Results tagged “election fraud” from SpyTalk

A right-wing Jewish organization that backs John McCain is flooding mailboxes in the key battleground state of Virginia with an Israeli-made film that equates some Muslims with Nazis.

A man in Springfield, Va., whose family originates in South Asia, told us he was offended by the DVD, especially when it arrived in his mailbox again and again - seven times in all, he said.

"Obsession: Radical Islam's War Against the West," intercuts scenes of Islamist terrorist attacks with old film of Nazi rallies and contemporary footage of Muslim children reciting poetry celebrating suicide bombings.

"They should have a warning on them about the explicit violence," said the South Asian man, who is married with two young children.  He asked not to be identified for fear of upsetting his neighbors in his largely Republican neighborhood.

"My children pick up any DVD that's lying around and put it on," said the man. "It stereotypes all Muslims as ignorant and backward. I found it personally offensive, but I certainly don't want my children seeing that stuff."

Some 22 million DVDs were also delivered to homes via newspaper inserts in "100 local newspapers, with distribution concentrated in political swing states like Ohio, Florida, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Nevada," Seth Hettena reported in Columbia Journalism Review.

"Obsession" was produced by Israeli filmmaker Raphael Shore, who is one of three officers of the Clarion Fund, which is sponsoring the Virginia mailings.  Adding mystery to the project, pseudonyms were used for two of the film's financial backers, because, Shore maintains, they feared reprisals by radical Muslims.

"'Obsession' gives the picture that unfortunately no one else does,"  Shore told the Israeli newspaper Haaretz back in June. "The average viewer tries to understand the conflict. It's difficult to connect all the dots and 'Obsession' does just that. It gives a coherence to a problem that people have been grappling with."

The Clarion Fund and associatyed groups are skirting the ban on nonprofit organizations backing political candidates, according to The Washington Post.

"One of the Clarion Fund's Web sites, http://www.radicalislam.com, posted an article two weeks ago that stated, 'McCain's policies seek to confront radical Islamic extremism and terrorism and roll it back while Obama's, although intending to do the same, could in fact make the situation facing the West even worse,'" the Post reported.

The article has since been pulled down, "but its Web site still links readers to a vast network of sites that promote McCain," The Post reported.

"Aside from the content itself, a number of other factors related to the film have fueled the flames of controversy," Haaretz reporter Daphna Berman wrote, singling out its "largely Jewish and pro-Israel distribution network."

Heroin Killing U.S. Effort in Afghanistan

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Barack Obama sounds almost Rumsfeldian when he talks about a couple brigades -- about 7,000 troops -- being enough to save our bacon in Afghanistan. The Pentagon says it wants three, which also could turn out to be far from adequate.

Currently there are 36,000 U.S. military personnel in Afghanistan, including 17,500 serving with the U.S.-led NATO coalition and another 18,500 conducting training and counterinsurgency operations.

By comparison, in the 1980s the Soviet Union had from 80,000 to 104,000 troops in-country at any one time over its 10-year, ultimately futile occupation, during which time it built a 300,000-strong Afghan army in a losing effort to fight the U.S.-backed mujahideen.

But in light of new revelations on Afghanistan, comparing the U.S. campaign to the Soviets' may be less apt than harking back to the American experience in South Vietnam, where high-level official corruption negated the effort of over a half million troops and tens of thousands more civilians in the late 1960s.

Writing yesterday in the New York Times Sunday Magazine, the State Department's former number two anti-drug official, Thomas Schweich, described U.S. efforts to counter the cultivation of poppies -- which make heroin -- as stymied by the Pentagon, which has  resisted getting involved in the drug war, and Afghan President Hamid Karzai and his cronies, who have bought the loyalty of the drug lords by letting them turn their turf into the world's leading heroin source. 

"A lot of intelligence -- much of it unclassified and possible to discuss here -- indicated that senior Afghan officials were deeply involved in the narcotics trade. Narco-traffickers were buying off hundreds of police chiefs, judges and other officials. Narco-corruption went to the top of the Afghan government. The attorney general, Abdul Jabbar Sabit, a fiery Pashtun who had begun a self-described "jihad against corruption," (said)  he had a list of more than 20 senior Afghan officials who were deeply corrupt -- some tied to the narcotics trade. He added that President Karzai -- also a Pashtun -- had directed him, for political reasons, not to prosecute any of these people."

Problem: The main growth of poppy farming is in provinces where the Taliban dominate, filling their coffers.
A Diebold executive installed computer patches that may have swung the elections to Saxby Chambliss and Sonny Perdue, according to Steven Spoonamore, a top cyber-crime consultant to credit card companies and former McCain delegate. 

Larisa Alexandrovna and Muriel Kane have the details at Raw Story.com