Clarion’s Latest Film Unveiled!

The producers of Obsession: Radical Islam’s War Against the West and The Third Jihad: Radical Islam’s Vision for America have been murmuring in recent weeks about an upcoming film which, according to their press release, will, “document the development of the Iranian nuclear program, the threats posed by such a program, and the West’s inability to recognize the true nature of an extremist Islamic Revolutionary regime…”

I ran a reverse DNS search of obsessionthemovie.com this morning and found that the Clarion Fund, which funded and produced Obsession and The Third Jihad, has registered a new website and made, at this point, a fairly bare-bones site for its new film, Iranium.

Iranium‘s website is http://www.iraniummovie.com.

Here are two of the possible DVD covers for the film.  The website is currently running a poll to select which cover will be chosen.

Iranium will be released in September, just in time for mid-term elections in November!

The website offers the following synopsis of Iranium.

Since the inception of the Islamic Revolution in 1979, Iran has displayed hatred for the West. Coupled with an extremist and apocalyptic messianic ideology, this regime has terrorized the world at large for over 30 years.

The 45-minute film will explore the principles of the revolution, and expose the hatred and violence exhibited by Iran’s brutal leadership. The film will document the development of the Iranian nuclear program, the threats posed by such a program, and the West’s inability to recognize the true nature of an extremist Islamic Revolutionary regime that does not represent the worldview of the majority of its citizens.

As highlighted in the Rebutting Obsession project (which, in full disclosure, I contributed to) the Clarion Fund participates in rewriting history to portray Muslims as irrational and suicidal participants in a global movement to destabilize and dominate the west.

The depth of Clarion’s willingness to contribute to Islamophobic hysteria and promote conspiracy theories was made clear in The Third Jihad, a film that bore striking similarities to the antisemitic Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

Our former colleague, Khody Akhavi, did some of the initial research linking Clarion to HonestReporting, and Ali Gharib and I have written about Clarion’s ties to European far-right groups (including one in Belgium that sought amnesty for convicted Nazi collaborators) and Islamophobic networks.

I have no doubt that Iranium will live up to the reputation of Clarion’s previous films, but this time it seems that its agenda is to push the U.S. towards a confrontation with Iran.

Clarion’s list of interview subjects for the film (which can be viewed here) include former CIA director and PNAC letter signatory James Woolsey, Irving Kristol Award recipient Bernard Lewis and Rachel Ehrenfeld.

All three are also members of the neoconservative Committee on the Present Danger.

Harold Rhode is also listed as an interviewee.  Rhode, a protege of Bernard Lewis and Richard Perle, is a  former Foreign Affairs Specialist in the Office of Net Assessment, Office of the Secretary of Defense.

In their January, 2004, Mother Jones article “The Lie Factory”, Robert Dreyfuss and Jason Vest write:

Called in to help organize the Iraq war-planning team was a longtime Pentagon official, Harold Rhode, a specialist on Islam who speaks Hebrew, Arabic, Turkish, and Persian (Parsi/Farsi). Though Douglas Feith would not be officially confirmed until July 2001, career military and civilian officials in NESA began to watch his office with concern after Rhode set up shop in Feith’s office in early January. Rhode, seen by many veteran staffers as an ideological gadfly, was officially assigned to the Pentagon’s Office of Net Assessment, an in-house Pentagon think tank headed by fellow neocon Andrew Marshall. Rhode helped Feith lay down the law about the department’s new anti-Iraq, and broadly anti-Arab, orientation. In one telling incident, Rhode accosted and harangued a visiting senior Arab diplomat, telling him that there would be no ‘bartering in the bazaar anymore…. You’re going to have to sit up and pay attention when we say so.’

Rhode refused to be interviewed for this story, saying cryptically, ‘Those who speak, pay.’

In a Jerusalem Post interview on April 9th, Rhode continued to defend the Bush administration’s invasion of Iraq but took issue with the decision to use Iraq’s supposed pursuit of WMDs as the justification for overthrowing Saddam Hussein.

How would you have wanted it presented?

For what it was… He [Saddam] was clearly involved with these bastards, with al-Qaida and all sorts of other fundamentalists who are out to destroy the West.

Why should Saddam, a secular Sunni, get involved with al-Qaida? What was his motivation?

Let’s say say that everybody here is helping everybody else. I help you in ways that are good for you, and you help me in ways that are good for me. I have a money system that can transfer things; you use it. I need weapons transferred to someone that you have connections with. I’m not your leader, you’re not my leader. It’s mutual. They’re all on the same side here… Look, there were times the KGB and the CIA were on the same side and there are times right now that this country [Israel] and Saudi Arabia are on the same side – that’s until the day Iran is taken care of and then that will end.

If he’s secular, why did he write “Allahu akhbar” in his own blood on the flag, why did he supposedly have a Koran written in his blood? Why? I don’t know what secular means. Secular is a nice Western word. The best way you can put that in Arabic is la diniyah. La means no and diniyah is the law. That means you don’t fear God, you don’t fear judgment day. That means you can kill me or I can kill you and I’m not afraid of what God will say.