The Israeli power of delusion is evident in this short film called, The Last Day, which purports to film the last moments of an Israeli family before Iran drops a nuclear bomb on Israel and obliterates it. The film, created by Ronen Barany, is shot in faux-documentary style with lots of shots of Israelis in extremis including suitably shaky, off kilter camera angles proclaiming it a product of ersatz cinema verite.

While the computer enhanced graphics showing massive explosions in the Israeli hillside may shock Israelis used to viewing a relatively tranquil landscape, the boom-boom screams out “computer enhancement.” If this were still photography critics would call it a photoshopped reality. We’ll have to come up with another name for an altered reality via video.

It should go without saying (but I’ll say it nevertheless), that the film is even more interesting for what it leaves out than what it includes. It presumes a backstory which the viewer fills in (hence the power of effective propaganda) of a hegemonic power-mad Iran hell-bent on getting nukes and using them on its bitterest foe, Israel. The poor Israeli shlumps in this movie are of course the collateral damage of Iranian megalomania. They’re innocent victims. No reference to any role Israel itself may’ve played in this conflict. Israel is doing nothing but defending itself from pure evil.

This film is a perfect example of how an entire people can be anesthetized and transported into an altered state of reality that shows them to be innocent lambs led to the slaughter; when in fact they are just as much agents of their own destiny as their enemies are.

The fact that this film is pimped by a RP rep for 5W PR, Ronn Torossian’s agency (who also pimps the Clarion Fund anti-Muslim films along with porn stars and has been charged with extorting millions of dollars from the followers of an Israeli Sephardic wonder rabbi) tells you reams about the film’s subtext.

The NYPD has gotten itself wound up in knots over all the lies it’s told about its involvement in the anti-Muslim film, Third Jihad. The film was produced by the Clarion Fund, an offshoot of the pro-settler group, Aish HaTorah.

When Arab police officers complained to a Village Voice columnist a few years back after they sat through a screening of the film, the police department denied any connection to it. The Brennan Center for Justice filed a Freedom of Information request which revealed that the film was in fact shown to 1,300 police officers (a significant percentage of those involved in anti-terror assignments).  Now the police flacks claim that while it may’ve been shown to officers, this wasn’t an officially sanctioned program.

Although Commissioner Kelly appeared in the film, his flacks said the film’s producer’s used stock interview footage and didn’t interview him themselves. When the film’s producer presented evidence of the date and time of e actual interview, the flacks all of a sudden recovered from their amnesia and recalled that not only had their been an interview but the flack had recommended the Commissioner participate. Which of course sets things up nicely so Kelly can now say: what a stupid thing for me to have agreed to do. What was my flack-flunkey thinking?

Getting the drift of how these liars operate? Just like Bernie Kerik before him, I think New York may be starting to get tired of the elastic nature of truth at NYPD headquarters and tired of Kelly’s patron, Mayor Bloomberg. The latter, by the way, is outraged that the film was shown to NYPD officers and doesn’t know who did it, but promises to find out. When he finds out it was Kelly himself, what’s he gonna do? Fire him?

The police claim they don’t know who gave them the film, but that they had nothing to do with it. Rather, it was foisted on them by a conveniently unnamed “Homeland Security contractor.” Though this appears another highly dubious claim, it does focus attention on the web of contractors with pro-Israel anti-terror credentials who are riding the gravy train of lucrative contracts which offer them opportunities to train federal, state and local police and military forces in the ways of anti-jihad.

Among these are Frank Gaffney’s Center for Security Policy and Aubrey Chernick’s NC4. Gaffney’s general counsel at the Center is the infamous Kahanist, David “Beychok” Yerushalmi, who in the past has bragged about the numerous briefings he’s given to police forces, Homeland Security and other agencies.  No doubt, he’s inculcating in them his own high level of anti-Muslim paranoia.  Chernick, one of the wealthiest and most generous funders of Muslim bashing (David Horowitz, Pam Geller, Robert Spencer are major recipients of his largess), owns NC4, which provides anti-terror  and threat awareness training (likely with a dose of “indoctrination”) for its clients.

It’s no accident that Frank Gaffney joined the advisory board of the Clarion Fund in 2010, just before they released their third film, yet another Islamophobic diatribe directed this time against a Muslim country, Iranium. The two organizations are a match made in anti-jihadi heaven. In some sense, the success of the Obsession and Third Jihad films inspired the anti-Sharia movement, which Gaffney and Yerushalmi have milked for funding and political notoriety.

One aspect of the Times coverage that disappointed was its omission of the name of the donor who, in an elaborate obfuscation, donated $17-million to distribute another Clarion film, Obsession, to 28-million voters in swing states during the last election.  He was right-wing pro-Israel Republican Barre Seid, a major donor to David Horowitz and other far-right pro-Israel groups.  Seid tried to disguise the gift by making it through a Koch-affiliated third-party donor-advised fund which allowed him to plausibly (if you’re terribly gullible) deny any connection to Clarion Fund or the film.

Score one for our side: Ethan “Eytan” Bronner, NY Times Israel bureau chief was scheduled to speak today at the Clarion Fund panel on the “Iran menace” with John Bolton, Richard Perle, the Fund’s director and the film director who created the new Clarion anti-Iran agitprop doc, Iranium.  Ben Smith of Politico, taking a decidedly favorable view of Bronner, reports that Bronner, after being shamefully hounded by the radical left, decided better of participating in the panel.

But it’s such a tough job being Israel bureau chief.  These leftists always seem to want their pound of flesh.  Now they got it (at least that’s how Bronner and Smith likely see it).

The explanation offered to Smith by a NY Times media flack shows that either Bronner is the most oblivious, careless public speaker in America, or else terribly disingenous:

Ethan was invited by the 92nd Street Y, where he has appeared before, to be on a panel. He dealt only with the Y and was not aware of involvement by any outside group (in fact, he had never heard of the Clarion Fund before this). He did not select the panel members. When he learned of the makeup of the panel, he suggested to organizers at the 92nd Street Y that a broader spectrum would make for a better discussion. When the Y was unable to add more voices to the panel, Ethan decided to withdraw.

In his public appearances, as in his Times articles, Ethan sticks to impartial reporting and analysis, and avoids editorial judgments.

You mean Bronner was invited by the Y to speak about Iran, a subject about which he has almost no professional expertise, and assumed he was speaking alone and that no one other than the Y was sponsoring?  And that the Y didn’t inform him that in fact the sponsor of the event was Clarion?  This beggars belief.  You mean the NY Times Israel bureau chief, who supposedly covers Israel isn’t aware of one of the best funded far-right pro-settler media shops which has intimate ties with Aish HaTorah, one of the most prominent pro-settler groups in Israel?

I do so love the entirely gratuitous puffery on Bronner’s behalf claiming that despite the fact that he was paid $10,000 in speaker fees arranged by a settler based speakers bureau, whose projects he then profiled in his own reporting, that he really, really is an impartial reporter who always sticks to the facts, maam.

Kudos to Eli Clifton for his original reporting.  I wrote a letter of complaint to the NY Times public editor.  Maybe it had an impact.

Eli Clifton reports that the NY Times’ Ethan Bronner will speak at a panel discussion hosted by the Clarion Fund on November 7th at the 92nd Street Y in New York.  It will mark the premier of the latest Clarion media event, Iranium, which is agitprop posing as “documentary.”  It paints Iran as a demon whose nuclear program is a threat to world civilization.  Clarion, you’ll recall, with its close ties to the militant settler group, Aish HaTorah, created two previous anti-Muslim films, Third Jihad and Obsession.  Among other things they equated Islam with Nazism and claimed radical Islam was seeking to overthrow the U.S. government and replace it with a Sharia regime.

Clarion with $20 million in financial support (funneled through a Koch Brothers non-profit conduit) from right-wing political donor, Barre Seid, circulated hundreds of thousands of one of its DVDs in swing states just before the last presidential election.  Clarion’s Radical Islam website compared the terrorism/defense platforms of John McCain and Barack Obama and warned that McCain would keep America safer.  When activists pointed out that this was a blatant political endorsement, Clarion removed the offending language.  But the group’s partisan political ideology is apparent.

Which raises tons of questions about Bronner’s participation in the program.  First, Bronner doesn’t cover Iran, has no special expertise in Iran, speaks no Farsi, and has never covered Iran.  He is the Israel correspondent of the Times and his expertise, if he has any, is Israel.  His bona fides regarding Iran are non-existent.  He will be joined on the panel by other neocon darlings John Bolton and Richard Perle, both of whom have argued strenuously for U.S. &/or Israeli military intervention to prevent an Iranian bomb.  These three will be joined by a moderator from Clarion and Iranium’s director, and a pro-Shah Iranian monarchist, Nazie Eftekhari, who was an employee of the former Shah’s son till his suicide.

Max Blumenthal (quoting Gawker) points out that the Times, after another recent Bronner brush with ethical improprieties in which he was represented by a speaker’s bureau run by a West Bank settler, made this statement about the paper’s guidelines for such staff engagements:

Speaking fees are generally not allowed from companies, lobbying groups or other sources that might raise questions about our impartiality.

— Even if an engagement does not involve a fee, we should avoid situations that would create an appearance of favoritism or suggest too close a relationship between a Times journalist and the people or institutions we cover.

Bronner clearly violates guideline #1 above and though he doesn’t explicitly violate guideline #2 since he doesn’t cover Iran, it does raise the question why any NY Times journalist is speaking not just for a partisan anti-Iranian, Islamophobic group like Clarion, but how he justifies appearing on a panel so heavily biased toward the position of attacking Iran.  And sorry, the idea that he will provide balance to the other speakers by representing a more moderate perspective doesn’t hold water.  What he does do is provide a NY Times imprimatur to a Clarion Fund event.  This is how the Islamophobia cartel amplifies and “koshers” its message before the American audience.  They co-opt the mainstream media and get that Good Journalism Seal of Approval.  The next time anyone hears the words Clarion Fund or Iranium they’ll remember seeing the New York Times name associated with it.  It’s the political equivalent of money laundering.  Or we could call it blue (and white)-washing in honor of the boost it provides to Israel’s bellicose foreign policy toward Iran?

And what does the NY Times get in return?  Notoriety and charges of bias and favoritism toward Islamophobes and pro-Israel forces.  Sounds like a pretty bad bargain to me.  You may wish to write the paper’s ombundsman, who may not reply or take the issue seriously, but who knows, lightning could strike.  Someone’s created a hilarious Bronner spoof Twitter account.

It’s beginning to appear that virtually every statement, every tweet, every Facebook Wall posting from the Israeli government about the Flotilla is either steeped in fraud or simply wrong.  Earlier today, I posted about what Dena Shunra has aptly called an IDF blood libel against the Flotilla activists, who are claimed to be preparing to “shed blood” of IDF soldiers who attempt to stop them.  Allegedly, they’re also bringing “sulfur” aboard the boats in order to attack the IDF in some unspecified way.

Omer Gershon, Israeli actor and hoaxster aka 'Marc Pax'

The latest piece of hoaxterism is a video which Max Blumenthal, Benjamin Doherty and Ali Abunimah have proven to be a fake.  It features an alleged gay man named “Marc Pax,” claiming that he was refused a place on the Flotilla because of his sexual preference.  Robert Mackey of the Lede now confirms that the video was a fraud and that three Israeli government officials tweeted about the video at virtually the same time and almost immediately after it was uploaded to the web.  The character in the video is in reality, Omer Gershon, an Israeli actor and marketer who has made at least one commercial with a director named Elad Magdasi.  You take one look at Gershon’s Groucho-like eyebrows and eyeglasses and you know this guy is a fake.  Mackey notes that Magdasi’s YouTube channel prominently flacks videos produced by…are you ready?  Stand With Us.  Now I wonder whether Magdasi himself has made videos for SWU before?

Would SWU fund such nonsense?  Of course not.  They’re far too classy a group to do that.  In truth, there are any number of equally scuzzy pro-Israel advocacy groups with the means and the will to produce this video, among them LATMA or Clarion Fund.  But the SWU connection is most intriguing.

UPDATE: Everything you’ll read about government denials of involvement below was also apparently a lie as no less than the prime minister’s office itself conceded, in effect, that the government was involved in production and dissemination of the video:

The premier’s office in response did not deny that that the government was involved in the video’s production, and admitted that government bodies had distributed the link.

“Various bodies dealing with international media campaigns continuously monitor and distribute internet content when they recognize content that can serve Israel’s campaigns,” the prime minister’s office said in a statement.

What this tells you is that the Israeli government doesn’t really give a crap whether they’re exposed or not.  They didn’t even try to be subtle.  It also indicates the utter cynicism of the government toward the international community and world media.  The ends, for Bibi & Co., are so much more important than the means.  Protecting Israel (as they see it) entitles them to lie and cheat, all in the name of the State.

* *

When the Israeli government was found to have its hand in the fake cookie jar it reacted with its best Claude Rains-expression of SHOCK, I say shock, that anyone could be so low as to create such a video.  It complained loudly: “We were duped.”  Yeah, I bet you were.  About as duped as the proverbial art forger discovered to have sold a fake Vermeer for millions.

It sternly reprimanded at least one its staff who tweeted about the video.  Though my impression is that it reprimanded him for being discovered, rather than for the fake that he acted on behalf of Israel in promoting the video:

“Mr. Seemann is a 25-year-old who is interning in our office. His tweet was a mistake on his part. It was done without authorization and without approval. His mistake has been pointed out to him.”

I’ll bet it was done without authorization or approval.  If you consider that the MFA’s Danny Ayalon has declared the Flotilla to be Israel’s Public Enemy #1 and that his sworn mission is to “delegitimize” it by any means necessary, the claim rings hollow.

Yigal Palmor, the MFA’s chief PR flack has dropped the claim that the video is truthful and now calls it a “mockumentary,” as if to say: “We were fooling you all along and did it on purpose.”  What the purpose might be is anybody’s guess.

UPDATE I: It’s starting to feel like everyone is coming around the the peace activists’ way of seeing the Gaza siege.  Even Allison Rowen Taylor supports the Gaza Flotilla!  Well, OK she only gave 1 cent.  But every little bit counts, Allison, and we appreciate your support.  It just shows you that even the misguided can find the true path and that teshuva is a godly thing.  Next thing you know the Flotilla’ll be receiving gifts from the Danny Boys, Dan Gordis and Dan Pipes.  Then you’ll really be able to say the leopard’s changed his spots!

There remain a few Israelis though who still are sour pusses as far as the Flotilla is concerned.  Those brave hearty souls of the Mossad for example.  They’ve been hard at work sabotaging the ships that they can.  It appears likely they broke the propeller shaft of one of the Greek boats.  H/t Paul Woodward.

Related articles

• Mossad saboteurs attack Gaza flotilla? (warincontext.org)

Tomorrow, Rep. Peter King, one of the most prominent anti-Muslim members of Congress (who wrote a suspense novel about a Congressman who foils an Al Qaeda plot), plans to hold the first of several hearings on the supposed menace posed by the radicalization of American Muslims.

As one who has studied the anti-Muslim movement over the course of the past few years, King’s rhetoric and tone in explaining the rationale for the hearings came right out of the playbook of Steve Emerson, Daniel Pipes, Pam Geller, David Yerushalmi, Robert Spencer and the like.  Among the politician’s wild claims is one that “85%” of American mosques are controlled by “radical imams” and that Muslims are “an enemy living amongst us.

Returning to the anti-jihad mafia, King consulted closely with a number of them including Emerson.  At their suggestion, he originally had planned to call Aayan Hirsi Ali, a radical anti-Muslim who has made a good living out of publishing books and telling paying audiences of the evils of Islam.  She is a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.  Another dropped witness was Walid Phares, a Lebanese Maronite Christian, darling of the anti-jihadi set, star of the lurid Clarion anti-jihadi films, Third Jihad and Iranium, and former Washington DC representative of the Lebanese Phalange, which brought the world among other things, Sabra and Shatilla.  The radical right was also under the impression King would call Emerson and Spencer to testify.  But he caved on this as well.

This happened in the face of extraordinary pressure from Pres. Obama and others defending the honor and decency of American Muslims, causing him to tone down his witness list and his rhetoric.

Fear of immigrants and 'alien' religions (like Judaism, as in this cartoon) runs historically deep in America

Despite this, elements of King’s harsh anti-Muslim viewpoint remain in the form of a few of the guests.  The most noted one being Zuhdi Jasser, a right-wing Republican neocon who is the favorite “good Muslim” trotted out by people like Emerson.  Glenn Beck has called him the “Muslim that we were all searching for after 9-11″ and “a voice I trust.”  Considering how much Beck hates Muslims, that should tell you a good deal about Jasser’s views of his co-religionists.  I’ve profiled Jasser several times in this blog.  I even earned a polite request from his lawyer to edit a post I wrote about him (which I naturally refused to do).  Media Matters has also profiled him.  Unlike Christian Arab Muslim haters like Phares and Brigitte Gabriel, Jasser is Muslim, though a harsh critic of just about everything in American Islam.  He’s such a favorite that he’s been the star of not one, but two Clarion Fund films which posit a conspiracy by this country’s Muslims to topple the government and Constitution and replace it with Sharia law.  Clarion, you’ll recall, is the producer of a total of three films which take aim at various alleged Islamic conspiracies against western values, the latest one being Iranium, which advocates a military strike against Iran.  Clarion is an arm of the pro-settler group, Aish HaTorah.

The N.Y. Times has exposed Rep. King’s own ties to terrorism in his avid fundraising on behalf of the Irish Republican Army, when it was designated a terror group by the U.S. government.  The fundraising done in this country for the IRA was largely used to purchase and devise bombs and other weapons used in the IRA struggle against British rule in Northern Ireland.  In fact, he defended the IRA’s deadly attacks on civilians:

“If civilians are killed in an attack on a military installation, it is certainly regrettable, but I will not morally blame the I.R.A. for it.”

King even complained that the Secret Service was investigating him for his close ties to Irish terror operatives.

King’s rather unconvincing defense of his actions notes that the IRA didn’t attack Americans (with the implication being that American Muslims would).  It seems to me that while the IRA may’ve been different from Al Qaeda and other radical Islamist groups in some respects, they both kill/ed civilians and a lot of them.  The fact that the IRA killed British civilians or Irish Protestants and Al Qaeda killed Americans seems meaningless sophistry.

The tone of these hearings invokes a similar hysteria of an earlier era, that of the House Committee on Un-American Affairs (HUAC), which rooted out so-called Reds and radicals from positions of influence in American society.  This is an era of the Communist witch-hunt which most Americans today deplore as a badge of shame for this country.  It seems to me that without strenuous objection to King’s hearings, he may take us down a similar road.  The pols who sat on HUAC too were looking to burnish their careers and score quick, easy political points with their constituents.  Like them, Peter King is looking to make a name for himself as a terrorist hunter.

But, just as HUAC was long on outrageous claims and short on results, so King is doing a deep disservice to the vast majority of American Muslims who live lives like ours, share values like ours, and seek the same goals for themselves and their families.  Demonizing Muslims is a cheap shot, a political trick.  It’s easy to score points on a relatively small, politically vulnerable minority.  American politics has a long history of xenophobia regarding the most recent wave of immigrants.  In the 19th century it was Know Nothings raving about the Irish Catholic Papist.  In the 20th, it was the KKK campaigning against Blacks and Jews.  In the 21st century, Muslims become the immigrants du jour of the Know Nothing American right (better known as the Tea Party).

If Peter King and his committee were serious about this subject, they would explore ALL of American Muslim life, not just alleged proclivity toward terrorism.  That would be a set of hearings that would teach Americans much more comprehensively about their fellow citizens.  Or alternatively, King could study radicalization of many different groups within American society, of which Muslims might be one.

King specifically rejected the latter approach in a statement that betrays his racism:

If we included these other violent events in the hearings, we’d be sending the false signal that we think there’s a security threat equivalency between Al Qaeda and the neo-Nazi movement, or Al Qaeda and gun groups. There is none.”

Mr. King added, “I’m not going to dilute the hearings by including other extremists.”

In the minds of the radical right figures I mentioned above, of course it would dilute the hearings to include other dangerous Americans prone to terrorism, because in their view Muslims are the most prone to violence.  Which of course is an odious lie.

Related articles

• Who Is Zuhdi Jasser, Star Witness For Rep. Peter King’s Muslim Radicalization Hearings? (loonwatch.com)

While the wages of sin are reputed to be death, the wages of Stuxnet will be unforeseen havoc for years to come.  Several interesting reports out about the cyberweapon, which outgoing Israeli chief of staff Gabi Ashkenazi took credit for in his farewell party yesterday.  Those who read my blog carefully may remember two points I tried to make about Stuxnet at the height of the attack.  First, no matter how much damage was done, the relative impact would be short-term and not severe.  Just to be clear, I wrote this not because I want Iran to have a nuclear weapon, but rather because I thought the idea of sabotaging its nuclear program was wrong in ways moral as well as pragmatic.

Second, I wrote that the model of cyberattack represented by Stuxnet would let loose a whirlwind of potentially destructive attacks against any party responsible for it.  In a way, Stuxnet is like the proverbial gun in a play, about which Chekhov says: if you see a gun in the first act it will be fired by the third.  In other words, the damage wrought by Stuxnet might be confined to Iran’s nuclear program at first, but there is no possible way to prevent that gun from being fired again once you’ve seen it used.

The N.Y. Times published a story a few weeks ago revealing that Israel and the U.S. collaborated on creating Stuxnet.  I’d say that we live in an industrial-technological glass house.  So why we threw that rock at Iran’s nuclear program is beyond me.  Did we think that some smart set of hackers or a foreign intelligence agency might not use the mojo against us sometime?  Do we think that our nuclear power plants, electric grid and industrial systems are so secure that someone might not arrange for our own comeuppance?

Personally, I think whoever originally derived this concept and approved it wasn’t thinking straight.  They were going for immediate, short-term gain (damaging Iran’s nuclear facilities) and giving short-or even no-shrift to the far-range implications.

Returning to my first point above, the Washington Post reveals a new study by the Institute for Science and International Security, which uses video footage compiled by IAEA cameras inside Iran’s nuclear facilities, to confirm that Stuxnet did a relatively small amount of damage overall to Iran’s plants at Bushehr and Natanz.  At most, 10% of the centrifuges were destroyed and these were rapidly replaced.  Iran’s overall output of enriched uranium in 2010 didn’t even decline.  So you remember Meir Dagan crowing about how Iran’s nuclear ambitions had been humbled by his brilliant cyberploy, and the Iranian bomb had been pushed back to 2015?  Forget about it.

While the majority of the ISIS report sounded extremely persuasive to me, this bit of magical thinking didn’t:

…The worm almost certainly exacted a psychological toll, as Iran’s leaders discovered that their most sensitive nuclear facility had been penetrated by a computer worm whose designers possessed highly detailed knowledge of Natanz’s centrifuges and how they are interconnected, said David Albright, a co-author of the report.

“If nothing else, it hit their confidence,” said Albright, ISIS’s president, “and it will make them feel more vulnerable in the future.”

I have no idea why Albright would say this.  While Stuxnet certainly was a crisis for Iran’s nuclear program, given how successfully it defended against the crisis and recovered from it, why would Iranian scientists or security experts be quaking in their boots?  If anything, it will make them even more determined not to allow such a breach in the future.

And on the contrary, I’d say that now it is the U.S. and Israel who will have to be looking over their shoulders knowing they’ve unleashed the god of cyberdestruction on the world.  Iran has already been hit and absorbed the worst of it.  But we haven’t and our security experts should be runnin’ pretty scared I’d think imaging ways in which our own industrial processes could be compromised and the immense damage it could cause us.  This October, 2010 article from the Post delves into some of the ways in which the worm and its descendants could bring us to our knees.

Finally, FoxNews notes that a group of sophisticated computer hackers, angry at a security firm which supposedly attempted to infiltrate its ranks, penetrated the company’s e-mail system and exposed a modified version of Stuxnet, which they promptly unleashed online.  Don’t worry, our electrical power grid is not about the go down.  The version of the worm they released is not an exact duplicate of the real thing and probably can’t do much immediate damage to anyone.  But my point is that once you let this genie out of the bottle you’ll never get him back in it.  You don’t know who will get hold of Stuxnet next and what they might to with it.  And the article makes very clear that there are versions of Stuxnet out there and that some very enterprising hacker or foreign computer intelligence agent will be able to make use of it–someday.  And we’ll have only ourselves to blame because we thought we were being oh so clever when we birthed Stuxnet and bestowed in on our Iranian friends

Remember karma?  What you do comes back to you.  And in ways unforeseen.   Oh, and incidentally, you won’t hear about any of this in Clarion Fund’s new ‘hit’ movie, Iranium…

Now, the moment so many of you have all been waiting for: the première of Clarion Fund/Aish Hatorah’s latest magnum opus in its epic trilogy of Islamophobia.  Iranium is coming.  It will be premiered (where else) at the Heritage Foundation and introduced by one of the great neocon charlatans, Richard Perle.  It will be screened at New York City AMC Theaters.  Years in the making and with a cast of neocon thousands (well, OK maybe “tens”) and a seeminly unlimited budget (fronted no doubt by far-right Jewish Republican fatcats like Barre Seid who spent $17-million promoting Obsession), Iranium will scare the wits out of you (well, maybe not you) and send you crawling to your local Congress member demanding that they do something, anything about Iran before it’s too late.

Ali Gharib and Eli Clifton actually watched the entire film before Clarion locked down its Vimeo account and made the file private.  Their review is available at Teheran Bureau.  If anyone here has access to the full length version, please let me know.  I think it’s critical that progressives watch this film, blog about it and so steal the thunder from Clarion and the war party advocating attacking Iran.  The more we can tell the world what this film is really about the less people will fall prey to the inevitable propaganda that will pass for objective information about the “Iranian threat.”

Reza Khalili: alleged Iranian double agent and star of 'Iranium' (Reuters)

I’ve been watching video segments consisting of portions of the film and one sticks out like a sore thumb.  It’s video of an interview with an alleged Iranian CIA spy, Reza Khalili (not his real name, nor is anything else about this guy genuine).  The name was familiar to me and then I realized why.  Yossi Melman profiled him in Haaretz.  When I read his piece something about it smelled fishy.  This was confirmed when Prof. Muhammad Sahimi also suspected fraud.  He wrote about the alleged spy:

Even according to him [Khalili], the last time he was with the IRGC [Revolutionary Guards] – if he was – was in late 1980s, twenty-years ago. Things have changed fundamentally. The IRGC has changed, but so also has the society. What relevance his “experience” has to the current state of affairs? None.

The article is also full of inaccuracies…When he was supposedly with the IRGC, there was no nuclear program to speak of; so what does he know? As much as anyone else based on public information.

…This guy, Khalili is not even smart. If he were, he would try to make his case without invoking Israel and the Nazis.  The very fact that he does goes to show that he is associated with lunatics and at best is an opportunist.

On this subject, can you tell me any Iranian besides the Mujahadeen e-Khalq, who publicly advocate bombing Iran and who say if the U.S. doesn’t have the nerve they hope Israel will? Can you tell me any Iranian (other than perhaps monarchists living in Beverly Hills) who ape Bibi’s “it’s 1938 and Teheran is Munich” hysteria? Can you tell me any Iranian who complains that the West had a chance to overthrow the Iranian regime last June “without firing a single bullet” and didn’t do it? Do you know an Iranian who believes that among the last remaining signs of the coming of the Iranian messiah that must occur are the “destruction of Israel and bombing of Persian oil fields and European capitals?”

Does this guy pass the smell test?

One of the few honest statements in Melman’s profile is an acknowledgement that Khalili is associated with “conservative right-wing circles in the U.S.” Among other lies or misstatements in Melman’s profile is the claim that Khalili’s alleged mentor Dr. Ali Shariati, was assassinated by the SAVAK (Iran’s Shah-era secret police). Prof. Sahimi correctly notes that Shariati died of a terminal illness and was not killed by anyone. Either Khalili is making up stories and Melman hasn’t done his research or Melman himself is trying to pass off lies as truth.

Melman’s story also claims that Khalili taught Revolutionary Guard personnel how to use computers. In another passage, Khalili notes that his most active period in the Guard was in the “early 1980s.” I myself took a computer science course at Columbia University in 1980 and computers were in their infancy. Microsoft didn’t even begin as a company until 1980 and Windows wasn’t developed until 1985. I am dubious that Khalili taught anyone anywhere computers in the early 1980s.  Another strike against him.

Clarion Fund has also trotted out similar alleged Muslim “turncoats” to people its earlier films, among them the notorious Zuhdi Jasser, the star of Third Jihad.  Before that it was Walid Shoebat, the fake PLO terrorist, and Tawfiq Hamid.  So it’s a common ploy of these people to latch onto sources of dubious repute and hang the weight of their expose on the expertise they bring and the ‘authenticity’ of their inside knowledge of the subject, whether it be the race for the world Muslim Caliphate or Iranian world ‘domination.

Take a look at a few of Khalili’s bedfellows and you’ll get a sense of how trustworthy he is.  Roger Simon of Pajamas Media interviewed him in 2008, claiming the CIA offered an email approving publication of a profile of him (thus giving him the CIA Good Housekeeping seal of approval).  Pat Robertson’s CBN also featured him.

Khalili has even written an “exposé” of his “double-life” working for the CIA while a Revolutionary Guard, A Time to Betray.  It even looks like he hoodwinked as formidable a journalistic figure as the Washington Post’s David Ignatius into reviewing it (and highly favorably I might add).

I invite my readers to peruse other video footage used in Iranium. If you note any similar howlers to this one please let me know. We’ve got to take this propaganda apart line by line if necessary to drain the toxin from the body politic that the film is liable to build up.