Post-Dispatch refuses to distribute DVD offensive to American Muslims
Despite the perilous state of American newspapers, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch advertising department took an ethical stand and refused to distribute the DVD of a film that for two years has troubled American Muslims.
The film, called “Obsession: Radical Islam’s War Against the West,” was distributed to an estimated 28 million people via 70 American newspapers, primarily in states crucial to the coming presidential election. The only other newspaper reported to have refused the DVD was the News & Record in Greensboro, NC.
The Miami Herald reported that its own decision to distribute the DVD angered the Muslim community there:
We feel that it’s going to incite more hate and bigotry against our community,” said Altaf Ali, Florida chapter director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations. The DVD does not do enough to differentiate between terrorists and mainstream Muslims, he said.
The Herald’s description of the DVD says it includes…
…montages of terrorist training camps and suicide bombers paired with narration by commentators such as Daniel Pipes, founder of the conservative Middle East Forum think tank. Many of the film’s pundits are known for controversial views on Islam. In one part of the DVD, clips of Muslim children being recruited as suicide bombers are interspersed with images of Nazis.
Jen Wood, the Post-Dispatch’s vice president of advertising, said her department received the request to include the DVD as an insert at the beginning of the summer. She said the advertiser provided the newspaper only with a trailer, and refused when Wood asked to see a copy of the entire film - something she described as “not an unusual request.”"I didn’t have enough information to make a decision, so I said ‘no thank you,’” said Wood. “It wasn’t clear what exact message they were trying to send.”
The Herald reported that the nonprofit Clarion Fund, which promotes “national security through education,” sent the DVD to 28 million households, “many in election swing states such as Florida, Ohio, Michigan and Pennsylvania.”
In Florida, the DVD was distributed in the Herald, the Orlando Sentinel, the South Florida Sun-Sentinel, the St. Petersburg Times, the Florida Times-Union of Jacksonville and the News-Press of Fort Myers.
In October 2006 (another election year) I wrote a story about how besieged the St. Louis Muslim community was feeling- the worst, many told me, since just after Sept. 11, 2001. A St. Louis screening of the “Obesession” movie featured in that story:
At the end of August, a thousand people — about half of them Jewish and half Christian, according to organizers — attended a screening of the movie “Obsession: What the War on Terror is Really About” at the Frontenac Hilton Hotel. The group’s sponsors promoted the movie with a provocative billboard featuring a dark-skinned man whose head was wrapped in a kuffiyeh and the words, “Confessions of a Terrorist.”
The terrorist in question was Walid Shoebat, who said he was a former member of the Palestine Liberation Organization. Shoebat appeared in the hourlong movie and then spoke to the audience.
Muslims who were there said they were horrified by what they believed was the movie’s inference that Islam, terrorism and Nazism were one and the same, despite a disclaimer that ran at the beginning and end of the movie that said “most Muslims are peaceful and do not support terror.”
Far more upsetting, they said, was the reaction of the audience.
Writing in “The American Muslim” two weeks after the screening, [Sheila] Musaji said those Muslims who attended were “still experiencing physical and emotional distress primarily due to the positive reaction of the audience — including applause and standing ovations — and to some of the hateful comments we overheard from individuals sitting around us.”
Fatemeh Keshavarz, head of Washington University’s department of Asian and Near Eastern Languages, who was at the screening, said: “This was hate speech, pure and simple. … being in that room, I felt threatened.”
The movie was made by Honest Reporting, “a grass-roots movement dedicated to ensuring that Israel receives fair media coverage,” according to its website. Honest Reporting is an arm of Aish HaTorah, an orthodox Jewish education network based in Jerusalem.
Richard Senturia, executive director of Citizens for a Just and Lasting Peace in the Middle East, which co-sponsored the screening, said that the Muslims who attended “saw what they saw and heard what they heard. I’m not going to deny their feelings.”
Karen J. Aroesty, the Anti-Defamation League’s regional director for Missouri and Southern Illinois, was also in the “Obsession” audience and said she was disturbed by what she saw in the crowd’s reaction. She is now working with Muslims on an effort to re-screen “Obsession,” but this time to also provide a forum for people to discuss their feelings about the movie.
“Frankly, things are getting out of hand,” Aroesty said about the sequence of events that have frightened many St. Louis Muslims. “All these things happen, and they converge in different ways in a community like St. Louis.”
Wood said her department needs to have a full understanding of what is being advertised in the newspaper, otherwise, it “reserves the right” to decline an ad. “I exercised my right not to accept [the DVD],” she said.
Tim Townsend has been the religion reporter at the Post-Dispatch since June 2004. He previously covered personal finance and consumer news for The Wall Street Journal. He holds master's degrees from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and Yale Divinity School. In 2005 he won the Templeton Religion Reporter of the Year Award, given by the Religion Newswriters Association. 
Fatemeh Keshavarz said: “This was hate speech, pure and simple. … being in that room, I felt threatened.”
It would have been kind of her to specify what exactly in the film was “hate speech.” The only obvious hate speech was the exhortations to jihad violence and hatred of the Jews coming from jihadist preachers. But they were on film, and were filmed not by the producers of Obsession but by TV cameras in their own countries, where their hateful messages were broadcast approvingly.
There is not a problem with “hate speech” here. It’s the TRUTH speech that some are afraid to confront that is contained in this DVD.
I’m not sure why the newspapers would distribute this in the first place. They are not in the business of distributing DVDs for anyone who asks. I’m not sure how the maker of the DVD convinced so many newspapers to give it out with their regular paper. It seems very strange to me.
It seems like a clear case of propaganda.
Why doesn’t the post make the DVD available at their office for free for every reader that wants it?
“…..does not preclude the inherently violent and intolerant nature of Islam.
Those with even a modicum of education, those not prone to ingesting PC, leftist, Islamic apologia in totality, are already well aware of this unfortunate reality.”
If you were really “Awake”, you’d know that most of what’s happened in the last 50 years is religious, but rather political, social and economic.
But then you of course “are already aware” of “the inherently violent and intolerant nature of Islam”!
No doubt by watching DVDs similar to this one which appeal more to your right-wing sensibilities!
Yeah, you sound really educated!
They are PC cowards- Michae Savage is right liberalism is a mental disorder so they cannot help it. Islam is an ideaology and not a race but of course the American Defamation league will call it racism. When it is too late they will wish they had heeded the warning of Obsession.
I’m not sure what I think about all this. There is a true ethical dilemma here, and not many see it.
For many in America, the face of Islam IS a terrorist covering his or her face and carrying an AK-47. That is what we’ve been shown, and what we believe to be an accurate portrayal of Islam in our day. For many of these, a documentary that shows these images and purports to explain the background will be believed without question, and any disclaimers will be ignored.
I could see why an individual Moslem, sitting through a screening of this film in a theater full of white americans would wind up feeling scared and threatened…and want to stand up and shout that it doesn’t apply to THEM.
Unfortunately, the voices of moderate Islam are either ignored or shouted down, and so they keep silent.
I know that the answer is education and serious conversation. But what of those who refuse to listen? What if they are the majority? (and it appears that they are).
I would like to know when this ad campaign surfaced, and when all this took place. What exactly happened? It sounds like this organization wanted to run an ad promoting this DVD. Did they actually also want the P-D to distribute free copies rolled up in the paper? That, to me, does cross the line between an advertisement and a tacit endorsement of the material on the DVD.
for OverEmphasisOnTerror,
UNRELATED events? I saw this video long before this distribution, having been a long time watcher of JihadWatch.org (Go there, you might be surprised). The point being made in the DVD is that radical Islamists use the core texts of Islam, the Koran, Hadith and Sura, to justify violence against Jews, women and non-believers, as well as other members of the Muslim community that don’t necessarily agree with their radical interpretation. Until the “moderate” Muslim community openly rejects these interpretations, all non-Muslims will feel a wholly justified suspicion of all members of the “religion of peace”.
for OverEmphasisOnTerror,
UNRELATED events? I saw this video long before this distribution, having been a long time watcher of JihadWatch.org (Go there, you might be surprised). The point being made in the DVD is that radical Islamists use the core texts of Islam, the Koran, Hadith and Sura, to justify violence against Jews, women and non-believers, as well as other members of the Muslim community that don’t necessarily agree with their radical interpretation. Until the ”moderate” Muslim community openly rejects these interpretations, all non-Muslims will feel a wholly justified suspicion of all members of the ”religion of peace”.
Muslims believe the Qur’an to be God’s literal, unchangeable and eternal word. Every single word of it; including its most violent passages. No ifs, ands, or buts.
So, in attempting to follow every passage of that book to the letter (as Islam demands of them) why would such Muslims deserve the ‘radical’ or ‘extremist’ label?
It’s because those who use those labels are either ignorant of what the Qur’an actually states - and of what Islam really teaches - or they are being deceitful.
Do we generally refer to Orthodox Jews as extremists?
Muslims, themselves, will tell you that Islam is not a religion. It is a complete way of life in which religion is but one part. It is a supremacist ideology in which Muslims are considered superior to everyone else and in which no separation of mosque and state exists. As a theocracy, like all theocracies, it is both antithetical to our Constitution and is in conflict with it.
Democracy, individual rights, and man made laws which permit what Allah and Muhammad have prohibited are the ‘modernity’ about which we so often hear.
If Islam really were ‘the religion of peace’, we would welcome Muslim fundamentalists into our society. But it’s not.
Is every Muslim a terrorist? No. But every Muslim is a member of that same ‘complete way of life’. A ‘radical’ Muslim in Dearborn would be a mainstream Muslim in Waziristan. Does anyone here really believe the Taliban, whose stated goal was the establishment of ‘a pure Islamic state’, has twisted or perverted the teachings of Islam? If so, please provide specific arguments.
We’re not at war with ‘terror’. Muslim fundamentalists have been at war with ‘unbelievers’ since Muhammad traveled to Medina.
The movie ‘Obsession’ got it wrong in attempting to separate ‘radical’ Islam from everyday, run-of-the-mill Islam, for there is no such demarcation. The issue is what Islam teaches and how each Muslim interpretes it, and there is no unifying voice in Islam.
And the Post-Dispatch got it wrong, too, in not providing their viewers the opportunity to see Muslim fundamentalists practicing Islam as Muhammad intended it to be.
I am extremely impressed and thankful that the Post-Dispatch made a decision to refuse to distribute this hate film. Gives a person much hope for St. Louis and Missouri in the department of consciousness.