Collegiate Times

When many voters across the country open their mailboxes, they may find a DVD that was not on their Netflix queue.

Roughly 28 million copies of "Obsession: Radical Islam's War Against the West" have been mailed to households in prominent battleground states such as Virginia and Ohio.

"Obsession" is a 2006 documentary film detailing the threat posed to the United States, Israel, and the West in general by violent Muslim extremists.

The Clarion Fund, a nonprofit organization that seeks to raise awareness of "the radical Islamic threat," is distributing a pared-down 60-minute version of the documentary to voters by mail, as well as to local newspapers in partnership with the Endowment for Middle East Truth, a political advocacy group.

"We feel that the media is not adequately covering or addressing the issue," said Clarion Fund Communications Director Gregory Ross.

Ross insisted the mailings were not electioneering for any particular candidate.

"We're not legally allowed to influence the election; we'd say that whoever is elected, they need to take this threat seriously," Ross said.

The Council for American-Islamic Relations asked the Federal Election Commission to investigate the DVD distribution, which targeted about 28 million. "American voters deserve to know whether they are the targets of a multimillion-dollar campaign funded and directed by a foreign group seeking to whip up anti-Muslim hysteria as a way to influence the outcome of our presidential election," said Nihad Awad, executive director of CAIR, in a statement.

Ross said that the Clarion Fund is funded via private donations from several thousand donors who span the political spectrum.

However, local viewers contested the film's implicit cultural conclusions.

"This is a very strategic move, whoever's made this movie; it's probably a McCain supporter," said Mona Masood, a member of Tech's Muslim Student Association. "It says that the 9/11 terrorists were trained at American flight schools, so you can't really trust Muslims. Or in the London attacks, they say that these people were homegrown; they grew up on such-and-such street so you can't really trust anyone."

Other members of Tech's Muslim and academic communities said the film presented a skewed picture of Islam, particularly linking modern-day radical Islam to Nazism in the 1930s.

"They suggest that these radical Islamists are the intellectual heirs to Nazism," said Matthew Gabriele, an interdisciplinary studies professor who specializes in the Crusades. 

"They have the former Hitler youth, Alfons Heck, saying this (global jihad) is just the same," Gabriele said. "It wasn't subtle at all. Especially at the end of the film, they're really hitting the viewer over the head with that."

"What the movie doesn't mention is that the friendliest places for Jews to flee during World War II was northern Africa and Lebanon, which were predominantly Muslim," said Abdul Shakur Abdullah, head of Tech's Muslim Student Association.

Continue Reading: 12 Next »