Film on `Radical Islam' Tied to Pro-Israel Groups

Published on Tuesday, March 27, 2007 by Inter Press Service
by Khody Akhavi

WASHINGTON - A controversial documentary on the threat of radical
Islam, promoted by the two most-watched U.S. cable news networks, was
marketed and supported in part by self-described `pro-Israel' groups,
according to an IPS investigation.

Abbreviated versions and segments of `Obsession: Radical Islam's War
Against the West' ran on FOX News and CNN, but neither station
disclosed the film' s connection to HonestReporting, a watchdog group
that monitors the media for allegedly negative portrayals of Israel.

HonestReporting marketed `Obsession' but denies it produced or funded
the project.

`We initially gave some guidance to the `Obsession' staff,' wrote
Pesach Bensen, editor of Mediabackspin.com, the organization's weblog,
in an email response to IPS. `We're thrilled to see it succeed beyond
our wildest expectations.'

When `Obsession' was released last year, news pundits and anchors on
FOX and CNN praised the independent film for its candid look at
Islamic militancy. FOX incorporated footage from the film into a
one-hour special, which aired seven times in November 2006. CNN's
right-wing pundit Glen Beck called it `one of the most important films
of our time'. Sean Hannity of FOX News described it as `shocking
beyond belief'.

While such enthusiasm from right-wing talk show personalities comes as
no surprise, mainstream cable news programs also appeared to accept,
without question, the premise of the film, which explicitly compares
the threat posed by radical Islam to that of Nazi Germany in the
1930s.

Consider, for example, CNN news anchor Kyra Phillips's exhortations
during an adulatory interview in December 2006 with Raphael Shore, the
film's producer: `I encourage everybody to see this movieà you
definitely get an incredible education from watching this filmÃ
The movie left many of us speechlessà We appreciate what you've
done.'

HonestReporting was founded in 2000 by British university students who
objected to what they considered anti-Israel coverage by European
media in response to the second Palestinian intifada.

There is no mention of HonestReporting's connection to `Obsession' on
the film's website, _www.obsessionthemovie.com_
(http://www.obsessionthemovie.com) . In an online `Ask the Filmmakers'
segment on the FOX News website, Shore stated that he could not
identify the film's funders for fear of retaliation by the `radicals'
the filmmakers exposed.

Brian Gaffney, executive producer of the FOX News Documentary Unit,
declined to comment on whether HonestReporting's connection was
disclosed to the audience, or whether FOX was aware of the
organization's ideological perspective. `There is no mistaking that
this was a film with a clear point of view,' Gaffney wrote in an email
to IPS. `Its forceful case against Radical Islam spoke for itself.

In the case of CNN, which ran segments of the film in the context of a
joint interview with Shore and cast member Nonie Darwish, it appears
that producers were unaware of the connection.

`I was told that HonestReporting was not involved with this film,'
said CNN spokeswoman Megan Mahoney.

Any relation between HonestReporting and `Obsession' is also missing
on the film's website, but the organization's name does appear at the
end of the film's credits. In addition, a call for tax-deductible
donations to help ` launch' the film appeared on HonestReporting's
website, promising a free DVD of ` Obsession' upon
release. Contributors of 250 dollars or more were promised a free copy
of the book `Israel: Life in the Shadow of Terror`. An entry on
Mediabackspin.com, the organization's weblog, also describes
HonestReporting as a `proud partner' of the film.

`Obsession' features interviews with Harvard law professor Alan
Dershowitz, investigative journalist Steve Emerson, Itimar Marcus of
Israel-based Palestinian Media Watch, and Daniel Pipes, a
controversial scholar of medieval Islamic history whose website
campus-watch.org sparked criticism in 2002 for its alleged
McCarthyesque attacks on Middle East studies professors.

Its production credits include the Middle East Media Research
Institute, or MEMRI, a translation service founded in 1998 by
Col. Yigal Carmon, who spent more than 20 years in Israeli
intelligence and later advised two Israeli prime ministers; and the
Palestinian Media Watch, an Israeli group founded by Marcus, that
monitors Palestinian news organizations for alleged anti-Zionist and
anti-Semitic propaganda.

`Obsession', for all its fans, has engendered contentious debate on
U.S. university campuses not only for its disquieting barrage of
video footage culled from the Arab media, but also for the film's
distribution network.

According to the New York Times, when a Middle East discussion group
organized a screening at New York University earlier this year,
distributors of the film required those in attendance to register at
IsraelActivism.com, the official website of the Hasbara fellowships.

The program, also known as the Jerusalem fellowships, was started in
2001 by Aish Hatorah ' an Orthodox Jewish outreach organization and
yeshiva based in East Jerusalem ' in conjunction with Israel's
Ministry of Foreign Affairs. According to its website, the group
`educates and trains university students to be effective pro-Israel
activists on their campuses' by providing its participants with
`tools, resources and confidence to return to their campuses as
leaders in the fight for Israel's image.'

Aish Hatorah helped found HonestReporting. Rabbi Ephraim Shore, the
president of HonestReporting, also helped found Hasbara.

According to the St. Louis Dispatch, a summer screening of `Obsession'
in St. Louis was sponsored by the local branch of Aish Hatora and
featured a post-film discussion with Walid Shoebat, an ex-Palestine
Liberation Organization militant who was interviewed in the film. In
the summer of 2006, Shoebat, a convert to evangelical Christianity,
also spoke at the `Night to Honor Israel,' a three-day event presented
by Pastor John Hagee's Christians United for Israel, a lobby group
that aims to mobilize Christian Zionists as a political force,
according to the San Antonio Express.

While watching the film, it becomes clear that the controversy
surrounding ` Obsession' has less to with what it says about the
threat of radical Islam, than how it presents the information. While
the film contains disclaimers stating that `it's important to remember
most Muslims are peaceful and do not support terror,' critics argue
that it makes little distinction between the religion of Islam and the
political realities that inform terrorism.

`It's all part of that industry of Muslim bashers,' said Ibrahim
Hooper, a spokesman for the Council on American-Islamic Relations.

`The sentiment is there, you can see in the [1995] Oklahoma City
bombing that it was originally seen as an act of Islamic terrorism,'
said Peter Hart of Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting. `It's almost a
default position for the media, so you're going to have work like this
received uncritically.'

The Oklahoma City bombing, initially attributed by the mainstream
media to Islamic terrorists, was actually perpetrated by right-wing
extremists from the U.S. midwest.

The film's director, Wayne Kopping, argues that it aims to uncover the
mixed messages propagated by radical Islamists in the Muslim world,
who moderate their voices only when they speak in Western media
outlets.<

`Children in the Arab world are¦ breastfed on a diet of hatred for
the West. Not only that ' the entire culture is permeated with it,'
said Kopping in a FOX interview. `The question is what are they [the
spokespeople] saying in their own language, on their own TV stations
to their own people. That's when you really hear what they think, and
they call for jihad.'