Los Angeles’ Museum of In-Tolerance, named in honor of Nazi-hunter Simon Wiesenthal, is now steeped in Muslim hatred. Rabbi Marvin Hier, its current leader, has endorsed the Iran yellow star hoax. Now, he’s actively promoting one of the most Islamophobic films ever produced, Third Jihad.
The Clarion Fund is listed as the sponsor of the film, though its creators (including Rabbi Raphael Shore) are affiliated with the pro-settler Aish Hatorah, a group based in Israel. Clarion appears to be little more than a domestic shell organization designed to enable the producers to claim the film was made in the U.S.
Third Jihad features Zuhdi Jasser, who though he professes to be Muslim, seems to detest almost everything about his religion, especially anything that remotely hints of Islam existing in a political context. Jasser runs a one man Muslim organization which is characterized in an IPS story thus:
American Islamic Forum for Democracy…according to its website, is a non-profit which seeks to “intellectually stand against the religious fanatics who exploit the religion of Islam for a nihilistic, anti-American anti-Western war.”
Jasser makes common cause with Muslim haters like Daniel Pipes and other Jewish neocons. Years ago, he was active in CAIR but that relationship turned sour. Now he detests everything to do with the national Muslim organization and takes every chance he can to attack it. Third Jihad provides him all the opportunity he needs.
In the film, he purports to have discovered a radical Muslim version of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion:
“The Third Jihad” is largely based on a document the producers say the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) discovered in 2003. The film’s creators purport the document is a “’Grand Jihad Manifesto’ authored by the Muslim Brotherhood in North America, according to the promotional materials.
“The 15-page document outlines goals and strategies for the infiltration and domination of America from within,” says the release. “Among the strategies discussed is the establishment of ‘moderate’ groups, mosques and Islamic centers across North America in an effort to strategically position Islam so that it might weaken western culture and promote the implementation of Sharia Law.”
CAIR wrote a letter of protest to Rabbi Hier about the profound insult that this film poses to all American Muslims. But Hier has about as much sensitivity to the concerns of Muslims as a deaf person would have to Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony.
The Wiesenthal Center screenings were co-sponsored by another extremist group, the American Freedom Alliance. One look at its website makes you realize you’re visiting territory so far off the right side of the universe it might as well be Pluto. Here’s but a taste:
The American Freedom Alliance is a non-political, non partisan, movement of concerned Americans which identifies threats to western civilization. The organization promotes networking, activism and education in the following six areas:
* The Islamic penetration of Europe
* The collapse of academic freedom
* The identification and sources of media bias
* The growth of radical environmentalism
* The necessity for missile defense
* The dangers presented by the global governance movement
IPS notes that the Washington, D.C. screening of the film was promoted and documented by the International Free Press Society, which also heavily publicized the U.S. speaking tour of far-right Dutch Muslim hater, Geert Wilders. He himself produced an anti-Muslim film screed, Fitna, which I jokingly called here “Dutch for garbage.” Even the ADL has labelled Wilders “inflammatory” and Britain has refused him entry. Both Wilders and some members of IFPS have been linked to the Belgian neo-fascist group, Vlaams Belang.
All in all, this is a nice set of bedfellows with whom the Clarion Fund and the Museum of Tolerance are sleeping. But Rabbi Hier and Raphael Shore should remember what happens when you lie down with dogs…
I find it sad to report that just as Wilders spoke to synagogue audiences during his tour here, Detroit’s Temple Israel also screened Third Jihad. Someone should ask Rabbi Joshua Bennett what he was thinking when he invited these hatemongers into his shul.
The brutal truth of the matter is that instead of awakening the world to the danger of radical Islam, films like this actually promote Islamophobia and are conducive to an atmosphere that provokes violence against American Muslims.
H/t to Aziz Poonawalla.
Just this week it was announced that Wilders will definitely be prosecuted in Holland for the sowing of hatred, for instigating discrimination and for insulting a minority (inter alia by calling the Koran the Moslem ‘Mein Kampf’).
Attempts by his high profile Amsterdam lawyer, Abraham Moszkowicz, to get the prosecution called off by the Dutch High Court since, allegedly, Wilders statements fell under the freedom of expression guaranteed by the European Agreement on Human Rights came to nothing.
Job Cohen, Mayor of Amsterdam, is one of Wilders’ special targets because he is doing too much to his liking for the integration of Moslems in Dutch society. He pleaded at one stage for a judicial investigation into the Mayor’s affairs because Amsterdam had allegedly paid too much for land destined for a new mosque.
When Cohen visited New York, Mayor Bloomberg openly took up the cudgels for Wilders because allegedly ‘free speech’ had to be protected. I don’t know whether Bloomberg knew about Wilders’ anti-Cohen stance. An Op-Ed in the New York Times remarked that it was a bit rich for a fellow who wants the Koran to be banned to pose as a defender of free speech.
This is slightly off topic but I think it will be of GREAT interest to readers of this web site. Could be a matter of life and death at some point.
JINSA advocates censorship, military strikes on “partisan” media outlets
JINSA is the hard-line, Likudnik Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs. They boast a pretty powerful line-up of present and former advisors including Dick Cheney, John Bolton, Douglas Feith and Richard Perle. If you’re looking for groups to blame for helping to get us into the endless war and now occupation of Iraq, JINSA is certainly a great place to start.
The new edition of their house organ includes this remarkable gem, Wishful Thinking and Indecisive Wars, from retired US army officer Ralph Peters who says openly what we all suspect to be true every time an Al Jazeera office accidentally gets blown up in a war with the US, or the Israeli Defense Forces accidentally shoot a reporter. Revealing both constitutional contempt and the creepy linkages between right-wing Jews and fundamentalist Christian Zionists, Peters actually calls the media godless “neo-pagans” and advocates not only censorship but military strikes. The media, he insists, are a “hostile third party” in war, and must be treated as such.
Of course, the media have shaped the outcome of conflicts for centuries, from the European wars of religion through Vietnam. More recently, though, the media have determined the outcomes of conflicts. While journalists and editors ultimately failed to defeat the U.S. government in Iraq, video cameras and biased reporting guaranteed that Hezbollah would survive the 2006 war with Israel and, as of this writing, they appear to have saved Hamas from destruction in Gaza.
What????? It gets worse…
Pretending to be impartial, the self-segregating personalities drawn to media careers overwhelmingly take a side, and that side is rarely ours. [Ed. emphasis] Although it seems unthinkable now, future wars may require censorship, news blackouts and, ultimately, military attacks on the partisan media. Perceiving themselves as superior beings, journalists have positioned themselves as protected-species combatants. But freedom of the press stops when its abuse kills our soldiers and strengthens our enemies. Such a view arouses disdain today, but a media establishment that has forgotten any sense of sober patriotism may find that it has become tomorrow’s conventional wisdom.
As I pointed out, this already looks to, to varying degrees, like today’s conventional wisdom in Israel and the United States, two countries who never miss an opportunity to boast that they’re special precisely because they don‘t do such things. This all makes sense within Peters’ larger frame of understanding the role of the media, not as seekers of the truth but rather as a self-hating army all unto itself:
Today, the United States and its allies will never face a lone enemy on the battlefield. There will always be a hostile third party in the fight, but one which we not only refrain from attacking but are hesitant to annoy: the media.
While this brief essay cannot undertake to analyze the psychological dysfunctions that lead many among the most privileged Westerners to attack their own civilization and those who defend it, we can acknowledge the overwhelming evidence that, to most media practitioners, our troops are always guilty (even if proven innocent), while our barbaric enemies are innocent (even if proven guilty). The phenomenon of Western and world journalists championing the “rights” and causes of blood-drenched butchers who, given the opportunity, would torture and slaughter them, disproves the notion—were any additional proof required—that human beings are rational creatures. Indeed, the passionate belief of so much of the intelligentsia that our civilization is evil and only the savage is noble looks rather like an anemic version of the self-delusions of the terrorists themselves. And, of course, there is a penalty for the intellectual’s dismissal of religion: humans need to believe in something greater than themselves, even if they have a degree from Harvard. Rejecting the god of their fathers, the neo-pagans who dominate the media serve as lackeys at the terrorists’ bloody altar.
Apostates! All of them!
Back in 2002, the Nation’s Jason Vest wrote of JINSA and their friends, the Center for Security Policy(CSP):
On no issue is the JINSA/CSP hard line more evident than in its relentless campaign for war–not just with Iraq, but “total war,” as Michael Ledeen, one of the most influential JINSAns in Washington, put it last year. For this crew, “regime change” by any means necessary in Iraq, Iran, Syria, Saudi Arabia and the Palestinian Authority is an urgent imperative. Anyone who dissents–be it Colin Powell’s State Department, the CIA or career military officers–is committing heresy against articles of faith that effectively hold there is no difference between US and Israeli national security interests, and that the only way to assure continued safety and prosperity for both countries is through hegemony in the Middle East–a hegemony achieved with the traditional cold war recipe of feints, force, clientism and covert action.
Just switch out the q with an n, and here we are all over again. Iran.
God, please help us!
RE: JINSA advocates censorship, military strikes on “partisan” media outlets
A RELATED ARTICLE: “US Colonel Advocates US ‘Military Attacks’ on ‘Partisan Media’ in Essay for Neocon, Pro-Israel Group JINSA” – by Jeremy Scahill – 05/21/09
LINK – http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/05/21-11
HA! Oh where do I even begin, wanting to say succinctly what COULD as you know take up page after page of documentation.
So the LA MOT has brought this “documentary” out of moth balls after, um, how long since it was first released? Seven months? The “Clarion Fund” has poked it’s head back up from under the rock it has been hiding under? Aren’t they so “yesterday” ala Valley girl speak?
HELLO, it didn’t work last October with the mass mailing of “Obsession” nor with the timely release in “private showings” of this piece of garbage then, and it’s NOT going to work now either. Just goes to show how desperate they are Richard.
Moving on now………….(not you Richard, THEM!)
Richard,
How are you? Check out this piece on Loon Watch:
http://www.loonwatch.com/2009/05/the-clarion-funds-new-hate-the-third-jihad/