Islam: What the West Needs to Know | |
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Directed by | Gregory M. Davis, Bryan Daly |
Produced by | Gregory M. Davis, Bryan Daly |
Starring | Robert Spencer, Walid Shoebat, Bat Yeor, Serge Trifkovic, Abdullah Al-Araby |
Release dates |
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Running time | 98 minutes |
Country | United States |
Language | English |
Islam: What the West Needs to Know is a 2006 propaganda film produced by Quixotic Media. It features discussions using passages from religious texts and includes commentaries by Robert Spencer, Serge Trifkovic, Bat Ye'or, Abdullah Al-Araby, and Walid Shoebat. The film premiered at the American Film Renaissance Festival in Hollywood on January 15, 2006, and had a limited theatrical release in Chicago, Washington, D.C., and Atlanta in summer 2006.
While some reviewers have had a positive reception to the film, [1] others have criticised the film as being inaccurate, simplistic, biased and propagandist against Islam. [2] [3] [4] The Chicago Tribune 's reviewer, Michael Phillips, describes it as a "deadly dull anti-Islam propaganda piece". [4] The Washington City Paper's reviewer, Louis Bayard, argues that "If [the directors] Davis and Daly had a little imagination, they might see that the devil they’re chasing isn't Islam but fundamentalism, which assumes many forms." [5] The film has been described as an "anti-Muslim documentary" in the context of the counter-jihad movement. [6]
Louis Farrakhan is an American religious leader who heads the Nation of Islam (NOI), a black nationalist organization. Farrakhan is notable for his leadership of the 1995 Million Man March in Washington, D.C., and for his rhetoric that has been widely denounced as antisemitic and racist.
A number of organizations and academics consider the Nation of Islam (NOI) to be antisemitic. The NOI has engaged in Holocaust denial, and exaggerates the role of Jews in the African slave trade; mainstream historians, such as Saul S. Friedman, have said Jews had a negligible role. The NOI has repeatedly rejected charges made against it as false and politically motivated.
Daniel Pipes is an American former professor, anti-Muslim activist, and commentator on foreign policy and the Middle East. He is the president of the Middle East Forum, and publisher of its Middle East Quarterly journal. His writing focuses on American foreign policy and the Middle East as well as criticism of Islamism.
War on Islam or war against Islam is a term used to describe a concerted effort to harm, weaken or annihilate the societal system of Islam, using military, economic, social and cultural means, or means invading and interfering in Islamic countries under the pretext of the war on terror, or using the media to create a negative stereotype about Islam. The alleged perpetrators are non-Muslims, particularly the Western world and "false Muslims", in collusion with political actors in the Western world. While the themes of the "War against Islam" mostly concern general issues of societal transformations in modernization and secularization as well as current international power politics, the Crusades are often given as its starting point.
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Yossef Bodansky was an Israeli-American political scientist who served as Director of the Congressional Task Force on Terrorism and Unconventional Warfare of the US House of Representatives from 1988 to 2004. He was also Director of Research of the International Strategic Studies Association and has been a visiting scholar at Johns Hopkins University's Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS). In the 1980s, he served as a senior consultant for the Department of Defense and the Department of State.
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Louay M. Safi is a Syrian-American, a scholar of Islam and the Middle East, and an advocate of Arab and Muslim American rights. He published on such issues as social and political development, modernization, democracy, human rights, and Islam and Modernity. He is the author of 11 books and numerous papers, and speaker on questions of leadership, democracy, Islam, and the Middle East. He is also a spokesperson for the Syrian National Coalition, a league of Syrian opposition groups fighting Syrian President Assad, which was formed in November 2012 in Doha, Qatar.
Obsession: Radical Islam's War Against the West is a 2005 documentary film about the purported threat of Islamism to Western civilization. The film shows Islamic radicals preaching hate speech and seeking to incite global jihad. It also draws parallels between World War II's Nazi movement and Islamism and the West's response to those threats.
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In the political field, a war of ideas is a confrontation among the ideologies that nations and political groups use to promote their domestic and foreign interests. In a war of ideas, the battle space is the public mind: the belief of the people who compose the population. This ideological conflict is about winning the hearts and minds of the people. Waging a war of ideas can involve think tanks, television programs, journalistic articles, government policies, and public diplomacy. In the monograph: 'Wars of Ideas and The War of Ideas' (2008), Antulio J. Echevarria defined the war of ideas as:
A clash of visions, concepts, and images, and — especially — the interpretation of them. They are, indeed, genuine wars, even though the physical violence might be minimal, because they serve a political, socio-cultural, or economic purpose, and they involve hostile intentions or hostile acts. ... Four general categories [include] ... (i) intellectual debates, (ii) ideological wars, (iii) wars over religious dogma, and (iv) advertising campaigns. All of [the categories] are essentially about power and influence, just as with wars over territory and material resources, and their stakes can run very high indeed.
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