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.

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.

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)

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.

Donors Trust Fund: 'building a legacy of liberty' by spitting on America's Muslims and meddling in a presidential election campaign

Counterpunch has published an exposé about the Clarion Fund that takes the story to the next level.  This is a development I’ve been awaiting for two years.  We knew that Clarion was the ostensible producer of the three anti-Muslim films, Third Jihad, Obsession and the latest, Iranium (watch the unintentionally hilarious trailer).  But we didn’t know who specifically financed the films.  Now, we still don’t know specifically whom, but Pam Gartens has taken us right up to his doorstep and rung the doorbell.

Iranium: the movie

Turns out that in 2008, when Clarion sent 20 million copies of Obsession to households in swing states a few weeks before the presidential election, they didn’t do this alone.  Gartens estimates that the DVD reproduction and advertising costs amounted to somewhere in the neighborhood of $17-million.  This money came to Clarion via the Donors Capital Fund, a non-profit libertarian front group (“providing asset management for…capital dedicated to the pursuit of liberty”) closely associated with the interests of the Koch family:

There are shades of Charles Koch all over Donors Capital and Donors Trust.  Two grantees receiving repeat and sizeable grants from Donors Capital are favorites of the Koch foundations: George Mason University Foundation and Institute for Humane Studies.  Another tie is Claire Kittle.  A project of Donor’s Trust is Talent Market.org, a headhunter for staffing nonprofits with the “right” people.  Ms. Kittle serves as Talent Market’s Executive Director and was the former Program Officer for Leadership and Talent Development at the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation.  Then there is Whitney Ball, President of both Donors Capital Fund and Donors Trust.  Ms. Ball was one of the elite guests at the invitation-only secret Aspen bash thrown by Charles Koch in June of this year, as reported by ThinkProgress.org.  Also on the guest list for the Koch bash was Stephen Moore, a member of the Editorial Board at the Wall Street Journal.  Mr. Moore is a Director at Donors Capital Fund.  Rounding out the ties that bind is Lauren Vander Heyden, who serves as Client Services Coordinator at Donors Trust.  Ms. Vander Heyden previously worked as grants coordinator and policy analyst at the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation.

Its 990 form reveals (page 33) that it gave an $18-million grant to Clarion Fund in 2008.  It was by far the largest grant distributed that year, amounting to about 25% of the total grants.

There are several aspects of this that shock me.  I always figured Shelly Adelson or Irwin Katsof, billionaires much more closely associated both with pro-Israel and anti-jihadi political forces, to be the suspect donors.  This latest news takes things in a far more radical libertarian direction, and generally Jews have stayed clear of right-wing libertarianism because it’s always had a whiff of anti-Semitism about it (cf. Rand Paul).  While the Koch family is Jewish, their philanthropy has never been visible in that community nor has their interest in far-right Israeli politics been evident.

I can tell you one person who ain’t the donor: George Soros.  But I wonder if Eli Lake will be as dogged in pursuing the identity of Clarion’s sugar-baby as he was in pursuing J Street’s?

Though Garten has done a great service in tracing this as far as she has, the problem is that DonorsTrust (minimum gift: $1-million) has created yet another veil behind which another donor is concealed.  We thought all we had to do before was figure out which individual funded the Clarion films.  We didn’t realize that there could be further subterfuge.  And, in fact the Trust trumpets as one of its primary benefits that it shields it’s participants identity behind a shroud:

Privacy is very important to me and at times it’s been hard to do my charitable giving in a way that’s discreet.

My private foundation was beneficial for tax benefits and administration but completely failed when it came to privacy since all private foundation tax forms are available to the general public on the Internet. That’s why I set up a DonorsTrust donor-advised account. My contributions to DonorsTrust are not public information and the grants I recommend from DonorsTrust can remain completely anonymous.

It makes you wonder why such a donor would feel the need for secrecy (or “privacy,” as they call it)?  I’m just an old-fashioned former non-profit fundraiser who believes in transparency and standing behind your philanthropic commitments.  I find secrecy in philanthropy to be objectionable.  It just makes you wonder what they’re hiding and why.

In the case of the Clarion gift, this is even more evident and problematic since a grant from a non-profit charitable foundation was used in an overtly political manner to influence a presidential election.  Given the Koch family’s massive presence in the current election cycle, the fact that DonorsTrust used non-profits it funded to produce films assaulting Islam and endorsing a presidential candidate (one of the Clarion websites promoting Obsession rated McCain far better on security issues than Obama) stinks to high heaven.

CAIR has already demanded that the IRS investigate Clarion for these reasons.  Now it seems it should expand the demand to include DonorsTrust as well.

I have to say Garten’s speculation concerning David Horowitz as a donor suspect seems far-fetched.  He doesn’t have that kind of dough and I doubt he has access to it from well-heeled allies either.

I have been surprised by the fact that Clarion hasn’t used Iranium in the same way this election cycle that it did Obsession in 2008.  I expected another DVD blitz in voters’ mailboxes right about now.  So far it hasn’t materialized.  Could it be that their Obsession donor didn’t spring for another $18-million PR blitz?

It’s not just Israel that refuses to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.  American Jewish neocons have been proliferating so many hysterically-Islamophobic campaign outfits in the run-up to the midterm elections, you can’t tell the players without a scorecard.  There is of course the granddaddy/zaideh of smearmesiters, the Republican Jewish Coalition.   In the 2008 election, the RJC and Aish HaTorah mated (in spirit if not in body) and produced the Clarion Fund, which flacked for John McCain.  Lately it is touting its new hate-Iran film, the third in an anti-Muslim trilogy.  We can expect it to continue the same type of dirty tricks it exploited in the last election, where it spent upwards of $20-million distributing another of its Muslim-hate films to 28-million voters in swing states.

Eli Clifton and I have written about some other anti-Muslim campaign front groups which have proliferated like weeds after a Negev spring flood: Keep Israel Safe was founded by Gary Bauer and Tom Rose, who deserves credit as the Jerusalem Post editor who first moved it to the hard-right political stance it adopted after decades of centrist mediocrity; and Stop Iran Now, an ideologically wholly-owned subsidiary of Citizens United (yes THAT Citizen’s United, whom the Supreme Court offered a green light to spend countless millions smearing Democratic candidates).  The chief champion of all these groups is William Kristol and his Weekly Standard, election central for the Likudist neocon movement.

Now we have yet another mushroom sprouting after a spring rain: the Emergency Committee for Israel.  The parentage of this cuddly little package is also interesting.  Eli Clifton notes that the group was first promoted during a Campbell Brown CNN interview with Noah Pollak, the group’s executive director.  Brown is married to Dan Senor, a senior Bush apparatchik and likely major player in 2012 Republican election campaigns.

Pollak is a former assistant editor of the Shalem Center’s publication, Azure.  The Center is heavily funded by Las Vegas gambling tycoon, Shelly Adelson, Bibi Netanyahu’s moneyman and funder of the new Israeli daily, Yisrael HaYom (also known unflatteringly as Bibi-ton).  Pollak also contributes regularly to Commentary Magazine, the true zaideh of the Jewish neocon movement.

The Committee’s domain, emergencycommitteeforisrael.com, is registered to Margaret Hoover, granddaughter of Depression-era Pres. Herbert Hoover, and a former high-level Bush operative.  One hopes she will bring better luck to this enterprise than her grandfather brought to the U.S. economy in 1929 & thereafter.  As a consultant for the Republican Israel lobby, she could try a Hoover-era slogan rebutting charges of Israeli starvation of Gaza: “a chicken in every pot.”  Maybe she’ll recommend resolving the Palestinian refugee crisis by creating a series of Hoovervilles.  No wait, that’s how most Palestinians currently live.  She also participated in Rudy Giuliani’s failed presidential campaign, in which Norm Podhoretz was also an advisor who warned Iran was intent on fomenting a world war or something to that effect.  The new group’s board includes…you guessed it…Gary Bauer, William Kristol and Rachel Abrams-Dechter-Podhoretz.

If I were Pollak, I’d keep in mind what happens to mushrooms after the rains dry up: they wither and die just as these pro-Israel hate groups will do after November, and after their donors will have thrown good money after bad in funding these useless vanity campaigns which have absolutely no effect on the Jewish vote, which remains solidly Democratic.  As a test, we’ll watch the Joe Sestak PA. senate race for which the Committee has produced the hysterical campaign ad featured above.

Ben Smith’s reporting on this story for Politico features this incredible quotation from Kristol in which he actually claims that Aipac’s politics are too liberal (a view shared by the way with Shelly Adelson, if you’ve read his devestating New Yorker profile):

“Then there’s AIPAC, which is a wonderful organization, but one that’s very committed to working with the administration, so they pull some punches publicly.”

Kristol also has the chutzpah to claim he’s modeling his effort as a conservative mirror to J Street.  There is of course one major difference between the two: J Street has grassroots support, with tens of thousands of donors and over 100,000 who’ve signed up for its alerts.  The Committee has a bunch of cigar-chomping rich Jewish guys pursuing their political vanity project.

Another curious factoid about Pollak: he’s a moderator of a Porsche car forum (and a member for at least ten years).  That must be where all the lucre Pollak’s earning from Shelly Adelson and his other Jewish neocon fat cat donors is going: into his Porsche collection.  He should keep this concealed from all of his Burlington, VT. neighbors.  That, of course is Bernie Saunders country.  I don’t imagine there are too many Porsches tooling around Burlington’s streets especially not in those harsh New England winters.  I guess it won’t disturb too many of his fellow Jewish neocons that he drives a German car since so many of them are driving Mercedes, BMWs, Audis and the like.

There are additional anti-Iran front groups created by the Jewish community, which seem designed to do Israel’s bidding rather than the Republican Party’s.  Among them is Stand for Freedom in Iran, purportedly a grassroots community coalition which was in truth incorporated by the Jewish Community Relations Council of New York.  Remember too the 2008 campaign fiasco when the President’s Conference booked Sarah Palin to keynote a UN anti-Iran rally when Ahmadinejad was scheduled to address the world body.  That didn’t go over too well with the Obama campaign and most New York Jews, who detested Palin.

Eli Clifton writes that Clarion Fund‘s new anti-Iran film is to be called (quite creatively) Iranium. I wrote about it a few weeks ago when news of it first surfaced. But now the Aish HaTorah-affiliated Clarion has a website for the film which reveals some interesting and damaging information. A review of the Interviewee page shows many of the usual pro-Israel Islamophobic neocon suspects like James Woolsey, Rachel Ehrenfeld, and Bernard Lewis. There is the requisite retired U.S. general.

Clarion lays out the purpose of the film clearly:

The film will present a wide array of options to combat the threat and will target influential U.S. interest groups and policy makers. After viewing the film, the general public will be able to understand the critical nature of the threats and encourage a movement aimed at preventing the further advancement of the Iranian regime and its nuclear arsenal.

The italicized phrase clearly delineates the goal of the producers as rolling back Iran, which could easily be construed as regime change.  This is no surprise since it is a popular theme among Jewish neocons and their allies.  It is important when the Republican Jewish Coalition begins pimping this film come the fall election campaign, spending millions of dollars on screenings at synagogues and ads in the Jewish Forward, etc. that anyone who considers writing a word about it know that there is a radical military-interventionist message inherent in this film.  And this message is heavily endorsed by Israel’s current right-wing government, which would like nothing more than to see the U.S. either attack Iran or allow Israel to do so on its behalf.

Anyone who has followed Clarion’s previous propaganda ventures, Obsession and Third Jihad, will know that their M.O. is to co-opt a “native” to denounce “radical Islam” in the case of those two films, and Iran in the case of this one.  In the former case, it was rightist Republican Arizona cardiologist Zuhdi Jasser, who performed the requisite role of Muslim-bashing.

Caspian Makan: face of a fraud

For Iranium, they have recruited a new “star” of the Green protest movement, Caspian Makan.  If you read his press clippings from publications as august as the Guardian, you’d be forgiven for thinking that this guy was Moussavi and Karroubi’s right-hand man.  Makan claims to have been Neda Soltan’s fiance (not true) and claims to have been with her in her final moments after being fatally shot during the June riots in Teheran (also untrue).  Makan will tell anyone who will listen of the terrible hardships he has suffered both as a heroic partisan of the Green movement and as a refugee who fled on an arduous trek through Kurdish Iran to Turkey and then to exile in Canada.

Last month, this impostor even got an audience (no doubt thanks to his connections with the Clarion folks–what a great coup for their film!) with Israeli President Shimon Peres.  Apparently, the president’s handlers didn’t do their due diligence on this fellow–or else they did and they found him too much of a hasbara gold mine to pass up.  You can read the propaganda clearly articulated in the Jerusalem Post’s dutiful patriotic stengography.

Iason Athanasiadis, has written the definitive expose of Makan, pointing out his tenuous relationship with facts and the truth.  Indeed, Athanasiadis published Makan’s first interview after he escaped from Iran.  As such, this journalist should be accorded some respect in light of his disavowal of the so-called Iranian dissident hero.

It is interesting that when Makan first arrived in the west he was Neda Soltan’s fiance.  Here is how he described her last day in the Guardian interview:

On the day of her death, Caspian was out with his camera in another part of the city. “I was taking pictures of the protests and the protesters that day. It was hard to take pictures as the security guards were beating up protesters. I used my mobile’s camera when I couldn’t use my big camera. It was six to seven in the evening when I started seeing people get shot and injured. I thought of Neda a lot. I was very worried for her. I wanted to call her but the mobile phone system had been disconnected and I couldn’t contact her at all. I didn’t sleep that night. The terrible scenes were going through my head. I was sitting in front of my computer, looking at the photos I had taken. Around six in the morning my mobile rang. It was Neda’s number. But it wasn’t her. It was her sister. She said, ‘Caspian, Neda is gone!’ I didn’t understand what she meant. I couldn’t believe what she was telling me.”

And here is his description of his imprisonment following her death.  Note how it sounds like it comes right from the pages of a Victorian romantic novel:

“They told me they were taking me to Evin prison. They took me to a prison cell. Neda’s grave number was 32. The grave next to that was number 34, my cell’s number. I didn’t want to come back after they took me. I wanted them to kill me as well.”

There was one small problem with all of this.  It wasn’t true, as described by the Turkey-based reporter:

Makan launched into an account of Neda’s final days that was tragic and compelling. Unfortunately, it was also full of lies. The way he told it, Neda — a very politicized young woman — begged him to sally forward into the streets with his camera and document events. He dutifully did so, snapping extraordinary images of Revolutionary Guardsmen hanging off helicopters, mercilessly shooting into the demonstrators.

“Really?” I asked. “That’s funny, I never heard even a claim of helicopter-mounted snipers.”

“Yes, yes,” Makan assured me. “I would show you the evidence but the Islamic Republic confiscated all my archives.”

With Neda dead, Makan started giving interviews to international television channels, achieving the kind of international media profile he had always sought…Clutching a lock of Neda’s hair and a few pictures he snapped of her during their two-month acquaintance, he began a morbid international tour.

His blurb at the Uranium site calls him “her close friend.”  This is closer to the truth of the matter:

Not only was Makan not Neda’s fiance when she died, they were not even romantically linked anymore. Neda left him after a row they had and Caspian was allegedly seeing another girl, with whom he was spotted attending one of the post-election protest marches..

Similarly, Athanasiadis notes that when he had first met Makan some years ago, the latter had claimed to be a photographer but none of the photographers the former queried who would know of his work had ever heard of him.  I note the Uranium site calls Makan “an Iranian documentary filmmaker.”  Dare we ask to see any of his “documentaries?”  Is there even one?

The journalist describes Makan’s harrowing tale of privation during his trek to freedom, but then notes that the smugglers who took their lives in their hands to carry him to safety couldn’t stand the sight of him.  Apparently, he had the nerve to complain about the quality of the accommodations they provided him on his journey!

If the alleged Iranian dissident had a reason for leaving Iran it doesn’t appear to be the one he claims.  Rather, he had gone from being a regime-favored landscape photographer to being out of favor:

As a landscape photographer, he had always depended on the Islamic Republic for commissions (the Ministry of Culture block-bought all 3,000 prints of his book of landscapes from the Caspian Sea, one of the regime’s method for rewarding docile artists). Now, he was out of favor and the Ministry of Culture did not return his calls. So Makan escaped to Turkey.

Makan may have a burning passion, but it is not for Iranian democracy.  Rather it appears to be a passion for the good life and the fruits of success possible in the west:

Makan’s Narcissus complex is clear from the photographs of himself that he posts on Facebook, wearing elaborate suits and ties, driving a Mercedes, or Karate Kid-like in martial arts poses…

Now, in interviews conducted inside gleaming TV studios, he looks smug as a bug in a rug in his brand new suit. Neda must be spinning in her grave.

So much for Iranium’s token Iranian.  I’d say that, in a play on the film’s title that, rather than Iran being radioactive, their Iranian hero is.  It’s somehow fitting that Clarion has turned to a charlatan for affirmation of their anti-Iranian views, since those behind this film are charlatans as well, albeit political ones.

It’s also worth noting that the anti-Muslim right seems to have a special need to embrace such quisling frauds.  Aish HaTorah, with which Clarion is closely affiliated, has adopted another alleged Muslim convert to Judaism, a former druggie calling himself “Mark” (not his original name) Halawa.  I called him the Manchurian Muslim in the post I wrote about him.  Another was Walid Shoebat, the pseudonym of a Palestinian who claimed to be a Muslim-born PLO terrorist who turned against terror, the PLO, and became a Christian evangelical.  Only problem, he was none of the things he claimed to be.

There is also another interesting character appearing in the film.  Harold Rhode is a former colleague of Doug Feith and protegé of Bernard Lewis and Richard Perle.  He worked with Feith and Perle via the infamous Pentagon Office of Net Assessment, where he was responsible for plotting U.S. military strategy in the lead-up to the Iraq war.

He reaffirmed in an interview with the Jerusalem Post the standard lies of Cheney and other neocon warriors that Saddam was in bed with Al Qaeda and thought this was a more effective argument for war than Iraqi WMD (he at least was right on one of those counts).  Here is a sampling of Rhode’s sharp analysis of the Saddam-Al Qaeda connection and by extension all of Islam:

He [Saddam] was clearly involved with these bastards, with al-Qaida and all sorts of other fundamentalists who are out to destroy the West.

Why should Saddam, a secular Sunni, get involved with al-Qaida? What was his motivation?

Let’s say say that everybody here is helping everybody else. I help you in ways that are good for you, and you help me in ways that are good for me. I have a money system that can transfer things; you use it. I need weapons transferred to someone that you have connections with. I’m not your leader, you’re not my leader. It’s mutual. They’re all on the same side here… Look, there were times the KGB and the CIA were on the same side and there are times right now that this country [Israel] and Saudi Arabia are on the same side – that’s until the day Iran is taken care of and then that will end.

If he’s secular, why did he write “Allahu akhbar” in his own blood on the flag, why did he supposedly have a Koran written in his blood? Why? I don’t know what secular means. Secular is a nice Western word. The best way you can put that in Arabic is la diniyah. La means no and diniyah is the law. That means you don’t fear God, you don’t fear judgment day. That means you can kill me or I can kill you and I’m not afraid of what God will say.

I’m ashamed to say that this is a man once employed by the U.S. government as an expert on Islam and the Muslim world.  The fact that he’s starring in a new Clarion fund propaganda extravaganza doesn’t surprise me.  But that he was sitting in a Pentagon office charting U.S. war policy speaks volumes about our utter failure there during the Bush years.

Thanks to Eli Clifton for sharing his background information about Rhode.

Those of you who read this blog during the last presidential campaign will remember the Clarion Fund, which spent $15-million to distribute its Islam-hating Obsession to 28-million voters in swing states.  The purpose was to scare Jewish voters and others frightened of the ‘Muslim menace’ into voting Republican.  You can see how well that strategy worked.

Thanks to Sarah Posner, Justin Elliott and reader John Dickerson for alerting me to a story about those folks who brought you two perfect-storm anti-Muslim films (Obsession and Third Jihad).  They plan to do to Iran what they did to Islamism.  Note the mushroom-cloud in the film promotion and the claim that Iran will use nuclear weapons to destroy everything we in the west hold dear, including Israel.  And like their last electoral effort, this one will be timed to the upcoming November elections.

Last time around, a media expert quoted by Ali Gharib and Eli Clifton estimated that the Obsession DVD distribution cost between $15-50-million.  Justin Elliott does his homework and finds that Clarion took in $18-million in 2008 and spent $15-million, most of this on the cost of duplicating the DVD.  The Fund’s 990 report doesn’t specify who gave the $18-million, but there are any number of right-wing Jewish Republican fatcats who’d be only too pleased to do so.  In the past, several have speculated it might be Sheldon Adelson.  But given Clarion Fund is an extension of the far-right pro-settler Aish HaTorah, my money is on a fellow far-right Orthodox donor.  Someone like Irving Moskowitz or Rabbi Irwin Katsof, a billionaire co-founder of Aish.

Elliott’s piece gives us an early warning of the shenanigans planned by the Jewish crackpot-right like Clarion and the Republican Jewish Coalition.  I like to say that it’s good that they waste their money on such ineffective projects.  If they didn’t, they might actually discover an effective way to do damage against the Democrats.  Garbage like this won’t.  So I say, along with a thankfully retired president, “Bring it on.”

During the last election, much of the Jewish media featured distorted, misleading ads from the Republican Jewish Coalition touting fear of Barack “Hussein” Obama as anti-Israel.  No doubt, Clarion’s Jewish Daddy Warbucks will pay for swank ads in the same publications touting the Iran mushroom cloud film.  I’d urge them to consider what Clarion Fund is and consider the lies of their previous two films.  Jewish Week, The Forward, Haaretz and JTA clearly need revenue in this terrible climate for print media, but do they need it so badly they have to take funds promoting such garbage?

Here are a few choice quotations from the film’s finely calibrated press release:

Since the inception of the Islamic Revolution in 1979, Iran has displayed hatred for the West.  Coupled with an extremist and apocalyptic messianic ideology, this regime has terrorized the world at large for over 30 years.

…The film will document…the West’s inability to recognize the true nature of an extremist Islamic Revolutionary regime…

I was just glancing at Clarion’s website, Radical Islam, when I noticed this absolutely hilarious Facebook feed:

Al-Qaida is laying deadly “booby traps” by equipping its female suicide bombers with explosive breast implants [!] that are impossible to be detected at airport security checkpoints…

The source?  That impeccable font of anti-jihadi wisdom, Robert Spencer’s Jihad Watch!  Should we speculate how Orthodox settlers might conceal their explosives should they ever turn to suicide bombing as a tactic for killing Palestinians?  Perhaps explosive tallises (which they wear as an undergarment)?