Oct 27, 2008 04:13 PM
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Tue Feb 9
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28 million swing state residents got a special gift with their newspapers recently! An hour-long DVD called Obsession: Radical Islam's War Against the West was tucked in with papers thanks to Clarion Fund, a nonprofit group established by a radical right-wing Israelis dedicated to making Americans scared of Muslims. And hah, incompetent superflack Ronn [sic] Torossian is behind it all!
The Obsession movie is linked to a group called "Aish HaTorah," a far-right Jewish movement that Atlantic writer Jeffrey Goldberg calls "the lunatic fringe" of Israeli politics. Torossian, of course, represents them. Here is a fun story Goldberg tells about the time he met Ronn!
Several years ago, in one of my only encounters with him, he introduced me to Benny Elon, a rabbi and settler leader who was then Israel's tourism minister, and who, at various points in his career, has more or less advocated the ethnic cleansing of Israel of its Arab citizens. At one point, when Elon had gone to take a telephone call, Torossian and I started talking about Israel's right to reprisal for terrorist attacks. I was arguing in favor of some sort of proportionality (this was after Jenin, in which the Israeli army chose to root out terrorism block by block rather than bomb the city from the air) but Torossian interrupted: "I think we should kill a hundred Arabs or a thousand Arabs for every one Jew they kill." I was somewhat taken aback, of course, because this is a Nazi idea, rather than a Jewish idea. I asked him to explicate: "If someone from a town blows himself up and kills Jews, we should wipe out the town he's from, kill them all. The Israelis are suckers. They should have destroyed Jenin." He went on like this for some time. I would only note that Torossian, to the best of my knowledge, never volunteered for the Israeli army, so he seemed to me by definition a chickenhawk.
Yes, well, Ronn certainly speaks his mind, doesn't he. His terrible, dim, miserable mind. At least learning that 5WPR is behind this crazy group is pretty good proof that their ideas will never gain currency, right? If they had competent representation we'd be worried.
Of course your grandmother still thinks Barack Obama is a Muslim.
The Jewish Extremists Behind 'Obsession' [Atlantic]
Send an email to Alex Pareene, the author of this post, at alexp@gawker.com.
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