Just in time for the campaign season, the right-wing Clarion Fund, which shipped out 28 million DVDs to swing state voters in 2008 warning of the threat of radical Islam, has announced it’s working on a new film, this one on “the Iranian Nuclear threat.”
In a little-noticed press release this week, the Clarion Fund, which was behind Obsession: Radical Islam’s War Against The West, said the new 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 …”
The release also says the Iranian regime has an “extremist and apocalyptic messianic ideology” and it “has terrorized the world at large for over 30 years.”
Obsession was described by the Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg as “designed to make naive Americans believe that B-52s filled with radical jihadists are about to carpet-bomb their churches, and are only awaiting Barack Obama’s ascension to launch the attack.”
Conservatives have been consistently critical of the Obama Administration’s Iran policy, and the issue will likely come into play in the 2010 midterms.
Back in 2008, when Clarion made a splash by spending millions of dollars on distributing free copies of Obsession, TPM wondered who was funding the outfit. At the time, Clarion’s tax forms were not available; now, they are.
In 2008, the Manhattan-based Clarion Fund took in over $18 million in contributions or grants — it’s not clear from whom — and spent roughly the same amount of money. About $15 million of that was for duplication services, presumably for DVD copying.
Executive Director Richard Green was paid just over $100,000, and President Robert Shore made $40,000.
In 2008, media reports linked Clarion to the Israeli group Aish HaTorah, which Goldberg described as “just about the most fundamentalist movement in Judaism today. Its operatives flourish in the radical belt of Jewish settlements just south of Nablus, in the northern West Bank, and their outposts across the world propagandize on behalf of a particularly sterile, sexist and revanchist brand of Judaism.”
The Clarion Fund did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
(h/t Sarah Posner’s twitter feed)
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