The deadly attacks on US diplomatic outposts in Egypt and Libya raises a question I have, did the Arab Spring make the Middle East more dangerous? What do you think?
The violence looked spontaneous; it was anything but. Instead it was the
product of a sequence of provocations, some mysterious, some obvious. It seemed
to start in the U.S., then became magnified in Egypt and was brought to a deadly and
sorrowful climax in Libya—all on the
11th anniversary of 9/11. The cast of characters in this tragedy included a
shadowy filmmaker, a sinister pastor in Florida, an Egyptian-American
Islamophobe, an Egyptian TV host, politically powerful Islamist extremist groups
and, just possibly, an al-Qaeda affiliate in Libya. The instigators and
executors didn’t work in concert; they probably didn’t even know they were in
cahoots. Indeed, some of them would sooner die than knowingly help the others’
causes. Nonetheless, the death of Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other
Americans at the U.S. consulate in Benghazi was the result of a collective
effort, with grievous consequences.
As the Obama Administration struggles to contain the fallout of the
killings—and even to piece together exactly what happened—there’s an increasing
apprehension that this attack may herald a new genre of Middle East crisis. The
Arab Spring replaced the harsh order of hated dictators with a flowering of
neophyte democracies. But these governments—with weak mandates, ever shifting
loyalties and poor security forces—have made the region a more chaotic and
unstable place, a place more susceptible than ever to rogue provocateurs
fomenting violent upheavals, usually in the name of faith.
Collectively, these hatemongers form a global industry of outrage, working
feverishly to give and take offense, frequently over religion, and to ignite the
combustible mix of ignorance and suspicion that exists almost as much in the
U.S. as in the Arab world. Add to this combination the presence of opportunistic
jihadist groups seeking to capitalize on any mayhem, and you can begin to
connect the dots between a tawdry little film and the deaths of four American
diplomats.
Start with the filmmaker behind
Innocence of Muslims, a purported
biopic of the Prophet Muhammad that, according to some accounts, sparked the
demonstrations in Cairo and Benghazi. He goes by the name Sam Bacile, but almost
nothing is known about him. Or even whether he exists. Some reports suggest the
name is a pseudonym.
There have been other films about the Prophet, but since Islamic traditions
forbid any depiction of Muhammad, Muslim filmmakers tend to focus instead on his
contemporaneous followers and foes. In the 1977 film
The Message, for
instance, Muhammad remains always off camera and is never heard, but other
historical figures (including his uncle Hamza, played by Anthony Quinn) address
him.
The film made by Bacile makes no such concessions to Muslim sensibilities.
Indeed, showing Muhammad is the film’s only innovation. The accusations it makes
about him are rehashed from old Islamophobic tropes; the script is clunky and
the acting high-school-ish. The movie was apparently made last year, and
although the filmmaker claimed to have spent $5 million on it, the production
values suggest a much more modest budget. Before going into hiding in the wake
of the violence in Cairo and Benghazi, Bacile (or someone pretending to be him)
defiantly told the Associated Press that he regards Islam as “a cancer,
period.”
The film was screened in Hollywood early this year but made no waves
whatsoever. Bacile then posted a 14-min. series of clips on YouTube in July;
that too got no traction. But it caught the attention of Morris Sadek, an
Egyptian-American Copt in Washington, D.C., known for incendiary anti-Muslim
statements and blog posts. In early September, Sadek stitched together clips of
the film and posted them on an Arabic-language blog. He also sent a link to the
post in a mass e-mail. In the meantime, the film had attracted a singularly
unattractive fan: Terry Jones, pastor of a church in Gainesville, Fla., who is
notorious for burning the Koran and performing other Islamophobic stunts. He
promoted the film online and added fuel to the flames by posting his own YouTube
video, calling for the “trial” of the Prophet, for fraud and other supposed
crimes. Jones’ video features an effigy wearing a demon mask and hanging from a
noose.
Soon after that, the thread was picked up in Egypt by a TV host every bit as
inflammatory and opportunistic as Jones: Sheik Khaled Abdallah of the Islamist
satellite-TV station al-Nas. Supported by unknown backers, the channel traffics
in demagoguery and hatemongering. Abdallah is its star. In previous broadcasts,
he has called the revolutionaries of the Arab Spring “worthless kids” and
condemned newspapers that don’t support his views. But he reserves his harshest
criticism for the country’s Coptic Christians, who make up about a tenth of the
population.
For Abdallah, the fact that a Copt was promoting an anti-Muhammad film
endorsed by the Koran-burning pastor was too much. On his Sept. 8 show, he
broadcast some of the clips, now dubbed in Arabic. In one scene that was aired,
“Muhammad” declares a donkey the “first Muslim animal” and asks the creature if
it likes the ladies. Abdallah’s show, complete with the offensive video, was
also posted on YouTube, and it has attracted over 300,000 views.
Abdallah’s show was a dog whistle to the Salafists, a fundamentalist Islamic
movement that makes up the second largest faction in the Egyptian parliament.
For months, organized Salafist groups had been protesting in small numbers in
front of the U.S. embassy in Cairo, calling for the release of Omar Abdel
Rahman, the blind sheik currently in a North Carolina prison, convicted for
plotting a series of bombings and assassinations in the 1990s. They were joined
on Sept. 11 by prominent leaders like Nader Bakar of the Salafist Nour Party and
Mohammed al-Zawahiri, brother of Ayman al-Zawahiri, Osama bin Laden’s longtime
deputy and now head of al-Qaeda.
The leaders had left by the time the mob attacked the embassy and took down
the U.S. flag, while Egyptian security forces, hopelessly outnumbered, mostly
just watched. The crowd eventually dispersed. Afterward, some Salafist leaders
said the flag was snatched by members of a soccer-hooligan group known as the
Ahli Ultras.
Not far from Egypt’s western border, in the Libyan city of Benghazi, on the
anniversary of the 2001 attacks at the World Trade Center, the Muhammad movie
had provoked another mob of several hundred mostly Salafist protesters to gather
at the U.S. consulate. Many witnesses have since fingered a group known as Ansar
al-Shari‘a for organizing the protests; the group denies it.
Ambassador Stevens, visiting from Tripoli, was an unlikely target. He had
worked closely with the leaders of the uprising against Muammar Gaddafi and was
well liked by most Libyans. But some reports now suggest that lurking amid the
mob was a more malevolent force: members of the local chapter of al-Qaeda.
Only the previous day, Ayman al-Zawahiri had issued a new videotaped
statement from his hideout, confirming the death of his Libyan deputy Abu Yahya
al-Libi in a June U.S. drone strike and calling for him to be avenged. Reports
from Benghazi say armed jihadists infiltrated the protesting crowds. An
al-Qaeda-affiliated group known as the Imprisoned Omar Abdul Rahman Brigades is
suspected to have carried out the attack. The White House was still scrambling a
day after the attack to piece together what happened and whether it could have
been prevented. A senior Administration official said the Benghazi attack was
“complex” and “well organized” but would not comment on reports that it was
planned in advance by militants using the protest as a
diversion.
The terrorists struck twice: one set of grenades forced consulate staff to
flee the main building while a second targeted the building to which they were
evacuated. The attack did not appear spontaneous or amateurish. Stevens, foreign
service officer Sean Smith and two others were killed. The ambassador was
declared dead from smoke inhalation.
If Muslims responded violently to every online insult to their faith, there
would be riots in Cairo and Benghazi every day of the year. The Internet is full
of malefactors who constantly say, write or broadcast appalling things about
Islam. (And there are plenty of Muslim Web nuts who vilify other belief
systems.) It is the outrage machine, manned by people like Bacile, Jones and
Abdallah, who push matters into anger overdrive. They know the outcome of their
efforts will be violence and subversion. These men are enabled by
media—mainstream and fringe alike—that give them air to bloviate and a political
culture that makes little effort to take away their oxygen.
Before the Arab Spring, this chain of events would likely have been stopped
early. Dictators like Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak and Libya’s Gaddafi either blocked
Internet access to prevent their people from seeing inflammatory material (among
other things) or used their security agencies to crack down on protests long
before they could reach critical mass.
But democratically elected governments don’t have recourse to such draconian
methods. Still unused to power, they are unsure how to deal with angry
demonstrations, especially when they are mounted by powerful religious or
political groups. The tendency has been to look the other way and hope the
demonstrators run out of steam.
It doesn’t always work. The Salafists in Libya were emboldened by the failure
of the government in Tripoli to crack down on them when they recently desecrated
Sufi shrines. The Minister of the Interior (he has since resigned) said he
didn’t want to risk the lives of his security forces in order to apprehend the
culprits. “The Libyan authorities have been irresponsibly lazy in confronting
this threat,” says Tom Malinowski, Washington director of Human Rights Watch.
“They have a choice to make. Are they going to be a country connected to the
outside world, or are they going to allow a small number of people in their
midst to make that impossible?”
At least Libya’s President Mohamed el-Magariaf swiftly apologized to all
Americans for the attack on the consulate and promised to hunt down those
responsible: 24 hours after the attack on the embassy in Cairo, Egypt’s
President Mohamed Morsy had not issued a similar statement. When he finally did,
he seemed less concerned with what had happened at the embassy and more with the
affront to the Prophet, which he condemned “in the strongest terms.” The Muslim
Brotherhood, on its Twitter feed, condemned the Benghazi attack but made no
mention of the one in Cairo.
The Egyptian government’s almost insouciant response, hardly in keeping with
the country’s status as the second largest recipient of U.S. aid, will rankle
both President Obama and his domestic critics. In the hours after the attacks in
Cairo and Benghazi, Republicans piled on the President, questioning the wisdom
of his outreach to Islamist political forces like the Brotherhood. Even
political allies were moved to wonder whether Egypt could really be a reliable
friend.
Morsy’s silence has been interpreted by Egyptian analysts as a reluctance to
prod the Salafists, whose help he may need to get anything done in parliament.
But other political figures were equally pusillanimous. Nobel Peace Prize
laureate Mohamed ElBaradei, a prominent liberal secular leader, tweeted,
“Humanity can only live in harmony when sacred beliefs and the prophets are
respected.” That kind of timidity empowers not only the Salafists but also
instigators like Abdallah and his American counterparts.
For an understanding of what can happen when the industry of outrage is
allowed to function without check, look at Pakistan, where hatemongers
continually stoke anger not only against faraway foreigners but just as
frequently—and with more deadly results—against their own people. Minorities
like the Ahmadiyya sect are an easy target for extremist TV hosts like Aamir
Liaquat Hussain, a former Minister of Religious Affairs. On his show broadcast
by Geo TV in 2008, guest scholars declared the Ahmadiyyas “deserving to be
murdered for blasphemy.” Soon after, two members of the sect were killed.
Hussain was forced to apologize and leave Geo but has since returned to the
station.
Other Pakistani provocateurs target the Shi‘ite community, which makes up 10%
to 20% of the population. Militant groups with links to political parties as
well as the country’s all-powerful military are frequently behind violent
attacks against Shi‘ites. Criticism of such groups is often denounced by
extremist preachers as blasphemy, which is punishable by death under Pakistani
law.
When Salman Taseer, the governor of the country’s largest province and an
outspoken critic of the blasphemy law, was killed by his bodyguard last year,
the murderer was declared a hero by many. Munir Ahmed Shakir, the influential
imam of Karachi’s giant Sultan Mosque, is just one of many who have pronounced
as “non-Muslims” all those seeking to amend the blasphemy laws.
The new normal in Egypt and Libya is not as perilous as in Pakistan. Not yet.
But as the fledgling democracies of the Middle East struggle to cope with the
genies unleashed by the Arab Spring, you can count on the industry of outrage to
work overtime to drag the Middle East in that direction.
