City of Brass blogger, Aziz Poonwalla, takes the Simon Wiesenthal Center to task for screening “The Third Jihad”. Is he right? Yes and no. There is no question that it’s an incendiary film and to that end, it’s fair to ask what good comes from screening it. Calling it educational doesn’t work because even those parts of the film which are accurate (and there are many more of those than Mr. Poonwalla is either willing or able to admit), tend to shed more heat than light on the very real problem of violence and hatred which draw their inspiration from Islam.
And any time an organization as large and influential as the Wiesenthal Center acts, they should consider not only whether or not they have the right to do what they are doing, but also whether or not there is real benefit to their doing it. I am sure that they did ask in this case, but fail to see what value lay in screening a movie which will do nothing more (or less) than stir people’s rage without creating any constructive outlet for addressing the problems on which the film focuses.
All that having been said, the comparison by both Mr. Poonwalla and CAIR-Los Angeles of this film to The Protocols of the Elders of Zion is beyond shameful, unless of course they mean to suggest that some portion of that book are factually correct. And if they believe that, then they are the last people who should be complaining about any kind of ethnic or religious hatred.

The real problem here is that both CAIR and Poonwalla fail to address the challenges of even the small minority of Muslims (and that is how the film identifies them) who are using their tradition to create the underpinnings for a culture of hatred and violence. Or, do they not agree that there is such an active minority and that they do indeed present a real danger? If that is the case, their brothers and sisters in faith have far more to fear than the rest of us since Muslims kill far more Muslims in the name of Islam than they do non-Muslims.
By focusing obsessively on islamphobia, they not only fail to address a real threat, they undermine their own ability to raise legitimate concerns about the dangers of screening a film like “The Third Jihad”. Like those Jewish defense agencies that see anti-Semitism everywhere and call anyone who questions anything done by Jews, anti-Semites, they become parodies of themselves and unable to be heard by anyone who doesn’t already agree with them.
Of course the ultimate irony here lies in the fact that those who would most castigate the actions of the Wiesenthal Center, are in fact most like their own ugly assessment of the organization they most deeply oppose.