New Wave of Anti-American Protests in the Middle East and North Africa

[C. Flower]

"...but I don't think people have a right to be deliberately abusive of other peoples' beliefs."

In other words, you would support a blasphemy law.

No. An incitement to hatred law. We already have one here.

[Captain Con O'Sullivan]

'Incitement to hatred'. How the ***** does one transfer a hatred to another human being? A process of osmosis?

Half the stupid of the world are guilty of 'inciting hatred' when they instruct their children that their mosque/church/synagogue is the only place where the rightful god can be found and all the rest are wrong.

That is inherently an incitement to division and an invitation to see the other as a 'lesser' being.

If 'incitement to hatred' were to be tackled properly every priest, rabbi and imam would be behind bars.

Ufortunately they aren't. So 'incitement to hatred' becomes whatever any politico wants it to mean.

A nonsense charge unless is it generally applied.

[Count Bobulescu]

It may be lost on some Europeans, but the “West” does not universally hate Islam.

By comparison to the UK or France, the 6.2 million Muslim community in the US is much better integrated into society at large than in Europe. No marching in protest after prayers etc. Witness these comments from a leader whose mosque had just been subjected to a rare bout of vandalism.

“Nothing like this has ever happened to us before, even after 9/11,” said Ehsan Ahmed, a director of the Islamic Center of Harrisonburg mosque and an economics professor at nearby James Madison University. “We have always been welcomed here, and we participate in many community activities. We can’t say what their motive was, but the timing is very coincidental.”

http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/...y.html?hpid=z3

[Captain Con O'Sullivan]

Of course they don't. Unfortunately the clowns who get the newspaper columns and digital airspace decide on the narrative. And they profit from engendering such hatreds and suspicions.

Best possible result for the entire world would be if the average joe in east and west slung a rope over the nearest tree and by common accord rid the world of its homegrown nutters.

The world would be a far finer place the following morning- both east and west.

[riposte]

It may be lost on some Europeans, but the “West” does not universally hate Islam.

By comparison to the UK or France, the 6.2 million Muslim community in the US is much better integrated into society at large than in Europe. No marching in protest after prayers etc. Witness these comments from a leader whose mosque had just been subjected to a rare bout of vandalism.

“Nothing like this has ever happened to us before, even after 9/11,” said Ehsan Ahmed, a director of the Islamic Center of Harrisonburg mosque and an economics professor at nearby James Madison University. “We have always been welcomed here, and we participate in many community activities. We can’t say what their motive was, but the timing is very coincidental.”


http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/...y.html?hpid=z3

Count ....... those comments would fit in perfectly on the "Castle Catholics" thread. Did you ever read "Uncle Tom's Cabin."?

[Richardbouvet]

C. Flower, I agree that an incitement to hatred law is a good thing.

However, using incitement to hatred laws to penalise or ban material that may be insulting to religious leaders is a very dangerous road to go down.

Rushdie's "Satanic verses" was not an incitement to hatred, but if some Moslems kick up enough do we ban it under that guise? Also, what do we do about the serious scholars who genuinely believe certain inconvenient things about the Prophet Mohammed, just as some others believe pretty damning things about the Christian Holy Family?

In my view, we must not allow religious censorship to come in by the back door of incitement to hatred legislation. That is doubly true if we are banning it through fear of these infantile, violent tantrums from a section (a minority, I trust) of the Muslim population.

[Captain Con O'Sullivan]

Political correctness IS the new religion. Fully intend to be a heretic and infidel there too. Swablocks to the university campus priests.

[Count Bobulescu]

Post-Arab Spring States: Magnets for Extremism

The anti-American protests that targeted U.S. embassies throughout the Middle East last week suggest that in the near term, the greatest peril in the wake of the Arab Spring may come from the model of Lebanon: a weak democracy with inadequate institutions and security forces that are unable or unwilling to confront the Islamic extremists in their midst, as National Journal's James Kitfield and Sara Sorcher report.

http://www.nationaljournal.com//nati...emism-20120917

Here’s another attempt to figure out the reasons for the protests.

[1] Drone strikes.
[2] Israel-Palestine.
[3] American troops in Muslim countries

http://www.theatlantic.com/internati...otests/262440/


The stakes in the Rushdie fatwa just got a bit higher. Since Rushdie had exactly nothing to do with Innocence of Muslims, the 15 Khordad Foundation has upped the reward on killing author Salman Rushdie by $500,000. The fatwa against Rushdie goes back to 1989, when Iran's then-leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini declared the portrayal of Muhammad in The Satanic Verses blasphemous and called for Rushdie's murder. The 15 Khordad Foundation seized on the recent uproar over an anti-Islam film to raise the bounty on Rushdie from $2.8 million to $3.3 million. "As long as the exalted Imam Khomeini’s historical fatwa against apostate Rushdie is not carried out, it won’t be the last insult," says the foundation's head Ayatollah Hassan Saneii. Rushdie's memoir of living under constant threat of death, Joseph Anton, comes out this week. [The Washington Post]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/...0e8_print.html

[C. Flower]

Parts of the Internet are deeply in mourning for one of the US dead, Sean Smith, aka Vile Rat, an important and respected EVE Online diplomat.

http://www.geekosystem.com/libya-vile-rat/

[Count Bobulescu]

Video Shows a Crowd of Good Samaritans After the Attack in Benghazi

A new video surfaced over the weekend showing a group of unknown men pulling Ambassador Christopher Stevens from the burned-out wreckage of the American consulate in Benghazi. But who are they and why where they there?
The video, which was posted on YouTube with no other details by a freelance videographer, Fahd al-Bakoush, a freelance videographer. The AP spoke to him, but does not add anything about the other people in the video besides that they are civilians. The clip shows what appears to the body of Stevens being lifted through a window, by men who had apparently gone inside the building and then came back out through the same window. It seems to conform to the accepted theory about the way he died — that he was trapped in an inner room after attackers set the building on fire and died from smoke inhalation rather than a physical assault by the attackers

.
http://www.theatlanticwire.com/globa...enghazi/56929/

Here’s a two part interview with correspondents in Cairo and Tripoli. 8 mins total.

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/world...ts2_09-14.html

[Count Bobulescu]

Newsweek sinks deeper into the mire. It has come in for a lot of criticism for some of it’s recent covers and content. New editor Tina Brown is going for the lowest common denominator.

Sure, Ayaan Hirsi Ali's story is a worthy read, but it's mostly about Salman Rushdie and her personal departure from Islamic fundamentalism ("I know something about the subject. In 1989, when I was 19, I piously, even gleefully, participated in a rally in Kenya to burn Rushdie’s book The Satanic Verses," she writes), not about last week's news. But we still can't get past that cover. Man that cover--that font, the two angry faces that are standing in for all Muslims, their fists

.... Having learned their lesson from incendiary covers like making President Obama Gay and following it up with its record-setting and hardly factual "Hit the Road Barack" cover line (it was one of the magazine's best selling issues since 2010 and was penned by Hirsi Ali's husband Niall Ferguson ), we now have "Muslim Rage" staring at us in the face this morning.

http://www.theatlanticwire.com/busin...im-rage/56923/

[C. Flower]

Video Shows a Crowd of Good Samaritans After the Attack in Benghazi
.
http://www.theatlanticwire.com/globa...enghazi/56929/

Here’s a two part interview with correspondents in Cairo and Tripoli. 8 mins total.

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/world...ts2_09-14.html

Interesting. Thanks. There is still very little hard information on what happened.

[Count Bobulescu]

On Tuesday, Egypt's general prosecutor issued eight arrest warrants for anti-Muslim U.S. pastor Terry Jones, producer Nakoula Basseley Nakoula and six other Coptic Christians associated with the incendiary film Innocence of Muslims, the Associated Press reports. The prosecutor's office says the seven men and one woman could face the death penalty and are charged with "harming national unity, insulting and publicly attacking Islam and spreading false information."

It's not clear where the other Coptic Christians live (an AFP report names them as Adel Riad, Morris Sadek, Nabil Bissada, Esmat Zaklama, Elia Bassily, Ihab Yaacoub and Jack Atallah) but the prosecutor says they are outside of Egypt at the moment. Meanwhile Jones and Nakoula live in the free lands of Florida and California, respectively, where it's not a crime to make or promote a movie that depicts the prophet Muhammad as an effete homosexual.

http://www.theatlanticwire.com/globa...lmmaker/56972/

[riposte]

http://www.theatlanticwire.com/globa...lmmaker/56972/

I love your deadpan delivery Count

[Count Bobulescu]

Re Post #101

Gawker had a powerful response to Newsweek's "Muslim Rage" story; it is worth checking out both the original story and the reply. In the "evolution of journalism" chronicles, it must signify something that the proudly tabloidish and amoral Gawker is positioning itself as conscience-of-the-industry in this case.

Just for the record, and because I found it interesting, below and after the jump is a long message from a young Muslim-American reader on how the turmoil in the Middle East, and U.S. coverage of the uprisings, seem from his perspective. One big implicit message involves the ways America's absorption and recognition of its growing Muslim population differ at the moment from its attitudes toward other minority groups. More on this later on.

http://www.theatlantic.com/national/...m-rage/262507/

The tagged reactions to Newsweek's proposal have been ... mixed. Some tweets are funny. Some are satirical. Some are cruel. But they are pretty much united in their rejection of Newsweek's premise that "Muslim rage" is something to be talked about, under the magazine's brand, on Twitter. Which is also to say: People rejected glibness. They rejected cynicism. They rejected reductive branding. And they did so, specifically, by reappropriating the hashtag Newsweek had proposed. They treated #muslimrage not in the way Newsweek had framed it, but instead as exactly what it was: a joke.

http://www.theatlantic.com/technolog...e-meme/262473/