The drama never stops unfolding around the Clarion Fund, the operation behind a string of movies dubbed “anti-Muslim” by critics.

The group’s latest salvo is an hour-long documentary called “Iranium”, which more or less gives airtime to a gaggle of neoconservatives and their [...]]]> This article originally appeared on AlterNet.

The drama never stops unfolding around the Clarion Fund, the operation behind a string of movies dubbed “anti-Muslim” by critics.

The group’s latest salvo is an hour-long documentary called “Iranium”, which more or less gives airtime to a gaggle of neoconservatives and their allies on the Israeli right to advocate for a hawkish posture against the Islamic Republic of Iran.

While warning of an ideologically-driven, religiously-inspired Iran, however, the filmmaker behind the movie himself comes from among the religious extremes of another Middle Eastern state.

The writer and director of “Iranium”, Alex Traiman, hails from the Israeli West Bank settlement of Beit El, one of the ideological religious Jewish outposts in occupied Palestinian territory bedeviling U.S.-Israel relations.

I spoke to Traiman, who sported a black kippah and a bright red tie, after a screening of “Iranium” at the Heritage Foundation in Washington, where neoconservative don Richard Perle introduced the film.

“That’s where I live,” Traiman told me, after a deep breath, when I asked him if he lived in Beit El. “I just live there.”

Traiman worked for four years for the Beit El-based Arutz Sheva, or Channel Seven, also known as Israel National News, a former pirate radio station aligned with Israel’s religious settlers. He has in the past referred to Beit El as “a Jewish settlement… located in the Biblical province of Samaria, commonly referred to today as the West Bank.” Settlers refer to the West Bank by the Biblical “Judea and Samaria.”

On Tuesday at Heritage, Traiman, who has also written for a U.S.-based conspiracy website, called the World Net Daily, and presumably other occupied Palestinian territories, as “disputed territories in Israel.”

Beit El is a religious nationalist settlement near Ramallah in the West Bank, where some 5,500 settlers live, Founded in 1977, the settlement is built in land seized in 1970 by the military on what Israeli courts, according to Idith Zertal and Akiva Eldar, later deemed to be bogus security justifications.

Unlike their secular counterparts, who usually move into settlements to take advantage of government housing subsidies, the enclave of Beit El is a religious-nationalist settlement where residents think that God gave them the land that Palestinians lived on.

Palestinians view settlements as gobbling up land on which they hope to eventually build their state. In a peace deal, the border between Israel and Palestine would likely be doctored to include large settlement blocks in Israel.

But at a recent Washington Institute forum on potential maps for a peace deal, Washington Post columnist Jackson Diehl, a Middle East hawk, said Israeli annexation of Beit El is not realistic in a final peace deal: “Beit El dominates the road between the two major Palestinian towns of Ramallah and Nablus… This type of scenario is unacceptable to Palestinians.”

Last fall, a diplomatic row erupted when Israel refused a U.S. request for a three-month extension of a settlement construction freeze. The freeze extension was aimed at rescuing peace talks, and when Israel refused, with Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu in the thrall of his pro-settler coalition members, the U.S.-sponsored talks collapsed.

The crumbling of the settlement freeze was celebrated in Israel’s settlements, whese construction boomed.

Other characters in and around “Iranium” come from the hardest of the hard-line ‘pro-Israel’ camp and the Israeli right, those who have long opposed Israel relinquishing control of the West Bank in any peace deal.

Not surprisingly, the Capitol Hill premiere in February is being hosted by a group, EMET, whose president and advisors worked together in the 1990s, behind the backs of Israeli and American leadership, to spike the Oslo process. Indeed, EMET’s Hill activism for a Greater Israel seems to be matched only by the efforts of key people from the Clarion Fund.

Ties between Clarion and Aish Hatorah, an evangelist Israeli ultra-orthodox group, are well know and long-established through Clarion’s founder and executive producer of its movies, Canadian-Israeli Raphael Shore, not to mention a host of registration and tax documents that make Clarion appear to be little more than an Aish off-shoot.

But Traiman, a former radio host and PR flak brought on board by Clarion to write and direct “Iranium,” appears is literally on the frontiers of the Israeli right.

According to social networking websites, Traiman worked at Arutz Sheva for four years, editing, writing, hosting a show, and acting as marketing director. In 2006, Traiman did a fundraising junket for the channel that brought him to New York and New Jersey, where he went to high school. (Arutz Sheva also raises money from U.S. Christian Zionists.)

Just two months before that trip, Traiman wrote an article for the U.S.-based conspiracy website World Net Daily (WND), where he gave space and sympathetic coverage to several Rabbis who theorized that the 2006 Israel-Lebanon war — then still raging — was caused by a gay pride parade in Jerusalem. At the end of the article, Traiman was listed as a writer for the Jerusalem bureau of WND, which has published articles about how Al Qaeda has 40 nukes (some already in the U.S.) and how “soy is making kids ‘gay’.”

The current chief WND‘s Jerusalem bureau is Aaron Klein, a birther and the New York Times best-selling author of “The Manchurian President: Barack Obama’s Ties to Communists, Socialists and Other Anti-American Extremists”. (Klein also conducted the interview where Imam Faisal Abdul Rauf refused to condemn Hamas.)

Klein and Traiman co-edited their college paper when they were both at New York City’s Yeshiva University. “Following his completely secular education, Traiman decided to pursue a Jewish education at the only first tier university that could provide one,” says an article from the paper of the modern-orthodox Jewish university. If and how long Klein and Traiman worked together at WND is not clear.

Leaving WND aside, Arutz Sheva, where Traiman hosted a show, wrote and edited, and directed marketing efforts, has some conspiracy theory issues of its own. Last year, to celebrate the anniversary of the assassination of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, the “settler news organization,” as the New York Times labeled it, held a contest to find the best conspiracy theory providing a version of events different from the accepted history.

The accepted history, of course, is that religious Zionist Yigal Amir killed Rabin at a peace rally in 1995. In their 2009 book, “Jewish Terrorism in Israel”, Professors Ami Pedahzur and Arie Perliger wrote that Amir would have been inspired by the religious edicts from rabbis in West Bank settlements declaring Rabin din rodef, or a Jew who was willing to harm other Jews, a judgement punishable by death according to Jewish law. The professors also drop this nugget while recalling Amir’s machinations: “Only a fellow law school student, Margalit Har-Shefi—resident of one of the most prestige settlements, Beit El, and daughter of settler nobility—was let in on the finer details of the plan.” Har-Shefi even tried to break into the Beit El armory to get a weapon for the plot.

Arutz Sheva was founded by, according to various sources, either Beit El-based extremist Rabbi Zalman Melmand or Yaakov Katz, a politician from Israel’s National Union party, which has been accused of having ties to Israel’s banned extremist Kahanist political faction. Rabbi Meir Kahane was thought to be the “spiritual guide of those who allegedly conspired to kill Rabin.”

“There is a clear irony in having Israeli settler religious extremists urging the U.S. to bomb religious extremists in Iran,” said Lara Friedman, an expert on settlements and U.S. policy in the Middle East with American’s for Peace Now, in an interview.

Ali Gharib is a freelance writer based in Brooklyn, NY. He’s a regular contributor to the LobeLog.

The charges against my reporting are groundless. Indeed, I’d challenge Mellin to point to [...]]]> In a response to my post on the Clarion Fund’s advisory board, a user named “Nate Mellin” wrote a comment which challenged my reporting on the Clarion Fund’s documentaries and my participation in JewsOnFirst’s Rebutting Obsession project.

The charges against my reporting are groundless. Indeed, I’d challenge Mellin to point to any inaccuracies in what my colleagues or I have published. However, Mellin’s comment is in itself instructive — he is himself yet another connection in the extensive web that ties the Clarion Fund to Aish HaTorah, an ultra-orthodox organization based in Israel — and further bears out my reporting on the subject.

Mellin writes:

Eli Clifton is in no way an unbiased journalist reporting on this issue, but has undermined his own credibility by mixing in non-biased reports with reports on his anti-Clarion agenda. [...]

He has publicly acknowledged this bias in a report published on this very website April 19th, 2010. http://www.lobelog.com/clarions-latest-film-unveiled/

“As highlighted in the ‘Rebutting Obsession’ project (which, in full disclosure, I contributed to)…”

Eli Clifton may have his opinions on the films, but they are just that: opinions. He should in no way be considered a neutral authority on this topic.

The JewsOnFirst project looks at the supposed “facts” presented in Obsession and points out the distortion of historical events and misrepresentations of Islam and Muslims in the film. This was not a negative review of the film — think “two thumbs down” — but an objective, well-sourced effort to fact-check the Clarion Fund’s documentary.

But who, exactly, is “Nate Mellin” and why does he care about a blog post which highlights the far-right leanings of Clarion’s entire advisory board?

Using an e-mail address recorded by our comment system, it appears Mellin is associated with a company called JI Website Design and Development. That URL is part of JewishIdeas.com, “an Orthodox Web-Directory and Search.”  The company JI, according to its portfolio, designed the websites for Jerusalem Online University and Imagination Productions, among others.

All of these share common links to Aish HaTorah, the Israeli orthodox Jewish group which has denied having any formal links to the Clarion Fund. But Aish and Clarion once shared an address in New York; Clarion’s executive director, Raphael Shore, has worked as a full-time employee of Aish HaTorah and sits on the board of Imagination Productions; Rabbi Henry Harris and Rebecca Kabat incorporated the Clarion Fund, along with Raphael Shore, and served as employees of Aish HaTorah; Shore’s twin brother, Ephraim Shore was the executive director of Aish HaTorah in Miami and Toronto; and Clarion’s spokesperson, Gregory Ross, was an Aish HaTorah fundraiser.

Now we can add Nate Mellin, or “Nathan Meloul” as he is listed on his LinkedIn profile and his domain name registration, to the list of people whose activities appear to blur the line between Clarion and Aish HaTorah.

In his LinkedIn profile, he describes his current jobs as “Sr. Web Developer at Imagination Productions.” Imagination Productions produces JerusalemOnlineU.com, formerly known as AishCafe.com. The blog Failed Messiah looked into this and concluded: “Aish HaTorah changed the name of a missionary program, masked its connection to Aish, and uses it – and cash payments – to lure unsuspecting college students to Orthodoxy.”

Which brings us back to Mellin/Meloul. Why is he defending the Clarion Fund if he works for Imagination Productions?

The answer might lay in the Clarion Fund’s most recent 990, which lists $190,000 going to Imagination Productions to “help Imaginations further their mission of promoting Jewish Education.”

To summarize, Imagination Productions–whose board of directors includes Anne Ayalalon, the wife of Danny Ayalon, Israel’s Deputy Foreign Minister and former Ambassador to the U.S.–shares employees with Clarion and Aish HaTorah. Clarion helps fund Imagination. It should comes as no surprise that Imagination’s web-developer is defending the Clarion Fund’s documentaries. And all these institutional affiliations lead back to Aish HaTorah.

(We contacted Mellin/Melloul, Clarion, Jewish Ideas Website Design, Jerusalem Online U, and Imagination Productions for comment. As of press time, none had responded. We’ll update if we get anything.)

*UPDATE*

A Clarion Fund spokesperson confirmed to LobeLog that Nathan Melloul is a web designer for Imagination Productions. Melloul does not work for Clarion or RadicalIslam.org said the spokesperson.

When asked to explain the purpose of the $190,000 grant from Clarion to Imagination, the spokesperson responded that he doesn’t work with Clarion’s finances and, as a result, doesn’t know why the transfer took place.

He confirmed that Raphael Shore makes films with both Imagination and Clarion.

The “About Clarion Fund” page on the RadicalIslam.org website has added the following statement:

Clarion Fund was founded by Raphael Shore in 2006.  Shore is also the founder of Imagination Productions, a distributor of films relating to Jewish education; and JerusalemOnlineUniversity, a portal for online education.  Previously, Shore served in senior posts at Aish HaTorah.