Obsession

Were you unlucky enough to find this unsolicited $12.95 DVD in your mailbox just before the November presidential elections? As I live in a swing state, Florida, I was such an unlucky person. Adam Shatz, an Israeli writer for the London Review of Books, has the goods in the review's 9 October edition:

In the last two weeks of September, 28 million copies of [Obsession] were enclosed as an advertising supplement in 74 newspapers, including the New York Times and the Chronicle of Higher Education...

The Clarion Fund, the supplement’s sponsor, doesn’t explicitly endorse McCain, so as not to jeopardise its tax-exempt status, but the message is clear enough, and its circulation just happened to coincide with Obama’s leap in the polls....

Yes, it was a failed attempt to scare voters from casting their ballots for Barak Hussein Obama, sponsored by Rabbi Raphael Shore, the Endowment for Middle East Truth and Aish HaTorah, the Israeli settler movement.

Praise goes to the Council on American-Islamic relations for lodging a complaint against Clarion with the Federal Election Commission and of course, for Florida voters to refusing to be swayed by extremist NeoCon and Israeli propaganda.