[Vision2020] It’s Not About the Video

Art Deco art.deco.studios at gmail.com
Sun Sep 16 06:48:22 PDT 2012


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September 15, 2012
It’s Not About the Video By ROSS DOUTHAT

THE greatest mistake to be made right now, with our embassies under assault
and crowds chanting anti-American slogans across North Africa and the
Middle East, is to believe that what’s happening is a completely genuine
popular backlash against a blasphemous anti-Islamic video made right here
in the U.S.A.

There is a cringing way to make this mistake, embodied by the apologetic
press release that issued from the American embassy in Cairo on Tuesday as
the protests outside gathered steam, by the Obama White House’s
decision tolean on
YouTube<http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/envelope/cotown/la-et-ct-administration-asks-youtube-to-review-innocence-of-muslims-video-20120913,0,610679.story>to
take the offending video down, and by the various voices (including,
heaven help us, a tenured Ivy League
professor<http://www.usatoday.com/news/opinion/story/2012-09-12/Sam-Bacile-Anthea-Butler/57769732/1>)
suggesting that the video’s promoters be arrested for abusing their First
Amendment liberties.

But there’s also a condescending way to make the same error, which is to
stand up boldly for free speech while treating the mob violence as an
expression of foaming-at-the-mouth unreason, with no more connection to
practical politics than a buffalo stampede or a summer storm.

There is certainly unreason at work in the streets of Cairo and Benghazi,
but something much more calculated is happening as well. The mobs don’t
exist because of an offensive movie, and an American ambassador isn’t dead
because what appears to be a group of Coptic Christians in California
decided to use their meager talents to disparage the Prophet Muhammad.

What we are witnessing, instead, is mostly an exercise in old-fashioned
power politics, with a stone-dumb video as a pretext for violence that
would have been unleashed on some other excuse.

This has happened many times before, and Westerners should be used to it by
now. Anyone in need of a refresher course should consult Salman Rushdie’s
memoir, due out this week and excerpted in the latest New
Yorker<http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/09/17/120917fa_fact_rushdie?currentPage=all>,
which offers a harrowing account of what it felt like to live under an
ayatollah’s death threat, and watch as other people suffered at the hands
of mobs chanting for his head.

What Rushdie understands, and what we should understand as well, is that
the crucial issue wasn’t actually how the novelist had treated Islam’s
prophet in the pages of “The Satanic Verses.” The real issue, instead, was
the desire of Iran’s leaders to keep the flame of their revolution burning
after the debacle of the Iran-Iraq War, the desire of Pakistan’s Islamists
to test the religious bona fides of their country’s prime minister, and the
desire of religious extremists in Britain to cast themselves as spokesmen
for the Muslim community as a whole. (In this, some of them succeeded:
Rushdie dryly notes that an activist who declared of the novelist that
“death, perhaps, is a bit too easy for him” would eventually be knighted
“at the recommendation of the Blair government for his services to
community relations.”)

Today’s wave of violence, likewise, owes much more to a bloody-minded
realpolitik than to the madness of crowds. As The Washington Post’s David
Ignatius was among the first to point out, both the Egyptian and Libyan
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/david-ignatius-cairo-and-libya-attacks-point-to-radicals-jockeying-for-power/2012/09/12/d0d687d2-fcff-11e1-b153-218509a954e1_story.html>assaults
look like premeditated challenges to those countries’ ruling
parties by more extreme Islamist factions: Salafist parties in
Egypt<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/international/countriesandterritories/egypt/index.html?inline=nyt-geo>and
pro-Qaeda groups in
Libya<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/international/countriesandterritories/libya/index.html?inline=nyt-geo>.
(The fact that both attacks were timed to the anniversary of the 9/11
attacks should have been the first clue that this was something other than
a spontaneous reaction to an offensive video.)

The choice of American targets wasn’t incidental, obviously. The embassy
and consulate attacks were “about us” in the sense that anti-Americanism
remains a potent rallying point for popular discontent in the Islamic
world. But they weren’t about America’s tolerance for offensive,
antireligious speech. Once again, that was the pretext, but not the actual
cause.

Just as it was largely pointless, then, for the politicians of 1989 to
behave as if an apology from Rushdie himself might make the protests
subside (“It’s felt,” he recalls his handlers telling him, “that you should
do something to lower the temperature”), it’s similarly pointless to behave
as if a more restrictive YouTube policy or a more timely phone call from
the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of
Staff<http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0912/81184.html>to the
anti-Islam film’s promoters might have saved us from an autumn of
unrest.

What we’re watching unfold in the post-Arab Spring Mideast is the kind of
struggle for power that frequently takes place in a revolution’s wake:
between secular and fundamentalist forces in Benghazi, between the Muslim
Brotherhood and its more-Islamist-than-thou rivals in Cairo, with similar
forces contending for mastery from
Tunisia<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/international/countriesandterritories/tunisia/index.html?inline=nyt-geo>to
Yemen to the Muslim diaspora in Europe.

Navigating this landscape will require less naïveté than the Obama White
House has displayed to date, and more finesse than a potential Romney
administration seems to promise. But at the very least, it requires an
accurate understanding of the crisis’s roots, and a recognition that
policing speech won’t make our problems go away.


-- 
Art Deco (Wayne A. Fox)
art.deco.studios at gmail.com
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