Review of Obsession by David Shasha

Richard Silverstein has posted a review of the Islamophobic hate-film Obsession on his blog, written by David Shasha, one of the leaders of the American Sephardic Jewish community. It's a powerful indictment, beginning with a list of basic facts about the muslim world that are not open to debate, but simply a matter of historical record - and all providing needed context that Obsession deliberately eschews.He points out clearly exactly why Obsession, despite its disingenuous claim otherwise, is indeed an attempt to delegitimize the entire faith of Islam itself and Otherize muslim-Americans as a whole. And it does so by using the same propaganda tactics that Arab anti-semites themselves use to fan the flames of hatred against israel and America! A few excerpts:

Using a canny mixture of incitement and factuality the producers of the film bookend their movie with the admission that the film is not an indictment of Islam itself, but just a certain part of it. When I use the word "incitement" I mean to say that the film is completely disingenuous as it offers the basic theme that it hammers over and over again that Islam is akin to Nazism and that the Arab world is in the grip of this Nazi-Islamic ideology.

Propaganda is a means to express an ideological viewpoint at the expense of a plurality of views within the parameters of an open debate. According to this definition we can see a ratiocination taking shape which stacks the deck of argument. And to those living in the Jewish community, the primary mechanism for the distribution of "Obsession," this "obsession" with Radical Islamic ideology is something that we have become quite familiar with.

...

Embedded within this discourse are a deadening and repetitive array of media clips of screaming, lunatic Jihadis and their minions. Again, there is no need to deny that these people exist or to question the danger they pose not only to Jews and the West, but to the well-being of the Muslim world itself. Image after image is laced with stirringly bombastic music that often resembles the propaganda that the film decries. The rhetoric of the principles being interviewed eschews subtlety and intellectual heft and hammers home in propagandistic fashion that Arabs are Nazis and that's all there is to the matter.

...

And we cannot forget while watching this execrable piece of propaganda, a work that is as unhelpful pedagogically as it is dangerous, that the dual logic of contradiction is continually at play: we are TOLD that Islam is not like what is being shown on the screen and yet this is what is being SHOWN to us with a relentlessness that puts the rhetoric of Islam as a peaceful religion to the lie. After a steady diet of one solid hour of seeing images of Muslims juxtaposed - LITERALLY - with those of Hitler and other Nazis, I am not sure if it takes a genius to figure out that we are being browbeaten into capitulation to hate all Muslims.

And to make sure that we do not forget this fact, we are treated to an extensive set of interview clips with an old man named Alfons Heck - a now-reformed former member of the Hitler Youth!

The "obsession" of this film is to turn the current situation with what are admittedly some very dangerous people - all of whom it must be honestly stated are religious Muslim fanatics who twist the words of their traditions and promote ideas of hate and violence that have continually been spread throughout the world over the course of the past century - and make it into a primordial battle being waged between absolute good and absolute evil.

Now it is not at all necessary for us to demand that "Obsession" be fair, or that it present the socio-political and historical contexts that have created this mess. Having said this, it does seem more than curious that the producers of "Obsession" make this demand of the Muslims themselves. And indeed, the visual techniques used in the film are eerily similar to those used by the Muslim fanatics themselves: the endless repetitive barrage of flashy and shocking images presented in a de-contextualized atmosphere smacks of what we might best call hypocrisy. But I think we would more accurately understand the rhetorical mechanisms of "Obsession" as a form of PILPUL; the attempt to speak out of both sides of one's mouth while not-so-subtly railroading home a single, obsessive mono-causal point.

In essence, this is the very rhetorical means that is used against Israel and the US by the Arab media which often inflames the masses to hate Israel and the US. When Israeli and American acts of violence are stripped of their socio-political context, the Arab viewer's feelings are inflamed and the individual is left with a passionate hatred bordering on the pathological.

This is essential reading. Click to read the whole thing over at Tikkun Olam. The only thing missing from Shasha's analysis is a discussion of why the producers of Obsession have engaged in this propaganda exercise; the timing of the mass-mailing of the DVD, and the specific targeting of that mailing to specific swing states under contention in the Presidential election, make the answer rather obvious.