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. 
The old saying “Patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel” needs to be updated for situations like this. High-minded scoundrels with low-level courage hide behind applause-seeking ‘ethical decisions.’
Members of the advertising department in the paper I worked for were salespeople. They worked on commission selling space for advertisments and the major, if not only thing they considered was the amount of money they could get for the white space.
Why would Post-Dispatch ad sellers be any different? I could see them turning ad space down if they thought it would backfire and cause some kind of boycott from vocal minorities of activists… maybe that would stop them from selling as much ad space as possible. I’d like to hear a better explanation of why they’d choose to turn down good money at a time when the Post-Dispatch is cutting out copy from the daily issues, dropping content in non-essential sections and laying of 10% or more of the editorial staff. Refusing ads doesn’t seem to make sense to willingly give up money during hard times for the paper. I don’t think management would allow it to happen for any other reasons than
a) agreement in principle from management that the ideas and product should be kept out of the paper
b) fear that taking money and running the ad would backfire with some kind of advocacy action against management/paper.
Neither is high-minded or deals with ethics at all.
Ads for all kinds of offensive things are in the papers every day, and the Post runs things offensive to members of its community all the time ( read the Letters to the Editor and blog posts) yet this movie, labeled offensive, is held to a higher ethical standard… by salespeople?
Cute but transparent. Nice try… but people in Saint Louis can see through that kind of smokescreen I bet.