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.
Khaleel Mohammed, an Islamic studies professor featured in "Obsession," repudiated Obsession's message, calling it a "vile piece of propaganda."
In a statement Mohammed said he contributed in trying to better explain the meaning of the word jihad and that he'd thought the documentary would be objective.
Mohammed said the film is not objective and that he takes issue with some of the film's commentators.
"Many of them are not experts or have used the mantle of academic qualifications to purvey hate," Mohammed said. "That their alarmist drivel should be mixed with my whittled-down interview proves that the intent of the film is not to educate but to mislead."
Gabriele said the film perpetuated the idea of a "clash of civilizations," and despite its attempts to differentiate between the radicals and moderates, the film conflates them and confuses the distinction.
"The thing that bothered me most was the way that they bookend the movie with a disclaimer saying, 'This isn't about the majority of Muslims, most Muslims are peaceful,' while the imagery they used and the way the talking heads were speaking erased that," Gabriele said.
"There's a very clear 'we're in this together' message and a very clear sense that all of these bad guys, they're all the same; they're all in league and they're all out to get us," Gabriele said. "Then they have Michael Moore, the one token leftist, as a kind of naive Neville Chamberlain -- that we're all nave and strangling ourselves with political correctness."
Gabriele said Obsession's conflation of all Islamic movements -- even radical ones -- is a serious mistake.
"They don't talk about the differences between Sunni and Shiite. They share the same goals, but if Israel disappeared tomorrow there would be a civil war," Gabriele said. "It's dividing the world into these binary poles and we're the good guys, and while the rest may not be fighting us, they certainly want us to lose."
Gabriele said he thought the movie was electioneering and not so subtle at that.
"I think they're trying to make you afraid," Gabriele said. "When you look at the cover there's the wreckage from the World Trade Center, but if you look at the top, this is a Mahdi Army march in Iraq."