A little context, courtesy of Pepe Escobar:
atimes.com/atimes/Global_Eco … 4Dj01.html
As I said, a lot of this reminds me of the 2005-2006 Mohammed cartoons ‘row’, which JUST SO HAPPENED to also start shortly after an anniversary of 9/11. Not that that means ANYTHING, of course, except to those who can get their head out of the elephant’s arse that is the political ‘debate’ being spun around this event for a few minutes.
A little more context, courtesy of some court documents. It turns out that the producer behind this ‘anti-Mohammed’ film was a Federal informant in a 2009 bank fraud case.
thesmokinggun.com/documents/ … ion-756920
You can read the documents via the link. You couldn’t make this shit up - EXCEPT THAT SOMEBODY DID.
Or perhaps such thoughts simply demonstrate our own hubris and blind faith in american values as the standard by which all the world ought to be measured?
But this goes back farther than that. America has been the “Great Satan” in the eyes of many, many arabs, for a long time, and just as before whipping up this goat serves a purpose, just as when “W” conjured the “Axis-of-Evil”. Herds have very poor vision and simply trust the reports of those supposedly positioned to have the best perspective. These islamicists are looking deep for any excuse to whip up that ol’ arab anger at the “Great Satan”, That, since Obama, has been looking less and less evil.
The US involvement in the ‘Arab world’ goes back a long time. I don’t think you’ll find much evidence of that view of America existing prior to the 1950s, it’s not like it’s some baseless, meaningless prejudice of entirely ignorant people.
Muslims are relatively easy to provoke, that’s for sure, but that’s all the more reason to recognise that in this instance, as in so many others, that they have been provoked.
How has the Great Satan been looking less evil since Obama? He has simply carried on where Bush left off.
Obama, and Europe, didn’t back Murbarak, didn’t act unilaterally. The Arab Spring that was earned and celebrated by Arabs, was in large part subsidized by this administration and it’s air superiority.
Sorry but i think Omar’s nailed it here.
They may be sensitive but as a movie-fan I am continually saddened never to see a Hollywood movie set in Heaven depicting God, whether comedy or otherwise. Its such a rare thing for us to depict the Christian God and God or Jesus would never be depicted in a movie if it portrayed him to have only negative personality traits.
In Islam, depiction of the Prophet of any kind is not allowed. It IS deeply offensive to them, and it is as understanadble to I, the atheist, as the Christians not wanting to make God look bad.
I think this comes down to the fact that devotion to religion has dwindled in the Christian world as newer technologies began to change the way we live. Even the Catholic church constantly reforms its policies so as to keep modern Christians content (at least from time to time) and the Muslim world has strictly adhered to their doctrine and non-secular way of life, which has restricted science for centuries. Now we are fighting an enemy who is living in the fourteenth century.
The Muslims hate what they see as decadence and loss of important cultural values, and we hate their world largely because of the way they treat women in most Islamic cultures. In my opinion Islam, in ensuring women remain secondary to men, and by covering them up etc… they are removing an important part of a man’s life from all Muslims - the interaction with women at a social level and courtship and so on… This is dangerous - look at Catholic priests and their records with child molestation - surely no-one can suggest these men were paedophiles before they became priests? There have been simply too many cases - it’s sociological.
All i have to say is if I was a Mulsim this video would likely make me pick up my AK too! It was sensitive with the Danish cartoon perhaps and with Rushdie’s writings but this video is different, you’ll no doubt agree if you’ve watched it yet. It is a delibarate attempt to stir tensions further if you ask me, but that’s just my opinion.
No, they backed the Muslim Brotherhood, a product of the CIA. I fail to see how this is different to previous incarnations of the President.
Muslims don’t really do irony…
A little more background on the filmmaker behind the ‘Innocence of Muslims’ video.
First a proviso…it wasn’t The Islamic World, it was some subset of it.
That said your response doesn’t quite work for me. A film is made as far as we know not through an official act of the US government and people attack US diplomates and embassies, even killing someone. IOW their values made them act on people who did not share their values, people who likely had nothing to do with what these people were pissed off about. Once that happens, what can one do but begin to react via one’s own models of reality and ethics?
Imagine is someone in Iran made a film about X - something offensive to me - and I ran over to the Iranian embassy and tried to kill someone or destroy a diplomats car or whatever. It would seem to me likely that Iranians would judge my actions via their own morality. One can pretend one does not have the reactions one has, but it seems to me that’s the only real option at that point.
I think you are being juvenile but I might be wrong
is not, in most cases, an honest experession of what one thinks and feels, once violence is on the table.
Which is not to weigh in on the ‘Western’ side against Muslim states. This is this incident, not remotely all incidents.
It scares me that people would think they need to be violent to protect their God from images or ideas, or their religion.
Neo con foreign policy scares me also.
The combination is a nightmare.
I think a lot of people are overlooking the obvious - that most of the Muslims pissed off about this film could not have actually seen it, hence it is not the film per se that in any way resulted in the violence…
Nope. Not even close. It’s hardly a uniquely American value which says that if one is insulted by someone and wishes to extract violent revenge, one should extract that revenge on the person or persons who did the insulting, and not on people who had no role in the insult.
That said, yes, i also condemn the extraction of violent revenge for non-violent actions, something which rioting Muslims seem to be ok with - perhaps that is where the cultures clash. If so, then i have no qualms about saying that my “values” are, in fact, preferable to theirs.
This is almost certainly the case - and the fact that so many have not actually seen the film just adds to the stupidity and savagery of the response.
UNLESS THEY WERE MOTIVATED BY SOMETHING ELSE.
Christ, some people are dim-witted…
Yes, i am aware that you probably think the whole thing is some kind of CIA conspiracy or something equally fantastic and sexy, but the fact is that’s silly and frankly dumb. Yes, the anti-American anger predates the film, but the film was the trigger.
I’ve provided you with evidence that the guy who made the film was a government informant, and evidence that the smash up in Benghazi was in response to the Zawahiri video, not this ‘Innocence of Muslims’ pile of crap. I’ve also pointed out that most of the people involved in this rioting can’t have actually seen the video, and hence aren’t directly motivated by its content.
Frankly, if you still think this is just because Muslims are stupid and easily riled then you haven’t got a clue what’s going on in the world. The same goes for everyone else on this thread using this as an opportunity to pretend like the only thing worth discussing here is just how stupid the Muslims are for behaving like this, which is most of the posters. You should all be ashamed of having formed such strong opinions without asking the most basic and obvious questions.
Product? Debatable.It always strikes me that people can think so little of others and so highly of themselves, that for example even our enemies are robbed of any originality. They are misbehaving tools. Has it ever occured to you that it was not the US govt using them as much as them using the US govt, when and how it suited them? Maybe in the imagination of Cheney and the like, there ARE “products”, but in the practical world there are no sure bets, and man is known as fickle.
The administration backed the people of Egypt and Lybia. But the Muslim Brotherhood is no stranger in this lands; we are. It is their playground. They are terrorists to us, but within their society they are teachers and doctors of the poor. If there was a “product” of Washington it is not the Brotherhood but Murbarak. Obama was criticised, I think by McCain, precisely because he let an “ally” fall and attacked a Qadafi regime that had become pliant to American interests.
So ratting out others to reduce his prison sentence means that he now works for the government full time and they hired him to create a half ass movie desecrating Islam. Yeah, sure.
“No role” is a matter of opinion. Freedom to produce insulting media is protected by govt authorities, and so, it made embassyes accessories to the religious insult. It is not a mere muslim vice to take revenge on innocent by-standers. When Rodney King was brutalized by police, it was followed by riots and looting. It is a mistake to think that ALL violence is related, caused, by the insult or beating. It merely presents a moment of opportunity for those that care nothing about the beaten person or the insulted prophet, and from the reports we are getting that this attack was coordinated and perhaps even planned weeks before, one has to wonder if the murders were not simply targets of opportunity.
I agree that one should not kill a a person for saying something we don’t like, but what one says can get you killed, and not simply because you say the wrong thing around a muslim. It is a protected freedom precisely because it is not something that is naturally aspirated by all, including muslims, including CHRISTIANS, who in the height of their power DID prosecute and killed people for what they believed and not for what they did. In both cases, it has to be noted, the values of the founders, be it Jesus or Muhammed, were violated. The inquisition did not prove for me that Christians were savages, however, as this outbreak has seemingly proved to you that muslims are.
Nope, but the fact he has multiple identities and that this is not the only case where he ‘turned’ informant (as noted in the article I posted) should give you pause for thought about who this person is and what he represents…