new film will take a look at radical Islam's activities here in the U.S. We should be releasing the film in early October."
 
The noxious propaganda movie, also distributed at the Democratic and Republican parties nomination conventions by Watch Obsession Organization, has been relegated to the university film circuit where right-wing and pro-Israel campus groups have organized screenings.
 
Jewish and Republican students groups have sponsored scores of screenings of the propaganda film amid protests and rising student tensions on many campuses. A screening at the Pace University in New York was canceled last year and rescheduled only months later after administrators pressured the Jewish Student organization, Hillel's leaders into calling off their event. Not surprisingly Georgia Tech screening sponsored by the College Republicans required extra security as part of the so-called Islamophobic week dubbed as "Islamofascism Awareness Day" in 2007. Tellingly, a screening at New York University, distributors of the film required viewers to register at IsraelActivism.com, the Web site of Aish HaTorah's Hasbara Fellowships.
 
"The threat of Radical Islam is the most important issue facing us today. But it's a topic that neither the presidential candidates nor the media are discussing openly. It's our responsibility to ensure we can all make an informed vote in November," reads the sleeve of the DVD.
 
The movie attempts to equate Islam with Nazism, with showcases scenes of Muslim children being encouraged to become suicide bombers, interspersed with shots of Nazi rallies with narration by commentators such as Islamophobist Daniel Pipes.
 
 
Other anti-Muslim and anti-Islam luminaries featuring the film are: Alan M. Dershowitz,
Steven Emerson, Brigitte Gabriel, Martin Gilbert, Caroline Glick, Alfons Heck, Glen Jenvey,
John Loftus, Itamar Marcus, Walid Shoebat andProf. Robert Wistrich
 
 
In short, the propaganda movie contains within it numerous verified false claims and obvious errors. Some easy examples are the incorrect translations of Arabic documents to English, mislabeling Arabic television with Iranian or Persian television, events and scenarios placed out of context, as well as testimony given by self proclaimed reformed terrorists. It is a typical cherry picking of inflammatory images and splicing them together to create fear.
 
Scaring the scareable before an election! The distribution of the movie, less than two months before Election Day, is a ploy to assist GOP presidential candidate John McCain. It will surely incite more hate and bigotry against the Muslim community. When smear techniques are used against any other religious or minority group, it is recognized as bigotry but when it's aimed at Islam or Muslims it is not.
 
Its aim is to liken radical Islam to Nazism and to promote the state of Israel, said Omid Safi, a professor of Islamic Studies at UNC-Chapel Hill, who has seen the film several times. "One of the running themes is, 'We stand today as the world stood in 1938,' " said Safi, referring to the rise of Nazism. "It's fear mongering. It appeals to people's emotions."
 
To borrow Arianna Huffington, fear is a frighteningly effective sales pitch -- one that has worked like a charm for Republicans since the days of the Cold War Red Scares, and especially since 9/11.
 
Abdus Sattar Ghazali is the Executive Director of the online magazine, American Muslim Perspective: www.amperspective.com E-mail: asghazali@gmail.com

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