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Media Views

Associated Press: Muslim Rights Group Asks FEC for 'Obsession' Probe (9/24/08)

In the fallout from Saturday's appearance of Obsession: Radical Islam's War Against the West, the Council for American-Islamic Relations

has asked the FEC to investigate the DVD distribution, which targeted about 28 million households mostly in battleground election states. The DVDs—which critics call anti-Muslim propaganda—were inserted this month into more than 70 newspapers and paid for by the Clarion Fund, a non-profit group founded in 2006. The fund's focus is "the most urgent threat of radical Islam." It has declined to identify board members or its funding.

CAIR charges that the distribution of Obsession is an illegal attempt to influence the presidential election, but a spokesperson for the Endowment for Middle East Truth, another non-profit group that worked with Clarion, said that "targeting swing states was designed to attract media attention, but is not meant to influence the election result." That's tough to figure--the distribution would get media attention, presumably because it looks like it might have an impact on the election, but it wouldn't actually be trying to have an impact on the election?

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