[Vision2020] It’s Not About the Video

[Sunil Ramalingam]

Amazing! No connection to our foreign policy!

Sunil

Date: Sun, 16 Sep 2012 09:48:22 -0400
From: art.deco.studios at gmail.com
To: vision2020 at moscow.com
Subject: [Vision2020] It’s Not About the Video




   
   


   
   




   


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 to lean on YouTube to take the offending video down, and by the various voices (including, heaven help us, a tenured Ivy League professor) 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,
 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 
 assaults look like premeditated challenges to those countries’ ruling 
parties by more extreme Islamist factions: Salafist parties in Egypt and pro-Qaeda groups in Libya.
 (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 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 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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