Missteps in the U.S. Response to the YouTube Film on the Prophet Mohammed?

[DWill]

First I've heard of either that internet site or the theory that Israeli agents had the video made and distributed to fire up American resolve against Muslims. But I think of what's always said about extraordinary claims needing extraordinary proof, and there isn't any given. What's wrong with the motive featuring the Coptic Christian who hates Muslims for obvious reasons and wants to zing them good with an inflammatory "movie"? It's hard to fit what's known about "Sam Bacile" into a whole scenario of the Israeli Secret Police hiring him to make his inane film. Anyway, I'm always puzzled by people on the left joining the anti-Zionist cause to the extent that they seem to be taking up for Muslim fundamentalists. What's up with that?

[DWill]

I guess I never answered my own question about what, if anything, the U.S. did wrong in its response to the "Innocence of Muslims" fiasco. I never heard the word "apologize" used, which was good because there's nothing our govt. can apologize for in this instance. It was not good for the Obama admin. to request that Google "review" the video, since its hope in doing so was that Google would take the video down. I don't even think Hillary Clinton should have called the film "disgusting and reprehensible." The film isn't even anything you can take that seriously, but more importantly we don't want to set a precedent where it becomes expected for our gov. to denounce everything offensive to people that goes up on the internet.
Overall, I give the Obama people a "B."

[youkrst]

First I've heard of either that internet site

oh, my link to the ICH story was simply to demonstrate how a "ruckus" was escalated by a third party. The press for example can be so relatively silent on some aspects (ie. snipers on rooves) and so relatively noisy on other aspects, so i was using that story as an example where i heard all about the "muslim extremists turning nasty" but didn't hear a thing about "snipers on rooves firing on both sides".

in my view both sides are being played, the average westerner and the average middle easterner would i think have very little trouble enjoying a nice meal together yet the average westerner has a head full of "crazy muslim terrorists" and the average middle easterner has a front yard full of drone strikes and invasions and islamophobes.

seems to me the extremists and leaders and men who would be king are the ones who benefit while the average man does all the suffering.

who benefits from war, certaily not the average middle easterner OR the average westerner, rather it would seem arms dealers and wannabe leaders along with geo-political manipulators, banks politicians etc etc they would be the beneficiaries.

moderation on all sides seems to be the main casualty.

the theory that Israeli agents had the video made and distributed to fire up American resolve against Muslims.

no matter who put the fox amongst the chickens (even if it was a plastic fox) the resulting kerfuffle is perfect for a bit of "see we told you those mad muslims are coming so turn a blind eye a little longer while we bomb the crap out of 'em some more and get all the regime change we need to further our agenda" kinda action.

I'm always puzzled by people on the left joining the anti-Zionist cause to the extent that they seem to be taking up for Muslim fundamentalists. What's up with that?

i dont know much about people on the left but if you aren't anti-zionist you are surely ill-informed, even many jews don't like zionists, they are a problem if you like peace.

i wouldn't take up for Muslim fundamentalists but it seems to me the problem here is the duality thinking either/or, them/us, jew/arab, for us/against us, etc etc whereas i listen to BOTH sides and i think leadership on both sides fails to DO what the people want, the people an end to bombs, guns, deaths, maimed loved ones etc etc but there is no money or power in that for whoever hungers for that sort of thing.

manipulators have to have a conflict, the commies are coming, the muslims are coming, jesus is coming, justin bieber is coming lol fear and conflict = chaos and out of the chaos we can see a new world order coming into view, but whose world order is it, certainly not one that empowers the common man who is my main interest in all this.

I don't even think Hillary Clinton should have called the film "disgusting and reprehensible."

she may have been looking in the mirror when she said that

The film isn't even anything you can take that seriously

exactly, most of the people in oz protesting hadn't even seen it, it was just an excuse to let out a lot of frustration and crazy energy. a lot of "dumb power" built up over years of everything from wmd's to invasions to racism and who knows what else.

looking at it, the whole thing is "we are all in this together" and the west AND the east are constantly being lead into conflict that benefits the common man not one iota.

so who are these leaders that keep doing stuff that we dont want but keep paying for, until we take the credit card off them they will keep buying useless crap that kills both our children.

[DWill]

"What a Billion Muslims Really Think" had a lot of rational discussion of the problems in relationship between the U.S. and majority Muslim countries. Its main value is that it was based on a massive effort by Gallup Polls to interview Muslims. I haven't dug into the raw numbers of subjects. The biggest challenge that the film brings out for me, considering how much I've absorbed about the righteousness of Israel's cause, is how to unchain from that and identify with the very negative feelings that even moderate and liberal Muslims have for the favoring of Israel by the U.S.

Beware, though, of only one thing: the doc is interrupted many times by an obnoxious cat video.

[Robert Tulip]

Here is an article worth reading. It is shocking that not one of the world's top 500 universities is in an Islamic country, and the Arab world has published less books in total than Spain alone produces in a year. Islam is a force for stagnation and conflict. It is important to criticise Islam in order to help bring its benighted followers into the modern world.

Islam faces its demons

by: DAVID PRYCE-JONES
From:The Australian
September 22, 2012

THE battle is on for the Islamic soul, and it is a crucial battle of our age. Primarily it involves Arabs, who must decide what kind of people they wish to be and what sort of contribution they will make to the rest of humankind.

They cannot answer such questions without also deciding the part played by Islam, their historic faith, in affirming their identity and its role in modern civil society.

A billion other Muslims, from the US to Europe, Asia to Australia, are watching and waiting. Depending which way the battle goes, the West will have a willing partner or an implacable enemy. The stakes could hardly be higher.

One of the most confusing factors at work is that many Muslims don't really know what to think of the West. They often imitate what they say they hate.

Not so very long ago, the Muslim world, with the exception of some deserts and mountains, had fallen into the hands of Europeans. Those Europeans set up a number of nations as they saw fit and off-handedly put an end to the caliphate that was supposed to be ruling the entire Muslim community.

The introduction of new-fangled ideas such as democracy, with political parties and elections and the rule of law, were so many invitations to Arabs and Muslims to come to terms with the present time. But the invitation was spurned.

The sight of British, French or Soviet troops on Arab streets led to the perception that Muslims could have allowed such a scandal to happen only because they were inferior, victims through no fault of their own.

In a culture that mandates shame for coming off second best in any encounter, it's pointless telling people that there's no shame attached to the course of history, and that the world is as it is. Shame is put to rest, and honour recovered, only when some action levels the score.

This was a tall order but in one Muslim country after another, army officers set about winning the independence that would certify honour. They succeeded. The societies they then built were centralised and militarised, in fact imitations of the totalitarianism that had done such damage to Europe. The intention to modernise and reform ended in brutality and vandalism.

Arab philosophical and political equivalents of a Locke, a Montesquieu, a Jefferson, might have helped launch an experiment in democracy, but they did not emerge. There are writers and academics today, such as Fouad Ajami and Kanan Makiya, who are brilliant expositors of what's wrong, but to my knowledge there are no thinkers analysing what a modern Arab society would be like and how to achieve it.

The Muslim Brotherhood wanted to achieve the same ends of independence and dignity but by different means.

For them, a rightfully ordered Islamic world satisfies the laws God decreed for the faithful in the Koran, and these are closed to the slightest modification, his words unalterable forever.

Obedience is the demand placed on the faithful, with the death penalty obligatory in cases of disobedience. Scholarship long ago took the mystique of divine revelation out of the Christian Bible, but nothing like that has been done with the Koran. Like communism, Islam is an ideology with no conceivable half-measures.

Originally just a handful of friends in Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood has grown into an international body, representing the Sunni branch of Islam in at least 60 countries. One of the Brothers, Sayyid Qutb, was the author of many books arguing that only a return to the Islam of the early caliphate would restore Muslim power and dignity.

Promulgated everywhere, the Brotherhood program is regressive and totalitarian: "Allah is our objective, the prophet Mohammed is our leader, the Koran is our law, jihad is our way. Death for the sake of Allah is our most exalted aspiration."

For several decades Islamist extremists such as the Muslim Brothers have fought it out with the army, the former assassinating secular military figureheads, the latter imprisoning and executing Islamists, including Sayyid Qutb.

This power struggle expanded into a global issue once Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini had seized power in Iran in the coup of 1979. Tall and gaunt, he was forbidding in his black robes and turban, devising a constitution that made him Supreme Leader, a clerical dictator.

Iran is the leading Shia country, but Khomeini appealed to the Sunni majority to unite into a single Muslim identity. The proposed Islamic Awakening Front would drive the US and Israel out of the Middle East and spread the word of Allah until the whole world was united under Islam. Khomeini openly rejoiced in the use of violence: "Islam says kill all the unbelievers, just as they would kill you all."

Quite probably Khomeini was acting in bad faith over his Islamic Awakening Front. His revolution, he said, was not about lowering the price of watermelons but subjecting the world to Allah. This was quickly perceived as promotion of the Shia cause exclusively.

In Lebanon, Iran has been arming and financing Hezbollah, a Shia militia of 10,000 volunteers with an arsenal estimated at 60,000 missiles capable of striking anywhere in Israel. Spokesmen for the regime up to and including Khomeini's successor as Supreme Leader and his President keep promising in Hitlerite language to wipe out Israel. The development of the Iranian nuclear program is a threat to Sunnis as well.

Nouri al-Maliki, leader of one of the main Shia parties in Iraq, and Prime Minister there, has sentenced, so far in absentia, his Sunni counterpart to death.

Syria has a Sunni majority but two dictators, Hafez al-Assad and his son Bashar, belonging to the Alawite minority, between them have ruled for 40 years. Alawites are affiliated to Shi'ites, and the Assads voluntarily turned Syria into an Iranian protectorate.

When the Syrian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood rebelled in 1982, Hafez al-Assad killed no fewer than 25,000, probably many more. In a dreadful symmetry, about the same number have been killed under Bashar al-Assad.

Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Egypt line up for the Sunnis against Syria, Iran and Hezbollah for the Shi'ites, in a reprise of the sectarian confrontation that goes back to the earliest years of Islam. Combatants who once hacked off their enemies' heads in the field are replaced by a pilot flying a Russian jet over one of his own cities and dropping bombs on houses without knowing who is inside. Violence in these circumstances is the natural functioning of a political process that invariably comes down to a test of strength.

Pretexts for provoking Western democracies are easy to manipulate, and they have to be seen as the equivalent of gathering intelligence about the enemy's intentions and willpower, the difference being that innocent people lose their lives.

The crowd wanted to kill Salman Rushdie, for instance, but his novel had been published in English, a language they couldn't read to discover for themselves if he really was blaspheming. A single imam in Denmark reporting on cartoons in a provincial paper showing the prophet Mohammed set off a chain reaction of riots.

None of the crowd that attacked the US consulate in Benghazi had actually seen the mysterious video supposedly libelling the prophet Mohammed, but hearsay was enough for them.

Young women in burkas are seen at demonstrations brandishing placards with wobbly lettering in English, "Behead whoever insults Islam", obviously directed at non-believers.

A French satirical magazine pokes fun at the prophet and France closes 20 embassies for fear of reprisals. The rage behind slogans such as "Death to America!" or "Death to Israel!" is sincere, which makes this political theatre and the culture driving it all the more tragic.

Daily life on the Arab and Muslim street confronts individuals with hard choices and tests. The cruelty and criminality of the ayatollahs and the military dictators has been on a par. To whom should the individual turn for rectifying grievances and injustices? Are army officers or Muslim Brothers the better bet as job providers? Half the population of many Arab countries live on $2 a day, while the ruling families of Saudi Arabia and the Gulf emirates own their national economies.

And in the rightly ordered Islamic world there is an unequal relationship between Muslims and non-believers, and between men and women. A Christian caught practising the faith in Saudi Arabia is likely to be beheaded in public; a half-million Christians have fled Iraq; Islamists regularly attack and kill Christian Copts in Egypt and burn down their churches.

About half of Arab women are illiterate and in Arab Africa many undergo genital mutilation. No Arab university features on the list of the best 500 universities in the world. The number of books published in Arabic in the past thousand years is the equivalent of a year's publication in Spain. The total gross national product of the Arab world is the same as Finland's. Many of the young face chronic unemployment or the hardships of emigration. Boatpeople, and sometimes empty boats, wash up all along the coasts of Spain and Italy, and Australia.

The Arab Spring at first appeared to be about freedom. Dictators who had been in power for two or three decades, four in the case of Muammar Gaddafi, were forced into exile or lynched. It was unprecedented that former Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak was not lynched or forced into exile but given a reasonably fair trial and sentenced to prison.

The Muslim Brotherhood promised it would share power. But the leader of the movement has confirmed its ideological aim is "reforming the individual, followed by building the society, the government and then a rightly guided caliphate and finally mastership of the whole world".

A million people assembled in Cairo to listen to SheikYusuf al-Qaradawi, now in his 80s and a Muslim Brotherhood spokesman as influential as Sayyid Qutb had been. He preaches that one day soon Islam will command the obedience of the US, and he has a good word for Hitler's handling of Jews.

In recent elections, the Brotherhood won enough votes to appoint a senior member, Mohammed Morsi, as first civilian President. Installed, he purged the army, the media and the judiciary, while proposing to have a constitution drafted that would leave Egypt in the permanent possession of the Brotherhood.

"Arab Spring? What Spring?" asks one of the many Egyptians disillusioned by the Brotherhood takeover. "I see only an utter and complete rape of the nation that was the cradle of civilisation by an ideology that is the most detrimental factor at the base of misery, repression and loss that humanity has ever seen in all its history." For him and those like him, the Muslim Brotherhood has hijacked a religion to achieve "ruinous and obnoxious goals".

Democracy is the sole credible way of escaping from the totalitarian dead-end in which the Arabs have landed themselves.

President George W. Bush made a brave but dangerous attempt at bringing in key changes via Iraq. President Barack Obama takes the opposite view: that Arabs have to find their own way out of the confusion. His idea of a helping hand is to assent to a conference, also dangerous in its own way, to see whether criticism of Islam might be banned outright.

Statistics are uncertain, but tens of millions of Muslims have settled in Australia, Europe and the US. No doubt the scrapping of all restrictions on entry and work would lead to an emptying of Muslim lands.

The future is with those who are here. Someone among them will have to work out how Islam can become a force for integration rather than separation. In the absence of such a person, the culture clash will turn nasty.

Historian David Pryce-Jones is a senior editor at National Review.

[youkrst]

THE battle is on for the Islamic soul

i cant help feeling we'd do a little better in the battle for the islamic soul if we'd stop dropping bombs on their islamic bodies.

the battle is on alright, but does the owner of the aforementioned soul have any say in the matter or will the exalted leaders do whatever the hell they want regardless of the desire or benefit of the people. (business as usual).

[Robert Tulip]

Samuel Huntington wrote a fine book about 20 years ago called The Clash of Civilizations

Huntington argues that civilizational conflicts are "particularly prevalent between Muslims and non-Muslims", identifying the "bloody borders" between Islamic and non-Islamic civilizations. This conflict dates back as far as the initial thrust of Islam into Europe, its eventual expulsion in the Iberian reconquest, the attacks of the Ottoman Turks on Eastern Europe and Vienna, and the European imperial division of the Islamic nations in the 1800s and 1900s.

Huntington also believes that some of the factors contributing to this conflict are that both Christianity and Islam are:
Missionary religions, seeking conversion of others
Universal, "all-or-nothing" religions, in the sense that it is believed by both sides that only their faith is the correct one
Teleological religions, that is, that their values and beliefs represent the goals of existence and purpose in human existence.
Irreligious people who violate the base principles of those religions are perceived to be furthering their own pointless aims, which leads to violent interactions.

More recent factors contributing to a Western-Islamic clash, Huntington wrote, are the Islamic Resurgence and demographic explosion in Islam, coupled with the values of Western universalism—that is, the view that all civilizations should adopt Western values—that infuriate Islamic fundamentalists. All these historical and modern factors combined, Huntington wrote briefly in his Foreign Affairs article and in much more detail in his 1996 book, would lead to a bloody clash between the Islamic and Western civilizations. The political party Hizb ut-Tahrir also reiterate Huntington's views in their published book, The Inevitability of Clash of Civilisation.

[DWill]

Reading Kahneman's Thinking Fast and Slow is certainly increasing doubts about my ability to penetrate to the core of many complex subjects, such as the nature of the so-called Muslim world. I simply don't have the knowledge or experience to have any certainty about this or other questions which are multivariate. All I can do is describe what's in my head and compare it to what's in other people's heads. I would wish that they, too, would be tentative about their claims, but this doesn't often seem to be the case.

Kahneman's section on the availability heuristic is especially relevant to this topic. The availability heuristic describes the process whereby the items we call into our minds with the greatest speed and ease apear to us as naturally the most salient items and therefore the ones on which we base our judgment of the truth. Availability depends on the emotional power of images, which may in turn depend on which images we have most frequently been shown by the media. We don't often even realize that we're being given a limited menu. It's sort of like WYSIATI, too, or what you see is all there is. The images we've been fed by media, and the pronouncements by politicians, strongly influence availability as it operates in our minds. This is how we may come to think of Muslims as generally extreme, implacable opponents. We see the images of terrorists and hear what our leaders are telling us about the danger their kind represents.

The Gallup polling tells quite a different story about what Muslims really think. I recommend watching the documentary. It does give some support for the point of view taken by the author of the article Robert posted, though I think writer totally misses the role that the West (U.S. especially) has played in holding Muslim countries back from successfuly participating in the modern world. The polling indicates that 7% of Muslims are radicalized. That translates to a very large number of radicals, and it explains why there is so much violent extremism in many of these countries. Yet the rest do not want to be associated with such politics. The rest want to be safe from such politics, since most victims of extremist Muslims are Muslims themselves.

It's true that Muslim countries are in the end responsible for the societies they create. One thing that we in the West don't understand well is what saffron said about the value that sanctity has in Muslim societies. We can't expect them to forget about their sacred ideas; they will form religious societies one way or another, but this won't preclude progress for them, at least in a social or political sense. We're making a big mistake if we think that their religion inevitably means a violent clash with the West.