Published on Alternet (http://www.alternet.org)
Home > What President Obama Didn't Address: Who's Funding the Hate Campaign
Against Muslims?
________________________________________
What President Obama Didn't Address: Who's Funding the Hate Campaign Against
Muslims?
By Pam Martens [1], Russ Martens [2] / Wall Street on Parade [3]
December 7, 2015
Last evening, in his speech to the nation from the Oval Office, President
Obama reminded Americans that "Muslim Americans are our friends and our
neighbors, our co-workers, our sports heroes - and, yes, they are our men
and women in uniform who are willing to die in defense of our country." In
his concluding remarks, the President told viewers that our nation was
"founded upon a belief in human dignity - that no matter who you are, or
where you come from, or what you look like, or what religion you practice,
you are equal in the eyes of God and equal in the eyes of the law." (See
full video of the speech below.)
What the President didn't say is that while the recent mass killing in San
Bernardino, California was conducted by a married couple who were Muslim,
the Muslim community itself has been under relentless assault by homegrown
religious extremists since the attacks on the World Trade towers on
September 11, 2001.
According to the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), mosques in 31 states
in America have been the targets [4] of firebombs, arson, acid attacks,
gunfire, hate speech or other forms of religious intolerance since 2005. In
Joplin, Missouri, a mosque's sign was torched in 2008. Four years later, its
roof was set on fire with the perpetrator caught on a surveillance video.
One month later, in August 2012, the mosque was burned to the ground [5].
In 2008, Chris Rodda, reporting for the Huffington Post [6], wrote about
Muslim babies and children being gassed in an attack on a mosque in Dayton,
Ohio during the same week that a DVD of the race-baiting, anti-Muslim
documentary Obsession: Radical Islam's War Against the West was mailed to
thousands of households in Ohio and inserted into newspapers around the
state. Quoting an email she had received with an eyewitness report, Rodda
relayed:
"She told me that the gas was sprayed into the room where the babies and
children were being kept while their mothers prayed together their Ramadan
prayers. Panicked mothers ran for their babies, crying for their children so
they could flee from the gas that was burning their eyes and throats and
lungs. She grabbed her youngest in her arms and grabbed the hand of her
other daughter, moving with the others to exit the building and the
irritating substance there.
"The paramedic said the young one was in shock, and gave her oxygen to help
her breathe. The child couldn't stop sobbing.
"This didn't happen in some far away place - but right here in Dayton, and
to my friends. Many of the Iraqi refugees were praying together at the
Mosque Friday evening. People that I know and love.
"I am hurt and angry. I tell her this is not America. She tells me this is
not Heaven or Hell - there are good and bad people everywhere.
"She tells me that her daughters slept with her last night, the little one
in her arms and sobbing throughout the night. She tells me she is afraid,
and will never return to the mosque, and I wonder what kind of country is
this where people have to fear attending their place of worship?"
The Obsession DVDs were distributed seven weeks before the Presidential
election of 2008 in swing voter states when rumors were being fanned that
Barack Obama was a Muslim. Approximately 100 newspapers and magazines in the
U.S., including the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Miami Herald,
Philadelphia Inquirer, and St. Petersburg Times, distributed millions of
these DVDs. Including the direct mail campaign, 28 million DVDs flooded
households in key states.
In 2010, we became curious as to where the massive amount of money came from
to finance the production of this race-baiting film and the enormous amount
of funds needed to distribute 28 million DVDs. All that was known at that
point was that a front group called the Clarion Fund had its name on the
production. Where it got its money was a dark secret.
The Clarion Fund had only a virtual office address in New York City with no
physical presence and no employees on site. The documents the Clarion Fund
had submitted to the IRS to obtain its tax-exempt status showed it had its
own obsession with secrecy. One requirement it enforced on its vendors read:
"At all times, whether during or after the provision of services to Clarion,
Service Provider shall keep in confidence and shall not disclose or use, for
his or another's benefit, any nonpublic knowledge, data, material, document
or other information of any type that is related to Clarion, or its
subsidiaries, directors, members, managers, agents, employees or other
affiliates or that Service Provider otherwise acquires in the course of
providing services (collectively, the 'Confidential Information.')."
The Obsession film content was suspiciously slick. The first half shows
serial scenes of suicide bombers and human carnage at the hands of Muslims.
The second half of the film intersperses clips of Hitler, Hitler Youth, or
Hitler analogies with Muslim crowds that include young children with fists
in the air calling for death to westerners. While the film concedes that not
all Muslims want to kill, it quantifies the number that do (without any
substantiation) as 100 to 150 million Muslims, i.e., 10 to 15 percent of 1
billion Muslims.
After much painstaking research, we tracked down the money trail and
reported the following:
"The 28 million DVDs were produced at a cost of $15,676,181 by Artist Direct
Media which does mass manufacturing of CDs and DVDs with volume discounts.
The big media buy for Sunday newspaper insertions ran up the tidy tab of
$719,436 and was conducted by NSA Media, a unit of the global ad giant,
Interpublic Group, parent of McCann-Erikson. That figure seems decidedly on
the light side so there may be other funding sources involved that have not
yet surfaced. (NSA Media is a powerful ad buyer, representing some of the
biggest print buyers and consumer brands in the country, which might help
explain why so few questions were asked by the largest newspapers about this
unseemly project.) The full tab, and then some, was paid by the super
secretive libertarian nonprofit, Donors Capital Fund. In 2008, Clarion Fund
became Donors Capital Fund's largest grantee by a large margin, receiving
$17,778,600. That sum constituted 96 per cent of all funds received by
Clarion in 2008 and 9 times its revenue in 2007."
And who was behind Donors Capital Fund? All roads led to Charles Koch, the
right wing billionaire. (Read our full report here [7].) While we were able
to link Donors Capital to the funding of the film, we were not able to
pinpoint the names of the individual(s) who gave the money to Donors Capital
and earmarked it for producing and distributing the film.
David Horowitz, the anti-Muslim writer at Frontpage Magazine took the
Obsession film on a college road show that dovetailed with its distribution
through newspapers and direct mail. During the fall of 2007, and continuing
into 2008, Horowitz promoted an "Islamo-Fascism Awareness" program to more
than 100 college campuses, with the film Obsessionmade available for
viewing. The David Horowitz Freedom Center, a non profit, has received major
funding from the same parties that have funded Donors Capital Fund and its
sister organization, Donors Trust. Major among those donors is the Lynde and
Harry Bradley Foundation [8].
According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, Muslims make up approximately
one percent of the U.S. population and their "voting patterns generally
mirror the broader American population. American Muslims are Republicans,
Democrats, Libertarians, liberals and conservatives. There is no one
political platform or agenda for those who practice the religion of Islam in
the United States."
The majority of Muslims have been living peacefully in America since the
16th century, but some well-financed campaigns by dark money are
stereotyping all Muslims as terrorists while Muslims are, themselves, being
terrorized at their houses of worship. Presidential candidate, Donald Trump,
has now picked up the stereotyping cudgel and appears to be fomenting the
hate with a pledge to close some mosques and put American Muslims on a
registry if he's elected President.
On November 23, the Dallas Morning News ran an editorial [9] which carried
these prophetic words after an anti-Islam group showed up at a mosque in
Irving, Texas with assault rifles [10](it's legal to open-carry guns in
Texas):
"This is America. Free speech and the right to protest are our calling
cards.
"But AR-15s at a place of worship? That is out of bounds, and it shows how
very close we are to chaos."
It takes very little for hate to turn to murder. In February of this year, a
white middle-aged male in Chapel Hill, North Carolina shot and killed three
Muslim students execution style. Two were set to study to become dentists.
According to the New Yorker Magazine, the killer, Craig Hicks, wrote the
following on his Facebook page: "I hate Islam just as much as Christianity,
but they have the right to worship in this country just as much as any
others do." According to the article, Hicks also wrote that he hoped that
Jews, Christians, and Muslims might "exterminate" each other.
The President's address last night was a deeply inadequate response to the
hate fomenting in our nation and the mega amounts of dark money that want to
keep it alive through the 2016 Presidential election.
Pam Martens worked on Wall Street for 21 years. She is the Editor of Wall
Street On Parade. [3]
Russ Martens is the publisher of the public interest web site, Wall Street
On Parade.
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Report typos and corrections to 'corrections@xxxxxxxxxxxx'. [11]
[12]
________________________________________
Source URL:
http://www.alternet.org/tea-party-and-right/what-president-obama-didnt-addre
ss-whos-funding-hate-campaign-against-muslims
Links:
[1] http://www.alternet.org/authors/pam-martens
[2] http://www.alternet.org/authors/russ-martens
[3] http://wallstreetonparade.com/
[4] https://www.aclu.org/map/nationwide-anti-mosque-activity
[5]
http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/nation/story/2012-08-06/joplin-mosque-fi
re/56832356/1
[6]
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/chris-rodda/muslim-children-gassed-at_b_130076
.html
[7]
http://wallstreetonparade.com/koch-footprints-lead-to-secret-slush-fund-to-k
eep-fear-alive/
[8]
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Lynde_and_Harry_Bradley_Foundation#Dono
rsTrust_Funding
[9]
http://www.dallasnews.com/opinion/editorials/20151123-editorial-armed-protes
t-at-irving-mosque-out-of-bounds.ece?hootPostID=5cceee0ffddef43dc9be8156baeb
d9d3
[10]
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2015/11/27/man-who-led-ar
med-protest-at-texas-mosque-publishes-list-of-muslims-home-addresses/
[11] mailto:corrections@xxxxxxxxxxxx?Subject=Typo on What President Obama
Didn't Address: Who's Funding the Hate Campaign Against Muslims?
[12] http://www.alternet.org/
[13] http://www.alternet.org/%2Bnew_src%2B
Published on Alternet (http://www.alternet.org)
Home > What President Obama Didn't Address: Who's Funding the Hate Campaign
Against Muslims?
What President Obama Didn't Address: Who's Funding the Hate Campaign Against
Muslims?
By Pam Martens [1], Russ Martens [2] / Wall Street on Parade [3]
December 7, 2015
Last evening, in his speech to the nation from the Oval Office, President
Obama reminded Americans that "Muslim Americans are our friends and our
neighbors, our co-workers, our sports heroes - and, yes, they are our men
and women in uniform who are willing to die in defense of our country." In
his concluding remarks, the President told viewers that our nation was
"founded upon a belief in human dignity - that no matter who you are, or
where you come from, or what you look like, or what religion you practice,
you are equal in the eyes of God and equal in the eyes of the law." (See
full video of the speech below.)
What the President didn't say is that while the recent mass killing in San
Bernardino, California was conducted by a married couple who were Muslim,
the Muslim community itself has been under relentless assault by homegrown
religious extremists since the attacks on the World Trade towers on
September 11, 2001.
According to the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), mosques in 31 states
in America have been the targets [4] of firebombs, arson, acid attacks,
gunfire, hate speech or other forms of religious intolerance since 2005. In
Joplin, Missouri, a mosque's sign was torched in 2008. Four years later, its
roof was set on fire with the perpetrator caught on a surveillance video.
One month later, in August 2012, the mosque was burned to the ground [5].
In 2008, Chris Rodda, reporting for the Huffington Post [6], wrote about
Muslim babies and children being gassed in an attack on a mosque in Dayton,
Ohio during the same week that a DVD of the race-baiting, anti-Muslim
documentary Obsession: Radical Islam's War Against the West was mailed to
thousands of households in Ohio and inserted into newspapers around the
state. Quoting an email she had received with an eyewitness report, Rodda
relayed:
"She told me that the gas was sprayed into the room where the babies and
children were being kept while their mothers prayed together their Ramadan
prayers. Panicked mothers ran for their babies, crying for their children so
they could flee from the gas that was burning their eyes and throats and
lungs. She grabbed her youngest in her arms and grabbed the hand of her
other daughter, moving with the others to exit the building and the
irritating substance there.
"The paramedic said the young one was in shock, and gave her oxygen to help
her breathe. The child couldn't stop sobbing.
"This didn't happen in some far away place - but right here in Dayton, and
to my friends. Many of the Iraqi refugees were praying together at the
Mosque Friday evening. People that I know and love.
"I am hurt and angry. I tell her this is not America. She tells me this is
not Heaven or Hell - there are good and bad people everywhere.
"She tells me that her daughters slept with her last night, the little one
in her arms and sobbing throughout the night. She tells me she is afraid,
and will never return to the mosque, and I wonder what kind of country is
this where people have to fear attending their place of worship?"
The Obsession DVDs were distributed seven weeks before the Presidential
election of 2008 in swing voter states when rumors were being fanned that
Barack Obama was a Muslim. Approximately 100 newspapers and magazines in the
U.S., including the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Miami Herald,
Philadelphia Inquirer, and St. Petersburg Times, distributed millions of
these DVDs. Including the direct mail campaign, 28 million DVDs flooded
households in key states.
In 2010, we became curious as to where the massive amount of money came from
to finance the production of this race-baiting film and the enormous amount
of funds needed to distribute 28 million DVDs. All that was known at that
point was that a front group called the Clarion Fund had its name on the
production. Where it got its money was a dark secret.
The Clarion Fund had only a virtual office address in New York City with no
physical presence and no employees on site. The documents the Clarion Fund
had submitted to the IRS to obtain its tax-exempt status showed it had its
own obsession with secrecy. One requirement it enforced on its vendors read:
"At all times, whether during or after the provision of services to Clarion,
Service Provider shall keep in confidence and shall not disclose or use, for
his or another's benefit, any nonpublic knowledge, data, material, document
or other information of any type that is related to Clarion, or its
subsidiaries, directors, members, managers, agents, employees or other
affiliates or that Service Provider otherwise acquires in the course of
providing services (collectively, the 'Confidential Information.')."
The Obsession film content was suspiciously slick. The first half shows
serial scenes of suicide bombers and human carnage at the hands of Muslims.
The second half of the film intersperses clips of Hitler, Hitler Youth, or
Hitler analogies with Muslim crowds that include young children with fists
in the air calling for death to westerners. While the film concedes that not
all Muslims want to kill, it quantifies the number that do (without any
substantiation) as 100 to 150 million Muslims, i.e., 10 to 15 percent of 1
billion Muslims.
After much painstaking research, we tracked down the money trail and
reported the following:
"The 28 million DVDs were produced at a cost of $15,676,181 by Artist Direct
Media which does mass manufacturing of CDs and DVDs with volume discounts.
The big media buy for Sunday newspaper insertions ran up the tidy tab of
$719,436 and was conducted by NSA Media, a unit of the global ad giant,
Interpublic Group, parent of McCann-Erikson. That figure seems decidedly on
the light side so there may be other funding sources involved that have not
yet surfaced. (NSA Media is a powerful ad buyer, representing some of the
biggest print buyers and consumer brands in the country, which might help
explain why so few questions were asked by the largest newspapers about this
unseemly project.) The full tab, and then some, was paid by the super
secretive libertarian nonprofit, Donors Capital Fund. In 2008, Clarion Fund
became Donors Capital Fund's largest grantee by a large margin, receiving
$17,778,600. That sum constituted 96 per cent of all funds received by
Clarion in 2008 and 9 times its revenue in 2007."
And who was behind Donors Capital Fund? All roads led to Charles Koch, the
right wing billionaire. (Read our full report here [7].) While we were able
to link Donors Capital to the funding of the film, we were not able to
pinpoint the names of the individual(s) who gave the money to Donors Capital
and earmarked it for producing and distributing the film.
David Horowitz, the anti-Muslim writer at Frontpage Magazine took the
Obsession film on a college road show that dovetailed with its distribution
through newspapers and direct mail. During the fall of 2007, and continuing
into 2008, Horowitz promoted an "Islamo-Fascism Awareness" program to more
than 100 college campuses, with the film Obsessionmade available for
viewing. The David Horowitz Freedom Center, a non profit, has received major
funding from the same parties that have funded Donors Capital Fund and its
sister organization, Donors Trust. Major among those donors is the Lynde and
Harry Bradley Foundation [8].
According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, Muslims make up approximately
one percent of the U.S. population and their "voting patterns generally
mirror the broader American population. American Muslims are Republicans,
Democrats, Libertarians, liberals and conservatives. There is no one
political platform or agenda for those who practice the religion of Islam in
the United States."
The majority of Muslims have been living peacefully in America since the
16th century, but some well-financed campaigns by dark money are
stereotyping all Muslims as terrorists while Muslims are, themselves, being
terrorized at their houses of worship. Presidential candidate, Donald Trump,
has now picked up the stereotyping cudgel and appears to be fomenting the
hate with a pledge to close some mosques and put American Muslims on a
registry if he's elected President.
On November 23, the Dallas Morning News ran an editorial [9] which carried
these prophetic words after an anti-Islam group showed up at a mosque in
Irving, Texas with assault rifles [10](it's legal to open-carry guns in
Texas):
"This is America. Free speech and the right to protest are our calling
cards.
"But AR-15s at a place of worship? That is out of bounds, and it shows how
very close we are to chaos."
It takes very little for hate to turn to murder. In February of this year, a
white middle-aged male in Chapel Hill, North Carolina shot and killed three
Muslim students execution style. Two were set to study to become dentists.
According to the New Yorker Magazine, the killer, Craig Hicks, wrote the
following on his Facebook page: "I hate Islam just as much as Christianity,
but they have the right to worship in this country just as much as any
others do." According to the article, Hicks also wrote that he hoped that
Jews, Christians, and Muslims might "exterminate" each other.
The President's address last night was a deeply inadequate response to the
hate fomenting in our nation and the mega amounts of dark money that want to
keep it alive through the 2016 Presidential election.
Pam Martens worked on Wall Street for 21 years. She is the Editor of Wall
Street On Parade. [3]
Russ Martens is the publisher of the public interest web site, Wall Street
On Parade.
Error! Hyperlink reference not valid.
Error! Hyperlink reference not valid.
Report typos and corrections to 'corrections@xxxxxxxxxxxx'. [11]
Error! Hyperlink reference not valid.[12]
Source URL:
http://www.alternet.org/tea-party-and-right/what-president-obama-didnt-addre
ss-whos-funding-hate-campaign-against-muslims
Links:
[1] http://www.alternet.org/authors/pam-martens
[2] http://www.alternet.org/authors/russ-martens
[3] http://wallstreetonparade.com/
[4] https://www.aclu.org/map/nationwide-anti-mosque-activity
[5]
http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/nation/story/2012-08-06/joplin-mosque-fi
re/56832356/1
[6]
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/chris-rodda/muslim-children-gassed-at_b_130076
.html
[7]
http://wallstreetonparade.com/koch-footprints-lead-to-secret-slush-fund-to-k
eep-fear-alive/
[8]
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Lynde_and_Harry_Bradley_Foundation#Dono
rsTrust_Funding
[9]
http://www.dallasnews.com/opinion/editorials/20151123-editorial-armed-protes
t-at-irving-mosque-out-of-bounds.ece?hootPostID=5cceee0ffddef43dc9be8156baeb
d9d3
[10]
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2015/11/27/man-who-led-ar
med-protest-at-texas-mosque-publishes-list-of-muslims-home-addresses/
[11] mailto:corrections@xxxxxxxxxxxx?Subject=Typo on What President Obama
Didn't Address: Who's Funding the Hate Campaign Against Muslims?
[12] http://www.alternet.org/
[13] http://www.alternet.org/%2Bnew_src%2B
