My obsession

Note: MegaBee reserves all rights to his photo on Flickr, but I am claiming fair usage here.  If he wants to retain exclusive rights to his work, he probably should refrain from deploying it in public forums to comment pithily and smugly on major news stories.

Igot my copy of the movie Obsession: Radical Islam’s War Against the West in the mail a couple days ago.  In comments on blogs and news articles across the country, multitudes of enlightened folks claim they left their copies unopened, either tossing them in the trash or saving them for when they require a good laugh.  They were astute enough to judge by the verbiage on the packaging that the movie is nothing but hate propaganda by right-wing extremists.

People who are too smart to fall for this propaganda are also intelligent enough to divine the motivation behind the movie’s distribution to an incredible twenty-eight million households—and they’ll tell you they’re intelligent, too!  Over and over in comments decrying the movie’s right-wing slant, average Americans like Sally Lopez of Lemoyne, Pennsylvania (Dhimwit of the month, September 2008) point out that they’re “not stupid.”  One editorial comment to my hometown rag called the film a “piece of crap,” and the writer added that he and his wife are “a little too intelligent to let this influence us.”

Of course, those behind the film’s production and distribution are simply retarded, which is Jameel Al-Khaviz’s point in the photo above.  He’s showing you that the distributors are so dimwitted they even mailed and addressed the DVD to people with Muslim names!  In fact, Jameel is downright incredulous:

You have GOT to be kidding me. People, this is why you have a human check your mailing lists before you send out your screeds.

It’s probably safe to speculate that he didn’t watch the movie either.

Admittedly, I left my little gift unopened as well, but that’s because I’ve already seen the film a few times, and in fact on my old blog I ran links to YouTube videos of the movie in my sidebar.  Not seeing the movie doesn’t stop any of these people from loudly and vociferously condemning it, which I’ve pointed out before is a characteristically Islamist and dhimmi trait.  Much of the sound and fury about Geert Wilders’ film FITNA, for example, played out long before the movie was actually released.  That is, radical and moderate Muslims alike were bent out about the movie even before anyone in the world outside the Dutch MP’s tiny production crew even knew what the film entailed.  Mr. Wilders’ original web host Network Solutions, under the usual threat of Muslim violence, blocked access to the film’s homepage for “offensive content,” which consisted at the time (as I remarked here) entirely of the teaser “Coming Soon.”  So those who haven’t seen Obsession but are nevertheless offended by it can hopefully find solace in the bright side: being birds of a feather with Islamists who protest films they haven’t seen, they’ll fit right in when their turn comes, under threat of violence, to convert.

I mention FITNA because we all should have learned a lot from the experience, but it is clear that many of us didn’t.  In the build up to the film’s release in March, the bellicose posturing of Muslims the world over wasn’t even about the movie, because they hadn’t seen it yet.  The protests were about the very idea of saying anything critical of Islam or Muslims at all—even that there are a lot of violent Islamic fanatics who use the religion’s foundational texts and traditional doctrine to justify their carnage, as if this can be denied by any sane person.  And so it is unthinkable to Muslims like Jameel and scores of others with names like Hassan and Samira that they could even end up on the Obsession mailing list.  How stupid can we infidels get?

Here are a few more things that fascinate Haid Dasalami about reaction to the movie’s mass distribution:

• The movie is definitely and obviously a conspiracy by Jews.

This charge is being made across cyberspace and in letters to the editors of virtually all the newspapers that participated in the film’s distribution , but I especially enjoy the scholarly approach to this argument.  Citing the evil Jews will clinch any dispute in favor of Islamists and Islamic apologists.

• The movie is a right-wing polemic by neo-cons and other far-right ideologues.

This is another reason to forego actual examination of the film.  Jews AND Republicans: it just doesn’t get any worse than that, unless of course you can throw in a few Christian fundamentalists.  I find it deliciously telling that this pervasive opinion identifies only hard-core conservatives with the “war on terror.”  Democrats and liberals, on the other hand, think like Alan Colmes, who insists it is improper even to use the term “Islamic terrorists.”  Apparently, if it has even dawned on you that there are a hell of a lot of terrorists who are Muslim, then you’re a neo-con right-wing extremist.

• The movie’s content, timing, and distribution in “swing” states—all the handiwork of Republican Zionists—are designed to influence the upcoming national election.  The film is just a cheap trick to install John McCain and his Bush-legacy cronies in the White House.

Again, why would Republicans get a boost from scaring voters into recognizing the threat from militant Muslim radicals?  Barack Obama has said he’s going to increase military operations against the Taliban in Afghanistan, and he has even promised to invade sovereign Pakistan if necessary in order to get Osama bin Laden.  So why would a film condemning jihadists favor McCain?  The pervasive claim that Obsession is a specifically Republican product would seem to indicate that a number of Americans view John McCain as being less exclusive in his identification of the terrorist threat.  Obama defines the bad guys as OBL and the Taliban, which nearly everyone can accept, but Jack Mac is apparently eager to squish other Islamic nut balls as well.

Even in my silly little hometown rag of a newspaper, it is alleged that the film’s mass distribution is an election ploy, and my backyard is no swing state.  It stays red even if John McCain is photographed eating Democrat babies for breakfast while Obama saves a drowning puppy in the background.  It hasn’t occurred to any of these wizards that neither candidate has even deigned to stop by here to wave at our minuscule electoral vote total.  If the movie was sent out to affect the election, its backers ARE stupid to send everyone in my neighborhood a copy.  While they’re at it, they may as well send it to folks named Abdul.

I was musing about these matters with an outraged liberal friend who considers me a special case among “right-wing lunatics”—and he isn’t even aware I’m the great Haid Dasalami!  When I pointed out that most of the DVD’s were distributed as newspaper advertising inserts and that this is a questionable strategy for getting the movie into the hands of registered voters anyway, he opined that this is one of those cases where you just have to go beyond the obvious facts.

Having read tons of drivel from infuriated liberals with a disregard for them, I think I understand what he means by “facts,” but what can I say?

They’re an obsession of mine.

Tagged as: Afghanistan, Barack Obama, Geert Wilders, jihadists, Pakistan, photo, terrorists