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The Clarion Fund is a little known nonprofit organization closely linked to both the U.S. and Israeli right-wing that aims to “alert Americans about the threat of Radical Islam.” [1] The group, which was founded in 2006, claims to achieve its mission by conveying the “reality of radical Islam” in the didactic documentary films it produces and distributes, and through outreach efforts on the internet and on college campuses. [2]

The Clarion Fund has received media attention in recent years for its efforts to distribute millions of copies of the DVD version of the highly controversial short film Obsession: Radical Islam’s War against the West, and for its role in producing the film The Third Jihad: Radical Islam’s Vision for America, released in May 2009. [3] Clarion’s efforts to promote the films led to accusations in 2008 that the group was violating its tax-exempt status and attempting “to stir up a climate of fear in the United States in the weeks before the presidential election.” [4]

Controversy over Obsession

Some 28 million DVDs of Obsession, called “hate propaganda” by some critics, [5] were made available in newspaper inserts in several key swing states—including Florida, Ohio, and Michigan—during the lead-up to the 2008 presidential election. [6] The video, which attempts to make the case that “radical Islam” intends to “bow Western Civilization under the yoke of its values,” [7] was co-written by Raphael Shore, who founded the Clarion Fund, and Wayne Kopping, who produced the 2003 video Relentless: The Struggle for Peace in Israel, a documentary on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that focuses disproportionately on Arab hostilities. Several groups that support militarist Israeli and U.S. policies, including the American Israel Public Affairs Committee and the Zionist Organization for America, sponsored showings of Relentless. [8]

After its initial 2005 release, showings of Obsession spurred heated debates regarding “Islamophobia” on U.S. college campuses, [9] where the film has been aggressively promoted by David Horowitz as part of his “terrorism awareness project.” [10] When copies of the DVD appeared in swing-state newspapers and mailings during the last months of the 2008 election season, some observers charged that Clarion and the Endowment for Middle East Truth (EMET), which aided the distribution effort, were running a stealth campaign on behalf of Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) and other Republican candidates who had made “battling the threat posed by radical Islamists a central platform of their campaign, while presenting their Democratic rival, Sen. Barack Obama [D-IL], as being weak on the issue.” [11]

When a small-town newspaper in Pennsylvania, the Patriot News, investigated the source of the DVD mailing, it discovered that a Clarion Fund website, RadicalIslam.org, had posted a partisan political report that supported the McCain campaign. The report stated, “McCain's policies seek to confront radical Islamic extremism and terrorism and roll it back while [Barack] Obama's, although intending to do the same, could in fact make the situation facing the West even worse." The site removed the report after the Patriot News reporter questioned Clarion’s director of communications about it. [12]

A spokesperson for EMET, described by the Inter Press Service as a “group of hard-line U.S. neo-conservatives and former Israeli diplomats,” claimed that its goal was not to influence the election but to take advantage of the intense media attention in the swing states. [13]

According to the New York Times, Obsession served as a “flashpoint in the bitter campus debate over the Middle East, not just because of its clips from Arab television rarely shown in the West, including scenes of suicide bombers being recruited and inducted, but also because of its pro-Israel distribution network. When a Middle East discussion group organized a showing at New York University … it found that the distributors of Obsession were requiring those in attendance to register at IsraelActivism.com, and that digital pictures of the events be sent to Hasbara Fellowships, a group set up to counter anti-Israel sentiment on college campuses.” [14]

Obsession presents the views of a number of people associated with militarist or neoconservative political groups, including Caroline Glick of the Center for Security Policy; Daniel Pipes of the Middle East Forum; Steven Emerson of the Investigative Project on Terrorism; and Brigitte Gabrielle, founder of American Congress for Truth and advisor to the Intelligence Summit.

The Third Jihad

Produced by Clarion and released in May 2009, [15] The Third Jihad claims to explore a war that the “media is not telling you about” and reveal an enemy the “government is too afraid to name.” [16] In late September 2008, the film’s website claimed the movie “focuses on an FBI-discovered secret document—the manifesto of the American Muslim Brotherhood. It describes the ‘grand jihad’ goal of destroying Western civilization from within by infiltrating and dominating North America. The film reveals the agenda of the radical Muslim leaders in America and provides viewers with an impressively crafted look at the immediate dangers posed.” [17] 

The synopsis reminded one journalist of the infamous, racist volume The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. “Secret, recently uncovered documents. A ‘goal of destroying Western civilization from within.’ A grand conspiracy organized by a globally networked religious minority. Sound familiar yet? Could be because it’s echoing one of the most influential and persistent conspiracy theories of all time, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion … [which] detailed the sinister Jewish plan for world domination,” wrote reporter Eli Clifton. [18]

The “experts” featured in The Third Jihad include Rachel Ehrenfeld of the American Center for Democracy; former CIA director James Woolsey; Bernard Lewis; Michael Ledeen and Walid Phares of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies; Sen. Joseph Lieberman (I-CT); and former mayor Rudy Giuliani.

On Clarion’s RadicalIslam.org (whose banner trumpets “New Film Exposes Radical Islam in the United States”) visitors can watch a trailer for The Third Jihad that features quotes from Islamic extremists detailing their intentions to take over the United States and the West. The trailer purports that Zuhdi Jasser of the American-Islamic Forum for Democracy discovered FBI documents and decided to investigate ithem. Described as a “courageous Muslim” who decides to “break the silence,” Jasser asks rhetorically, “Is the Islamic state a threat to American security?” And answers, “Yes, it is.” [19] The trailer concludes, “We all know about terrorism. This is the war you don’t know about.”

Likud and Neocon Connections

Some critics have called Clarion Fund a tool of Israel’s rightist Likud Party because of its close association with many Likud figures and its espousal of views in line with the Israeli right-wing. In late September 2008, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) asked the Federal Election Commission (FEC) to investigate whether Clarion was violating election laws, which prohibit foreign entities from funding campaigns. CAIR alleged that Clarion was “an Israel-based group seeking to help Sen. John McCain win the U.S. presidential election.” [20]

CAIR laid out its case in an official complaint to the FEC. “According to the website for the Secretary of State for New York, Clarion Fund Inc. is incorporated in New York as a Delaware based foreign not-for-profit corporation,” the complaint reads. “According to the Delaware Department of Corporations, Robert (Rabbi Raphael) Shore, Rabbi Henry Harris and Rebecca Kabat incorporated Clarion Fund. All three of whom are reported to serve as employees of Aish HaTorah International, an organization apparently based in Israel. Also according to the Delaware Department of Corporations, the incorporators of the Clarion Fund used Aish HaTorah’s New York City address … to incorporate Clarion Fund in Delaware. Sources have reported that Rabbi Raphael Shore is an Israeli citizen who lives in Jerusalem and was employed as an executive director with Aish HaTorah International. Gregory Ross has been identified as Clarion Fund’s spokesman and communications director. According to the FEC candidate contributions database, Gregory Ross is a fundraiser for Aish HaTorah International. It was reported that distributors of ‘Obsession’ asked viewers to register for a screening of ‘Obsession‘ by visiting an Aish HaTorah website. It appears that the funding for the production, marketing and distribution of ‘Obsession’ may have originated from Israel-based Aish HaTorah International.” [21]

Said CAIR executive director Nihad Awad, “American voters deserve to know whether they are the targets of a multimillion-dollar campaign funded and directed by a foreign group seeking to whip up anti-Muslim hysteria as a way to influence the outcome of our presidential election.” [22]

Furthermore, were Clarion to directly or indirectly participate in political campaigning, its tax-exempt status (granted in 2007) would be jeopardized. [23] According to the tax code, “Public statements of position (verbal or written) made on behalf of the [501(c)(3)] organization in favor of or in opposition to any candidate for public office clearly violate the prohibition against political campaign activity.” [24] Given the content of the report posted (and later removed) at Clarion’s RadicalIslam.org, the fund is liable to  lose its tax status.

According to National Public Radio’s Peter Overby and Will Evans, Clarion’s tax filings, “don't provide clues as to who funded the…distribution” of Obsession, although Clarion assured them it was exclusively bankrolled by U.S. donors. [25] The reporters added, “We still don't know how closely Clarion is tied to Aish HaTorah, an international Jewish educational organization with offices in New York. Clarion's incorporation papers share the same address; the PR firm says that's no longer the case. But public filings list four directors of Clarion since its inception, and all four have ties to Aish HaTorah.” [26]

In an investigative report about the allegations, the Inter Press Service (IPS) reported that EMET, Clarion’s Obsession distribution partner, has ties to Likud and neoconservatives groups. According to IPS, EMET advisors include ambassadors Yossi Ben Aharon and Yoram Ettinger, who “were among the three Israeli ambassadors whom then-Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin referred to as ‘the Three Musketeers’ when they lobbied Washington in opposition to the Oslo accords.” Ettinger is a former chair at the Ariel Center for Policy Research, a hardline Israeli think tank. Likud Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu appointed another EMET advisor and former diplomat, Lenny Ben-David, to serve at the Israeli Embassy in Washington. “Ben-David had also held senior positions at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee for 25 years and is now a consultant and lobbyist.” [27] In mid-September, EMET sponsored a  Capitol Hill “seminar series” named after the multibillionaire casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, a key donor of the group Freedom’s Watch and the Republican Jewish Coalition (RJC), which according to IPS has worked “to persuade Jewish voters that Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama is aligned with radical anti-Israel forces in the Islamic world.” [28]

IPS reports that U.S. neoconservatives who have advised EMET include the late Jeane Kirkpatrick; Daniel Pipes of the Middle East Forum; Meyrav Wurmser of the Hudson Institute; Frank Gaffney of the Center for Security Policy; Woolsey; and Heritage Foundation fellows Ariel Cohen and Nina Shea. [29]