On Tuesday, ThinkProgress reported on the discovery by Demographics United that the Islamophobic filmmakers at the Clarion Fund sent an e-mail newsletter promoting a quote from a reader that attempted to legitimate the views of anti-Muslim Norwegian mass murderer Anders Breivik.
In the 1,500-page manifesto he wrote before slaughtering 77 people, Breivik, who appeared in court this week, recommended a Clarion Film for “further study” about Islam. The reader in the newsletter, whom Clarion claimed was writing from Norway, both whitewashed Breivik’s worldview — falsely suggesting his opposition was only to “Islamist terrorism” rather than to the religion Islam in general — and seemed to claim that a new report from Norway’s security agencies vindicated the mass-killer’s views.
As of yesterday, the comment by the “reader in Norway” no longer appeared on the Clarion site, www.radicalislam.org. The entire newsletter, which used to be available on the web by clicking on a link in the e-mail, now takes viewers to a Clarion page that reads: “The requested page could not be found” (pictured above right). Reached on his cellphone, Clarion official Alex Traiman declined to comment to repeated questions about the newsletter and its disappearance from the web.
Here’s a screen shot of the relevant part of the newsletter, where the “reader from Norway” was quoted in a section called “U Report,” which solicits reader comments and explicitly reviews them before publication:
The full now-scrubbed newsletter, as it was available on the web Tuesday, can be found at the Google cache for the webpage (for now; these tend to disappear after a while) or by downloading a PDF file of the page captured by ThinkProgress.
Last month, the New York Times wrote a story about the Clarion Fund’s film “The Third Jihad” being shown at the registration area of an NYPD conference. Subsequently, and after some dissembling, NYPD commissioner Raymond Kelly apologized for his appearance in the film and labeled it “inflammatory.” New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg slammed the NYPD for showing the film. At that time that controversy broke, ThinkProgress released the most comprehensive list to date of donors to the Clarion Fund.