Reaction to Obsession DVD distribution shows many Americans clueless about jihad, Part 4: “Obsession: A jihad-happy DVD delivered to a newspaper near you,” by Roger Moore in the Orlando Sentinel, September 14:
The movie Obsession: Radical Islam’s War With the West, whose trailer is below, was delivered with your Orlando Sentinel newspaper this AM. And, it is my understanding, the DVD was delivered to households receiving other newspapers around the country today as well. True? […]
I’ve seen the Obsession before, but I checked it out again this AM before heading out for a day on the water. It’s an alarmist manifesto about what the producers and their unnamed Brit narrator go to pains to label as the threat from “radical Islam.” The points seem solid, the massive amounts of video from TV programming all over the Middle East, from Lebanon to the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia to Pakistan, is damning. For years (much of the TV news footage from the Middle East, the Imam “death to America” sermons, is over 5 years old, not that things have changed much since) Arab governments all over the Middle East have stood by while their airwaves, their mosques and websites bubbled with anti-Americanism and antisemitism.
Experts, from Middle Eastern journalists such as Khalid Abu Toameh (described as a Palestinian journalist…they don’t say he’s with The Jersualem Post, which says volumes) to A British historian and Churchill biographer Sir Martin Gilbert to Itamar Marcus of Palestinian Media Watch (that’s a good idea for a think tank–monitoring TV and radio for this sort of naked evidence of “how they feel about us”) to conservative academic Daniel Pipes to journo Caroline Glick and Steve Emerson of something called The Investigative Project rail against the Islam-fascism that now confronts the West, and the ways it parallels (in their minds) the 1930s and the world’s slow-to-act take on Nazi Germany.
“Steve Emerson of something called The Investigative Project”: as Roger Moore might say, that phrase speaks volumes.
The experts vary widely in credibility and seem selected because of their willingness to say what the movie wants them to say. It’s a mildly scary film, but one utterly lacking in context. It lacks the history that got us to this point, ignores the creation of the, to the Arab world, “Colony” of Israel in their midst, the Saudi role in fomenting and financing this, the tipping point attack on Mecca by extremists and the Afghan War’s blow back. But that would break with the GOP/Conservative talking points on Islam and the Middle East. The Saudis and Big Oil are our friends, the creation of Israel had nothing to do with this, nor did the trumped up invasion of Iraq, the meddling in what they see as “their” affairs.
Moore is so abysmally clueless that he thinks that the jihad threat has something to do with the Saudis being our friends, and is utterly oblivious to the jihad warfare that went on for centuries before the creation of the State of Israel.
It’s a complicated mess, but if you invoke Neville Chamberlain’s “appeasement” of Hitler (not sure what anybody could have done, other than force a confrontation years before Germany or the Depression ridden, war-weary West were really “ready” for WWII )…
Yeah, that Chamberlain was quite the statesmen. So a few Czechs had to suffer under the Nazi boot — so what? It is a distant country, of which we know little.
…It’s a more complex subject than this, with a region rife with closed societies whose anti-democratic governments cower in terror from the fanatics who would overthrow them and derail all that swell US aid that’s had them living high on the kosher hog for half a century. Kopping’s certainly made good fodder for Fox, Limbaugh, religious TV chat shows in America (now THERE’s a think tank I’d like to see—Right Wing TV preacher Watch) and the like. It’s a pity things aren’t as simple now as they seemed back in 1941. Or 1241.
Yes, it’s all so complex — so long as one completely ignores the jihad ideology and Islamic supremacism, and their deep roots in Islamic texts and teachings. But why spoil a good sneer?