Muhammad Idrees Ahmad

Ziocon extremist and renowned warmonger Charles Krauthammer offers his own suggestions for the collective punishment of Palestinians, but he starts off with a paragraph which makes it amply clear that he couldn’t tell his elbow from his arse.

Gaza is now run not by a conventional political party but by a movement that is revolutionary, Islamist and terrorist. Worse, Hamas is a client of Iran. Gaza now constitutes the farthest reach of the archipelago of Iranian proxies: Hamas in Palestine, Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Mahdi Army (among others) in Iraq and the Alawite regime of Syria.

So the Sunni Hamas is an Iranian proxy, and so is the nationalist Mahdi Army? (There are Iranian proxies in Iraq — SIIC and Dawah — however, they comprise the Vichy government of Iraq). After heaping sufficent praise on ‘moderate’ Arab states of Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia, he chastises Israel for,

permitting the development of an unprecedented parasitism by willingly supplying food, water, electricity and gasoline to a territory that was actively waging hostilities against it…

[Therefore Krauthammer recommends:] the next Qassam will be answered with a cutoff of gasoline shipments…If that fails to concentrate the mind, the next step should be to cut off electricity. When the world wails, Israel should ask, what other country on Earth is expected to supply the very means for a declared enemy to attack it?

Another September 11?

Meanwhile AIPAC’s inhouse think-tank, Washington Institute for Near East Policy is setting the agenday for the Israel Lobby’s future action: adding Hizbullah to the EU Terrorist list.

The Europeans are unlikely to move in that direction, however, unless they regard Hizballah as a direct threat. Accordingly, the EU must come to recognize that although Hezbollah has not carried out attacks in Europe for a number of years, this could change rapidly. Hizballah’s infrastructure in Europe and ties to Iran give it the ability to mount an attack quickly should the perceived need arise.

Jeffrey Blankfort warns: ‘Here we see what the 5th columnists of the Washington Inst. and Israel may be planning in the near future, a Mossad-initiated terrorist attack in Europe that can be blamed on Hezbollah. Does this not sound like the statement in the PNAC document that noted that the US needed a “Pearl Harbor” type attack (9-11?) in order to get Americans to support the Zionist neocon agenda as spelled out in the PNAC statement’.

Ushering in the Clash

The much touted ‘clash of civilizations’ has not materialized, despite ample provocations. Some, however, are not deterred. Here is the latest Ziocon attempt to engender a civilizational conflict in order to get US-EU more squarely behind Israel.

A documentary produced in Israel and screened widely throughout the U.S. is stirring furious debate over its depiction of Muslims.

The film, “Obsession: Radical Islam’s War Against the West,” is gaining a quick following among conservative Americans, evangelicals and Jews. U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney is said to have seen the film and though it hasn’t technically been released yet, segments have been screened several times on Fox News and shown on nearly 200 university campuses.

But critics of the film dismiss it as “fear-mongering” propaganda aimed at bashing Muslims and inciting bigotry and hate.

“Obsession” is a one-hour look at radical Islam with footage of Arab and Iranian television, interspersed with rallies from Nazi Germany in an attempt to draw parallels between the two. Comprised mostly of news clips from recent years, it includes scenes of thousands of people chanting “Death to America” and children talking about their dream of becoming a martyr. “I hope Bush dies in flames and I want to go to Ariel Sharon and stab him with a sword,” one little girl in Bahrain tells the camera. The film also features interviews with prominent neo-conservative figures, like Daniel Pipes, who warn about the danger of radical Islam and its growing prominence in some circles….

Smear tactics

“It’s a typical cherry picking of inflammatory images and splicing them together to create fear,” Ibrahim Hooper, spokesman for the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) said in a telephone interview from the group’s headquarters in Washington, D.C. “When these smear techniques are used against any other religious or minority group, it is recognized as bigotry. When it’s aimed at Islam or Muslims, it has gained unfortunate levels of acceptance within our society.” The film, he said, “has an agenda to make Muslims look bad.”

Republican and Jewish students groups have sponsored scores of screenings, most of which occurred without incident, the film’s creators say. But protests and rising student tensions have begun accompanying the film on many campuses. A screening at Pace University in New York was canceled and rescheduled only months later after administrators pressured Hillel student leaders into calling off their event. And a recent Georgia Tech screening sponsored by the College Republicans required extra security as part of “Islamofascism Awareness Day.” …

Fueling the fire

Aside from the content itself, a number of other factors related to the film have fueled the flames of controversy. For one, it has a largely Jewish and pro-Israel distribution network, though Shore is trying to expand the film’s appeal. According to news reports, at a screening earlier this year at New York University, distributors of the film required viewers to register at IsraelActivism.com, the Web site of Aish HaTorah’s Hasbara Fellowships.

Shore, incidentally, was the director of both Aish HaTorah International and the Hasbara Fellowships, a pro-Israel advocacy group. But he says the film was an independent project.

He also tries to play down the film’s Israel connection, simply because “It isn’t helpful,” he says. “I don’t want it to be only Jewish and Israel-related.

“I don’t understand why it’s biased if Jews are behind the creation of an objective film,” he says. “There’s nothing wrong with Jews saying the radical Islamists are coming, just like there’s nothing wrong with Jews in Nazi Germany saying the Nazis are coming.”

Funders anonymous

The issue is further complicated as funding sources for the film remain hazy. Shore and director Wayne Kopping of South Africa are the only figures associated with the film willing to release their real names and appear in media interviews; the executive producer is listed as Peter Mier, while the production manager is listed as Brett Halperin. But Mier and Halperin are just aliases, Shore says. He describes the real Mier as a Canadian Jewish businessman who wanted to do something significant, but asked to remain anonymous for fear of his safety. According to Shore, about 80 percent of the film’s $400,000 budget was provided by Mier.

“At the recommendation of a number of experts we worked with in making the film, many of the individuals and organizations who helped make this film possible requested anonymity,” Shore explained during an online question-and-answer session on Fox.com. “Tragically, we’ve seen numerous times the response of the radicals to those who openly expose or disagree with them…

Shore also denies early reports that link the film to Honest Reporting, a pro-Israel media watchdog group.

On the organization’s site, “Obsession” is described as “Honest Reporting’s newest documentary film,” but Shore says it’s a mistake and that the film’s creators have told Honest Reporting to take it off their site “a dozen times.”

“It was a marriage of convenience to associate [my previous film] ‘Relentless’ with Honest Reporting. At the beginning, I thought I would do the same thing with ‘Obsession.’ I decided not to, but I considered it and that came out in the press.”

This summer, the film will be released officially and will be available in retail outlets like Wal-Mart, Blockbuster and Target. Some 100,000 copies have already been sold through the film’s Web site, www.Obsessionthemovie.com, and based on television ratings from Fox and CNN Headline News, which also broadcast segments of the documentary, Shore estimates that some 10 million viewers – including a large number of evangelical Christians – have already seen significant portions of the film.

“Many evangelical Christians are waking up and becoming passionate about this issue,” says Shore. “There is a shock factor because people haven’t seen this before. Now, they are seeing images of children being brainwashed, they see the passion and ideology of their religious leaders and they say, ‘Gosh, that’s scary.’ But if people were exposed to this already, it wouldn’t be so shocking.”