This month, when a group of New York City police officers showed up for their required counter-terrorism training, they got to watch a movie. And not just some diddly 20-minute educational film, either. It was a full-length color feature, with more explosions than a Transformerssequel and more blood-splattered victims than an HBO World War II series.
The bad news was that it was a spectacularly offensive smear of American Muslims. The film is called The Third Jihad. It is 72 minutes of gruesome footage of bombing carnage, frenzied crowds, burning American flags, flaming churches, and seething mullahs. All of this is sandwiched between a collection of somber talking heads informing us that, while we were sleeping, the international Islamist Jihad that wrought these horrors has set up shop here and is quietly going about its deadly business. This is the final drive in a 1,400-year-old bid for Muslim world domination, we’re informed. And while we may think there are some perfectly reasonable Muslim leaders and organizations here in the U.S., that is just more sucker bait sent our way.
“Americans are being told that most of the mainstream Muslim groups are moderate,” says the narrator, “when in fact if you look a little closer you’ll see a very different reality. One of their primary tactics is deception.”
The message here is that lurking behind those veils and prayer caps is a secret plan to impose a religious order out of the Dark Ages here in the U.S. The favorite image in The Third Jihad – shown over and over – is an enormous black-and-white Islamic flag flying over the White House.
This is pretty toxic stuff, the kind of film likely to spark a picket line at a local theater. In this case, however, the impact is somewhat more sinister, since the audience was law enforcement officers attending a mandatory prep session on what to know about the terrorist threat.
“After it was over, I was thinking, ‘What was that?'” said a cop who saw the movie at a training facility used by the department in Coney Island. “It was so ridiculously one-sided. It just made Muslims look like the enemy. It was straight propaganda.”