Philadelphia Weekly

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Ani DiFranco at the Electric Factory. (Photograph by Lauren Trzaska.)

I'm off to hang with American right-wingers obsessed with the threat of Islamic terrorism. I'm walking up the long, leafy driveway to the New Covenant Church in Mt. Airy where I'll sit in a huge and horribly overheated theater, under a looming cross, surrounded by 400 or so folks who think Bush is a great president and who've forked over $9.90 each to be bombarded with terrifying images of ranting, gun-waving, explosive-vest-wearing, mad-eyed, Nazi-saluting, America-hating, Jew-loathing, Christian-despising Muslim terrorists who, if they got the chance, would kill everybody in this room with their bare teeth and then laugh about it while playing soccer with a dead baby on a gruesome Internet video.

There's a beep-beep-beep. I look around. A black woman wearing a Muslim headscarf leans out the window of a beat-up Cadillac with a determined look on her face. Ohmygodohmygodohmygod.

"Excuse me," she says. "Do you know how we can get to Chestnut Hill Children's Hospital? Only the road's blocked."

We're here to watch a documentary called Obsession: Radical Islam's War Against the West. It's being presented by Philadelphia's right-wing talk radio station WNTP-AM, and its Christian sister station WFIL FaithTalk AM560.

We kick off with a short speech from Christian broadcaster Mark Daniels. He makes the first of many references to Adolf Hitler and the Nazis.

"It's no coincidence this is Holocaust Day," he says, "the day that saw the liberation of Auschwitz." By the Soviet Union's Red Army, he fails to add.

"We didn't see the signs back then either," he says. I want to shout that plenty of people on the left did. And said so. And actually fought against fascism in Spain and on the streets of London and Berlin.

But I don't.

Then it's the star turn. Right-wing talk radio host and self-styled "culture warrior" Michael Medved looks even more like a Muppet in the flesh.

He says it's his 23rd wedding anniversary. We all go "aw." The woman behind me shouts "mazel tov!" This will be a feature of the evening, the audience reacting as one--gasping when shocked, rumbling when disturbed, groaning when disgusted--punctuating the mood music with yells of "that's right" or "no" or "Oh my god."

Medved gets the veterans in the crowd to stand up. We love-bomb them. Medved says it's because of the troops we can all go home safely tonight. He must be gambling there's no one here from North Philly.

Medved calls Islamic radicals "neo-Nazis." But he goes out of his way to tell us most Muslims are good Muslims and not fanatics or murderers or neo-Nazis. Which is jolly nice of him.

This good Muslim/evil Muslim dichotomy is hammered home in the first few moments of Obsession--the movie we've all come to see.

Then Obsession segues into a montage of Islamist terrorist attacks, set against a soft disco-rock soundtrack that strikes the perfect balance between '70s porn and the ohmygod, heart-in-mouth symphonic terror rock that accompanies Jack Bauer's exploits in 24.

After each terror attack a red cross appears on a graphic map. Faster and faster they appear, more and more of them, spreading unstoppably, like a tidal wave, like an explosion, like a plague.

Next a series of talking heads--some former Muslims, some former terrorists--tell us how mad, bad and dangerous the evil Muslims are.

They're paranoid, says one talking head. They think, "there's an enemy out there who wants to get us."

"If you want to get people to fight, you have to get them to think there's a threat and a danger," says another pundit.