<div class="header">
<div class="left">
<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/"><img src="http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/misc/nytlogo153x23.gif" alt="The New York Times" align="left" border="0" hspace="0" vspace="0"></a>
</div>
<div class="right">
<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/adx/bin/adx_click.html?type=goto&opzn&page=www.nytimes.com/printer-friendly&pos=Position1&sn2=336c557e/4f3dd5d2&sn1=6c46ff2e/878a3ce7&camp=FSL2012_ArticleTools_120x60_1787510c_nyt5&ad=Sessions_120x60_Aug20_NoText&goto=http%3A%2F%2Fwww%2Efoxsearchlight%2Ecom%2Fthesessions" target="_blank">
<img src="http://graphics8.nytimes.com/adx/images/ADS/30/88/ad.308851/Sessions_NYT120x60_Rev_aug20.gif" border="0" height="60" width="120"></a>
</div>
</div>
<br clear="all"><hr align="left" size="1">
<div class="timestamp">September 15, 2012</div>
<h1>It’s Not About the Video</h1>
<h6 class="byline">By
<span><span>ROSS DOUTHAT</span></span></h6>
<div id="articleBody">
<p>
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. </p>
<p>
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<a title="Los Angeles Times article" href="http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/envelope/cotown/la-et-ct-administration-asks-youtube-to-review-innocence-of-muslims-video-20120913,0,610679.story"> lean on YouTube</a> to take the offending video down, and by the various voices (including, heaven help us, a <a title="USA Today" href="http://www.usatoday.com/news/opinion/story/2012-09-12/Sam-Bacile-Anthea-Butler/57769732/1">tenured Ivy League professor</a>) suggesting that the video’s promoters be arrested for abusing their First Amendment liberties. </p>
<p>
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. </p>
<p>
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. </p>
<p>
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. </p>
<p>
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 <a href="http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/09/17/120917fa_fact_rushdie?currentPage=all">excerpted in the latest New Yorker</a>,
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. </p>
<p>
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.”) </p>
<p>
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 <a title="Washington Post" href="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">Egyptian and Libyan </a>
assaults look like premeditated challenges to those countries’ ruling
parties by more extreme Islamist factions: Salafist parties in <a href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/international/countriesandterritories/egypt/index.html?inline=nyt-geo" title="More news and information about Egypt." class="meta-loc">Egypt</a> and pro-Qaeda groups in <a href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/international/countriesandterritories/libya/index.html?inline=nyt-geo" title="More news and information about Libya." class="meta-loc">Libya</a>.
(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.) </p>
<p>
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. </p>
<p>
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 <a title="Politico" href="http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0912/81184.html">phone call from the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff</a> to the anti-Islam film’s promoters might have saved us from an autumn of unrest. </p>
<p>
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 <a href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/international/countriesandterritories/tunisia/index.html?inline=nyt-geo" title="More news and information about Tunisia." class="meta-loc">Tunisia</a> to Yemen to the Muslim diaspora in Europe. </p>
<p>
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. </p><br clear="all"></div><br>-- <br>Art Deco (Wayne A. Fox)<br><a href="mailto:art.deco.studios@gmail.com" target="_blank">art.deco.studios@gmail.com</a><br><br><img src="http://users.moscow.com/waf/WP%20Fox%2001.jpg"><br>
<br>