Obsession Gets Some Overdue Mainstream Attention

Obsession, the Islamophobic video that has been distributed via newspaper inserts to some 28 million households in key swing states this fall, is getting some overdue negative attention from the mainstream media at last. The Washington Post carried an article about the video Sunday that made it clear that the mass distribution was intended to influence the election in the Republicans’ favor. And Monday’s Atlantic online blog post by Jeffrey Goldberg, entitled “The Jewish Extremists Behind Obsession” was particularly notable.

He casts a remarkably negative light on Aish HaTorah, the Israeli organization whose U.S.-based officials, in Goldberg’s words, “are up to their chins in this project.” (I think IPS was the first news source to point out the connection between Aish and Obsession in an article published back in March, 2007, although more has since come out, including a recent IPS update in September which noted other Israeli connections to the video and its distribution.)

I especially appreciated Goldberg’s identification of the Jerusalem Post’s Caroline Glick as one of his “favorite hysterics” — I posted on one of her fulminations last June — and as those behind the project as representing the “lunatic fringe.” In addition to Glick, who also heads the Middle East program at Frank Gaffney’s Center for Security Policy, Goldberg would presumably apply that description to Daniel Pipes and Steven Emerson who played prominent roles in the video. It was Goldberg, a veteran of the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF), who wrote that passionate indictment, “Israel’s ‘America Problem’” in the Washington Post’s Outlook section last May of the major national Jewish organizations, particularly the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations and AIPAC, for confusing “pro-Israel” with being pro-settler in their advocacy efforts.

Of course, the producer/distributor of Obsession was the still-mysterious Clarion Fund, which has just released a sequel, The Third Jihad about which my colleague Eli Clifton posted earlier this month. The new video, originally intended for distribution before next week’s election, according to the Post’s article, suffered production delays (hence, the distribution of Obsession instead).

While I haven’t yet seen it, I understand that it features commentary by Clifford May of the Likudnik Foundation for the Defense of Democracy and, more prominently, Princeton historian and neo-con icon Bernard Lewis, who, according to various accounts, helped persuade Dick Cheney, among others, that the Iraq invasion would be a very good thing for all concerned. It was also Lewis who on August 8, 2006, predicted on the editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad would very possibly launch an attack on Israel exactly two weeks later, on August 22, to mark “the night when many Muslims commemorate the night flight of the prophet Muhammad on the winged horse Buraq, first to ‘the farthest mosque,’ usually identified with Jerusalem, and then to heaven and back. This [date],” he went on, “might well be deemed an appropriate date for the apocalyptic ending of Israel and if necessary of the world.” Goldberg’s words about “hysterics” and “the lunatic fringe” come to mind.

Nonetheless, it was just six months later that, with Cheney in attendance, Lewis delivered the American Enterprise Institute’s (AEI) annual Irving Kristol Lecture — in which he warned that militant Islam was launching its third attempt to conquer Europe and the West through “terror and migration.” And it was presumably after that that he sat down for a long interview with the Islamophobic makers of Obsession and The Third Jihad.

Incidentally, for a penetrating analysis of Obsession, read a review by David Shasha featured on Richard Silverstein’s blog at the Tikun Olam site.

@Bin Laden sez OMG! Jihad!

Hold on to your MP3 players and Palm Pilots. The tragically hip in US Army intelligence have discovered the popular micro-blogging service Twitter. The crux of the draft by the 304th Military Intelligence Battalion is that terrorists could make use of the 140 character one liners normally reserved for teenage girls announcing breakups, exhibitionist bloggers titillating fans (e.g., “I’m blogging naked,) and unironic reviews of the mundane. “Yum….macaroni and cheese is delicious”

The report ominously warns that “Twitter has also become a social activism tool for socialists, human rights groups, communists, vegetarians, anarchists, religious communities, atheists, political enthusiasts, hacktivists and others to communicate with each other and to send messages to broader audiences…”

There is really no end of possibilities now that the I-Pod nano rocks in nine amazing colors. Prescient trend watchers might also note that bus systems, fast food and strip clubs can also be utilized by terrorists. The only possible use of such obvious and pointless breakthroughs in “intelligence” is to make the case to the dim and frightened that if terrorists might be using some common and day-to-day element of normal human life, then that common and day-to-day element of human life needs close surveillance and containment by the feds.

Meanwhile, Antiwar.com is making use of Twitter here and here.

No Noam on Base?

A group of South Korean military officers is pressing a court to overturn the military’s ban, announced earlier this year, on books which it considers dangerously pro-North Korean, anti-US, or anti-capitalist. The military says the “seditious” books would hinder the concentration of soldiers, and harm the military’s “mental power.” The officers say the move is censorship and unconstitutional.

The list reportedly includes 23 books, including two by US author Noam Chomsky which were listed for being “anti-government and anti-US.” One of those books is Year 501: The Conquest Continues.

‘King of Salsa’ Turned Accused Spy Speaks of His Magical Powers

Iranian-born British Army interpreter Daniel James, who is accused of spying for Iran, has too interesting of a backstory not to mention. With a background in body building and kick boxing, James says he eventually rose to the title of “Danny James, King of Salsa.” And that’s not even the funny part.

He apparently also traveled to Cuba at some point, during which he became a priest in a native religion and learned some magic. This came in really handy when he was sent to Afghanistan as an interpreter for General David Richards, as James told the court he “did black magic for General Richards to protect him from the Taliban.”

Did the Marines Die for Absolute Power?

This is the 25th anniversary of the bombing of the barracks in Beirut that killed 241 Marines. President Reagan sent in U.S. troops to try to help stabilize Lebanon after the Israeli invasion (and massacres by Israeli proxies in Palestinian refugee camps) the prior year. This was Reagan’s biggest antiterrorism debacle. He failed the Marines and he compounded the abuse by lying about it to the American people. But apologists for the U.S. warring continue to invoke the sacrifice of the Marines to vindicate practically any and all proposed U.S. invasions of foreign countries.

The Wall Street Journal editorial page today contains a piece implying that the Marines perished as a result of Democrats trying to limit the president’s power to intervene abroad. Robert Turner insists, “Had it not been for crass political partisanship, and efforts by Sen. Joe Biden and other congressional liberals to usurp the constitutional powers of the president, the loss of life in Beirut may have been avoided.” In reality, the folly and blame lies in those responsible for sending the troops to Lebanon, not for those trying to bring them home.

Turner then proceeds to blame 9/11 on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978, which attempted to limit the power of the president to wiretap any phone call he pleased. Turner implies that the only reason the 9/11 attacks were not detected was because U.S. government spies did not have boundless power to intrude on communications in America. This is tripe, as the reports of the Senate Intelligence Committee and 9/11 Commission showed. The subtitle on his article captures his message: “Liberal assaults on the executive branch have made us vulnerable.”

Robert McFarlane, Reagan’s national security advisor, has an article in the New York Times with a different song-and-dance on the anniversary. McFarlane says that the problem with the U.S. incursion into Lebanon was that the U.S. military did not plunge itself massively into the Lebanese civil war: “I urged the president to give the marines their traditional role — to deploy, at the invitation of the Lebanese government, into the mountains alongside the newly established Lebanese Army in an effort to secure the evacuation of Syrian and Israeli forces from Lebanon.” Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger recognized that it would be folly to commence a general war against Muslim forces.

I wrote about Reagan’s Lebanon debacle in Terrorism & Tyranny and for Counterpunch in 2003, looking at the Beirut debacle as a microcosm of the growing fiasco in Iraq. I concluded back then, “The Reagan administration paid no political price for its Beirut debacle. Reagan and Bush Sr. succeeded in falsifying, blustering, and smearing their way out of political trouble. Now, two decades later, the only ‘lesson’ that seems to be recalled is to stick resolutely to floundering policies – at least until the number of dead soldiers threatens to become politically toxic.” [cross-posted here]