Captain's Quarters -

The documentary Obsession has finally started to receive attention for its presentation of the indoctrination of Arabs into an Islamist mindset, thanks to programs shown on state-run television in places like Saudi Arabia, Iran, and other countries in the Middle East. The New York Times reports on the controversy the documentary has created on college campuses:

When “Obsession: Radical Islam’s War Against the West,” a documentary that shows Muslims urging attacks on the United States and Europe, was screened recently at the University of California, Los Angeles, it drew an audience of more than 300 — and also dozens of protesters.

At Pace University in New York, administrators pressured the Jewish student organization Hillel to cancel a showing in November, arguing it could spur hate crimes against Muslim students. A Jewish group at the State University of New York at Stony Brook also canceled the film last semester.

The documentary has become the latest flashpoint in the bitter campus debate over the Middle East, not just because of its clips from Arab television rarely shown in the West, including scenes of suicide bombers being recruited and inducted, but also because of its pro-Israel distribution network. ...

The documentary’s proponents say it provides an unvarnished look at Islamic militancy. “It’s an urgent issue that is widely avoided by academia,” argued Michael Abdurakhmanov, the Hillel president at Pace.

Its critics call it incendiary. Norah Sarsour, a Palestinian-American student at U.C.L.A., said it was disheartening to see “a film like this that takes the people who have hijacked the religion and focuses on them.”

Like most documentaries, Obsession has a point of view, and that has to be considered when evaluating the film. However, as I note in my review of the film last August, Obsession has an unusual defense for charges of bias and hyperbole: it uses the words and images shown on Arab television to make its point. Most television stations in these countries are run by the state, and the programs shown on the channels have the implicit imprimatur of the governments. Thus, Sarsour's criticism falls short.

In fact, if one watches the full-length version of the film, it does attempt to separate the extremists from the moderate Muslims. Several of the people who comment on radical Islam in the film are in fact moderate Muslims. (I mistakenly included Brigitte Gabriel among them in my review; she's Christian.) At least one of them, Walid Shoebat, is a former Islamist extremist himself who recognizes the dnagers his former comrades in arms represent.

Karen Arenson's description of the film gives an impression that it uses random footage of attacks and indoctrination, "interspersed with those of Nazi rallies," as some kind of narrativeless rant. That's simply false. The film spends some time pointing out the historical connections between radical Islamists and the Nazis in Germany, and the shared aim of both: extermination of Jews. As I wrote in August:

To this purpose, the film makes excellent use of Alfons Heck, an elderly German academic who once served as a high-ranking officer in the Hitler Youth. Heck points out that a worldy and sophisticated German people fell for the crudest kind of anti-Semitic propaganda -- so why should anyone expect the Arabs to resist their own government-produced propaganda? Indeed, Obsession fills itself with television clips gleaned from all over the Arab world, giving American viewers perhaps their first real taste of how pervasive the paranoia gets in Arab culture.

This connection with Naziism goes beyond the hordes of jihadis sporting salutes that look suspiciously like Sieg Heils. Obession also reviews the historical connections between Adolf Hitler and the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, whom Hitler embraced to the bemusement of his race-baiting followers. Heck recalls questioning why HItler allied with a non-Aryan group, and getting the answer that Nazis and Arabs wanted the same thing: the annihilation of the Jews. The Mufti later went to Bosnia and created an SS regiment of Muslims, one of the reasons that the Serbians -- who fought the Nazis -- felt betrayed by the West's alliance with the Bosnians in the 1990s.

Arenson doesn't do justice to the work the documentarians did in showing those connections. Nor does the Times reporter delve too deeply into the supposed controversy and polarization that she claims this film has promoted. Even when I attended college in the early 1980s, Palestinian activists held campus rallies showing the exact same kind of propaganda to support the PLO terrorists and their mission to wipe out Israel. Supporters of Israel got shouted down in much the same fashion as they do today. The Left adopted the Palestinian cause decades ago; in fact, one of the most controversial moments in Oscar history came in the 1970s, when Vanessa Redgrave used an acceptance speech to politick on behalf of PLO terrorists, and Paddy Chayefsky used his speech as an impassioned rebuttal to Redgrave's nonsense.

The college scene at the time differed only in that Chayefsky's point of view was usually suppressed by those who did want any competing points of view. With that history in mind, I have a difficult time understanding why a documentary like Obsession -- which uses the television images of the mainstream Muslim societies and the undeniable historical record -- seems like such a danger.

Or perhaps I've answered my own question.