Film Review: "Obsession: Radical Islam's War Against the West" (2005)

On Monday night, over 125 concerned Ottawans damned both political correctness and the freezing cold weather to come out to see "Obsession", the first offering in what my pal Fred hopes will become a thriving, bi-monthly film society where, because of either their pro-Western or pro-capitalist orientation, documentaries that you won't see at either the local art house cinema or on Canada's state broadcaster, the CBC, can be taken in.

I half-expected some fireworks at this screening, but surprisingly, there weren't. Perhaps it's because anyone who is familiar with this movie knows that after seeing it, you cannot possibly argue that Dick Cheney is a bigger threat than Osama bin Laden, kooks like this and more reasonable yet wrong-headed observers like this aside.

The message of "Obsession" is clear and is drilled home by the footage, some of which you can see here in a twelve-minute trailer: there is a strain of radical Islam that will stop at nothing to completely destroy North America, Europe and Israel. Moreover, this is not a rational ideology but one rooted very deeply in a certain interpretation of Koranic teachings. Moreover, while the number of Muslims worldwide who adhere to these beliefs are at most, approximately fifteen percent of the entire Islamic world, with over 1 billion Muslims on Earth, that equates to an army of 150 million who will go so far as to kill themselves to advance their version of jihad, many of whom already live here, as demonstrated by the examples of the London, Madrid and 9/11 bombings, not to mention the Toronto 17 who were thankfully prevented from carrying out their plan this past summer in Canada's largest city.

As commentators featured in the film from Harvard law prof Alan Dershowitz to former PLO member Walid Shoebat attest, the refusal of some living in liberal, pluralist democracies to realize the seriousness of this threat equates to a situation quite similar to Europe in the 1930s as warnings about the menace of Hitler went unheeded before over six million Jews perished in the Holocaust.

Don't take my word for it. Click on the link to the short trailer above and see what I'm talking about for yourself. It shouldn't be news to you, but if you weren't sure about how serious an issue we're dealing with here before watching this film, you certainly will be afterwards. Newt Gingrich had it right last July when he said that this is indeed World War III.

Official site here.

Overall rating: 9/10