Antisemitism Is Back: Is the Holocaust Next?

It was unfortunately not very long ago, that Antisemitism was so out of control it was utilized by the leader of a major country to demagogue support for an election. Using fear and economic depression to appeal to the worst parts of our soul. Semitic people are not necessarily Jewish, it is any body of Semitic background. I think that is what has struck me so much about the conversation around Obama's religious and ethnic background. Calling Obama a Muslim, an Arab and conflating that to say so he is a terrorist. Is it really different if you replaced Muslim and Arab with Jew? Are they materials being distributed to demagogue a whole race of people any different from the pictures of Jews with Big noses and calling all of us greedy, sub-human and non-Aryan. And distribution of this anti-Semitic hate is in our nation's newspapers. Can you imagine? This video, which really might as well have a big nosed Jew on its cover is being spread by the corporate media. Outrageous and disgusting: The New York Times alone distributed some 145,000 copies of Obsession: Radical Islam's War Against the West to 11 markets. Millions of voters in U.S. states crucial to this fall's presidential election received DVD copies of a controversial documentary film as advertising inserts in their morning newspapers... The 2006 film, Obsession: Radical Islam's War Against the West, which has been accused by critics of encouraging Islamophobia, was reportedly delivered, or slated for delivery this weekend, into tens of millions of households in states such as Ohio, Michigan, Florida, Colorado, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Missouri and other "swing states" that don't vote consistently for either party and usually decide elections. ...Gregory Ross, the spokesman for the Clarion group, which produced and is distributing the DVD, told the Harrisburg Patriot-News that the movie was being delivered to 28 million homes throughout the month of September and that the intention was not to sway voters to either candidate. ..."We're getting many concerned calls and emails from Muslims around the country who see this as an attempt to not only marginalize and demonize the American Muslim community, but also to sway the election by targeting swing states," Ibrahim Hooper, a spokesman for the Council on American-Islamic Relations, told IPS. "People are outraged. I haven't seen this kind of outrage in a long time. It's coming to their homes, it's coming to their neighbors and they believe its going to impact their lives and their children's lives negatively." Hooper also said there had apparently already been an incident of bias against a bus driver for Islamic school children in Ohio. The biased comments were likely inspired by film. ...But at least one newspaper, the News and Record of North Carolina, declined to carry the DVD. "We did not distribute it. I was not involved in the decision; it was an advertising call, in keeping with advertising policies," wrote John Robinson, the editor of the News and Record on his blog. "I asked our publisher about it. He said it was divisive and plays on people's fears and served no educational purpose. The revenue it would have brought in was not a motivator." Just disgusting RSS