IRANIUM: My Interview with the Filmmakers

Since Iran’s world-changing 1979 revolution, the Iranian mullahcracy has been at the forefront of Islamic terror against the West. Thumbing its nose at the disapproval of an impotent international community, it has proceeded full-bore to acquire the ultimate tool of terror: nuclear weapons capability. Iran’s imminent success in this regard would mean, at best, a disastrous reversal of the balance of power in the Middle East, and at worst, Iran’s promised destruction of Israel and an apocalyptic threat to the United States as well.

In the shadow of this impending menace, the Clarion Fund has released Iranium, an hour-long documentary highlighting the danger of a nuclear-armed Iranian regime. I attended a packed screening of the film in Los Angeles last month, and afterward the busy filmmakers agreed to discuss the project. Producer Raphael Shore is Clarion’s founder. Director Alex Traiman is a journalist and former radio personality covering news in the Middle East. He has also worked in marketing, and public relations.

Mark Tapson:    Raphael, let’s begin with the origin and mission of the Clarion Fund, the organization behind Iranium.

RS:     Clarion Fund was founded in 2006 and is a non-profit organization that educates Americans about issues of national security. To that end, the Clarion Fund produces and distributes documentaries on the urgent and growing threats of radical Islam and now Iran. As well, we run the website www.radicalislam.org, which has about 50,000 members who receive our regular updates. Our advisory board includes Walid Phares, Frank Gaffney Jr., Zuhdi Jasser, Daniel Pipes, Clare Lopez, and others.

In 2006, Clarion released the award-winning documentary Obsession: Radical Islam’s War Against the West about the global threat of radical Islam, and it was seen by about 30 million Americans. In 2008, Clarion released the well-received documentary, The Third Jihad: Radical Islam’s Vision for America, which focuses on the strategies of radical Islam in America and the risk it poses to western freedoms.

The West is the Best

Niall Ferguson, the prolific and controversial historian who recently devastated a roomful of empty-headed, Obama-worshipping talking heads regarding Obama's foreign policy incompetence, is now not only my hero but the subject of this lengthy but fascinating piece in the London Guardian. The 6-part miniseries made from his book Civilization: the West and the Rest, which airs in England in early March, promises to be brilliant and to drive the Left apoplectic:

Civilization sets out to answer a question that Ferguson identifies as the "most interesting" facing historians of the modern era: "Why, beginning around 1500, did a few small polities on the western end of the Eurasian landmass come to dominate the rest of the world?" In other words, the book attempts to explain the roots of something – western power – that has long fascinated its author... In two consecutive books, Empire and Colossus – published, not by accident, around the time of the Iraq invasion – he charted the respective imperial histories of Britain and America, concluding not only that Britain should be prouder of its colonial past, but that the world would be a better place if America imitated Victorian Britain and became a fully fledged liberal empire. Though both books were bestsellers and won Ferguson scores of new admirers, especially in the US, they also, not surprisingly, drew heavy criticism from the left.

Civilization, too, starts from the premise that western dominance has been a good thing.

The fact that this final line is even a controversial assertion speaks volumes about the degree to which the Left has successfully infiltrated academia, the media, and popular culture. The fearless Ferguson is a threat to their anti-American and anti-Western narrative, and a welcome antidote. 

Ignorance is Submission

Two online articles yesterday highlighted an unsettling, if not alarming, aspect of the stealth jihad that the Muslim Brotherhood has been steadily and patiently advancing throughout the West: the "Islamization of knowledge." Laura Rosenfeld, in her Pajamas Media piece "Caught in the Act: Akbar Ahmed, the ‘Islamization of Knowledge,’ and the Muslim Brotherhood," defines it concisely here:

The Islamization of knowledge movement seeks to ensure that anything taught in the university classroom which “opposes Islam” must be discarded.

The goal is to "recast the whole legacy of human knowledge... in such a way as to make the disciplines enrich the vision and serve the cause of Islam." Not truth, but Islam. If you really want to grasp just how severely this would limit the scope of human understanding and intellectual curiosity, check out Robert Reilly's enlightening book The Closing of the Muslim Mind.

The second piece, blogger Fjordman's "Medieval Myths," notes two European professors specializing in the Middle Ages who are struggling against the tide, trying to counter falsehoods being pushed by their Marxist colleagues, about the medieval contributions supposedly made to their European heritage by Islam. As Fjordman says, those same "anti-imperialist" colleagues don't seem to have a problem when the imperialism is non-Western, and so, in the halls of academe,

Islamic advances must be celebrated; the West demonized and ridiculed. European medieval peoples are invariable portrayed as barbarians with no culture of their own.

You can see the advances already being made in the Islamization of knowledge in our own high school textbooks, which promote a whitewashed, morally equivalent perspective of Islam and Islamic history, and which vastly inflate scientific accomplishments and cultural contributions by Muslims, while devaluing our own Judeo-Christian-Classical culture.

The Islamization of knowledge movement is one of the most subversive and dangerous threats to the future of civilization.

Mark on Clash Radio, Talking Iranium

I'm back on Doug Giles' Clash Radio again this Monday morning the 14th, from 11:30 a.m to noon EST, discussing my article on the documentary Iranium. Check it out online here...

Apocalypse Imminent

With the Muslim Brotherhood poised to emerge dominant in Egypt, uprisings rocking government foundations in Jordan and Tunisia and Algeria, domestic unrest bubbling up in Syria and Yemen, and Iranian-backed Hezbollah establishing control of Lebanon, the situation in the Middle East is ratcheting up from mere chronic instability to chaos. And looming over it all is the catalyst of a rabidly anti-Western, theocratic regime in Iran, in hot pursuit of nuclear weapons.

Recently I attended a packed screening at Los Angeles' Luxe Hotel of the new documentary Iranium, about the danger of a nuclear-armed Iran, produced by the Clarion Fund, the same filmmakers of the controversial Obsession: Radical Islam's War Against the West , and The Third Jihad: Radical Islam’s Vision for America . The audience so overflowed that the Luxe had to open up the adjacent conference room to accommodate everyone.

Featuring an array of compelling experts including former ambassadors John Bolton and Dore Gold, the Center for Security Policy’s Frank Gaffney Jr. and Clare Lopez, scholars Bernard Lewis and Walid Phares, political writers Clifford May and Kenneth Timmerman, and more, Iranium makes the case that keeping nuclear capability out of the hands of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and the mullahs has never been a more urgent task. Allowing it would result in a tectonic shift in the balance of power not only in the Middle East, but across the world. Gaffney asserts ominously that we have gone beyond the point where we should discuss the “risks associated with acting, to the point where we must discuss the risks associated with not acting.”

Lindsay Lohan, Hollywood Voice of Reason

I'm not a Twitter follower of Lindsay Lohan; it's all I can do to keep up with Kim Kardashian's unending scroll of product hawking. But The Wrap reports that the (former?) actress Lohan, usually described as "troubled" (polite media-speak for self-centered and self-destructive celebrities who are at least as much "trouble" to others as they are to themselves), has taken time out from her busy court schedule to tweet about the Egypt uprising - that's right, the Egypt uprising:

I pray Egypt maintains it's [sic] treaty with Israel and sets the trend for its neighbors to create peace with Israel and the entire region.

What a pleasant surprise, to hear someone in the entertainment world not only talk about something other than 1) themselves, 2) their uninformed socialist fantasies, and/or 3) their hatred/sexual fantasies of Sarah Palin, but actually express support for Israel's security for once, instead of bashing the country as a "genocidal apartheid state," banning its films from film festivals, and boycotting musical performances there. Good for you, Ms. Lohan.

Amid all her career-wrecking, tabloid-baiting cries for help, who knew she had a political consciousness? And a fair, reasonable, nonconformist one at that? What's next, Charlie Sheen tweeting concern about the Muslim Brotherhood's caliphate ambitions?

Europe: Is a New Dark Age Coming?

Check out these important reads about Europe and the state of the West, all from within the last few days. Three brief perspectives, alternately inspirational and alarming, from three champions of our rights and freedoms:

Geert Wilders, "The Lights Are Going Out All Over Europe":

The lights are going out all over Europe. All over the continent where our culture flourished and where man created freedom, prosperity and civilization. Everywhere the foundation of the West is under attack.

Daniel Pipes, "My Optimism About Europe":

That, over time, individuals and organizations are finding their voice and are learning strategy and tactics to fend off Islamism gives Europe civilizational hope.

Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff: "Reclaiming Our Rights":

All of our great institutions, including democracy and the rule of law, are made possible by the fundamental human rights that we all used to take for granted. These rights are now being deliberately destroyed.

Mark on Clash Radio, Yet AGAIN

I'm coming back to Doug Giles' Clash Radio again this Thursday morning, the 10th, from 11a.m to noon EST, discussing all sorts of topics with Doug's co-host Steve Pauwels. Don't miss the fun. Check it out online here...