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."