American Consulate Attack in Libya

[dreadgeek]

Toughy;

I don't have any issue with non-violent protests. I *do* have issues with violent protests and blasphemy laws. And I'm not looking at this issue from the point of view of the USA and that we are right. I'm looking at it from three points of view, two of them not my own. I look at it from a writer. That is *my* point of view and I want to be able to write a story about what it might look like to live in a Christianist Theocracy without fear of losing my liberty or my life. I'm not saying we live in such a society but the distance between that society and us now is the boundary between having the right to free speech and not.

No, I'm looking at this from the point of view of Salman Rushdie who wrote a book a quarter century ago and had a fatwa placed against him calling for his death. As it turns out, I had thought the fatwa had been lifted and then it turns out that three days ago, Ayatollah Hassan Sanei of Iran, reissued the bounty on Rushdie's head to the tune of 320,000 pounds. I'm looking at it from the point of view of the person burning the American flag, an action I disagree with but think should be protected. I'm looking at it from the point of Pussy Riot, locked up on a charge that comes down to blasphemy. I'm looking at it from the point of view of ACT-UP and Queer Nation back in 1992. I'm looking at it from the point of view of my parents in Birmingham in the 1960s. I'm looking at it from the point of view of every time anyone stood up and spoke truth to power when power would rather they shut up. Power would rather the powerless shut the hell up and if they think they can get away with it, the rich and the orthodox will use the power of the state to make sure that the powerless don't say uncomfortable things.

Peaceful protests outside embassies do not concern me. They are exercising their right to give vent to their anger and, as such, I might contemplate it but does not concern me.

Saying that people should be put to death or imprisoned because of what they write or speak or film concerns me. That Vladimir Putin had Pussy Riot locked up on a charge that comes down to blasphemy concerns me. Bounties on the heads of writers concern me. The detention of Bradley Manning concerns me. These are all attempts to silence voices that are inconvenient for power. Pharmaceutical companies being able to slap of writ of prior restraint on a journalist because they've written an article that shows fixing of results in trials concerns me.

Like I said before, I don't trust majorities, I don't trust mobs, I don't trust the rich, I don't trust the church, I don't trust the state and I don't trust the powerful. Majorities gravitate toward tyrannies, a democracy can be as tyrannical as a totalitarian state. Mobs are just the crowd at the lynching, the people at the witch burning, whenever bullying gets social sanction. The rich will gravitate toward plutocracy and the church will implement theocracy if they can get away with it. The only thing that stands between us and those various flavors of dystopia is the ability to write against it, march against it, rail against it and convince others of the rightness of our warnings. If that means risking that some people might be offended at the rantings of some fool then so be it.

Cheers
Aj

Originally Posted by Toughy

First I did not think up the 'to insult' vs 'from insult'. I heard it on, I think, the Randi Rhodes show (progressive talk radio syndicated)

Your argument and questions are a perfect example of the problem. You view free speech from a USA cultural perspective and they don't. You define free speech from that perspective and others do not.......hell France does not agree with our ideas around free speech. As Martina pointed out lots of folks define free speech from a different cultural perspective and narrative. There are few 'hard line in the sand' concepts that all cultures can agree on...or should.... such as slavery, child porn, child sex workers, don't lie, don't cheat, don't steal to name a few.

And as I said earlier and Corkey has repeated: The response to an insult (free speech) should not be one of violence in any culture. I think no violence belongs in the 'hard line in the sand' category.....but humans are not there yet. Non-violent protest should be the response and the large majority of the response to that obnoxious crap has been non-violent.

And we should all remember the terrorist attack that killed Ambassador Stevens and the ex-seals security folks is not connected to the film.

The protests (mostly non-violent) occurring in many Islamic countries are about that film. A 15 minutes Arabic translation of the film was shown on (right wing) Egyptian TV and that is when the protests began.

I did a lot of nodding my head yes when reading your posts.

[Toughy]

I believe we are in agreement Aj............

[Martina]

Originally Posted by dreadgeek

I don't trust majorities, I don't trust mobs, I don't trust the rich, I don't trust the church, I don't trust the state and I don't trust the powerful.

I love this.

[Kobi]

This is not good news.


NEW YORK (Reuters) - As Muslim countries reverberate with fierce protests over a film mocking the Prophet Mohammad, an ad equating Islamic jihad with savagery is due to appear next week in 10 New York City subway stations despite transit officials' efforts to block it.

The city's Metropolitan Transportation Authority had refused the ads, citing a policy against demeaning language. The American Freedom Defense Initiative, which is behind the ad campaign, then sued and won a favorable ruling from a U.S. judge in Manhattan.

According to court documents, the ad reads: "In any war between the civilized man and the savage, support the civilized man. Support Israel/Defeat Jihad."

MTA spokesman Aaron Donovan said the ads would be displayed starting on Monday, but he could not say at which stations.

"Our hands are tied. The MTA is subject to a court ordered injunction that prohibits application of the MTA's existing no-demeaning ad standard," said Donovan.

In July, U.S. District Judge Paul Engelmayer ruled that the ad was protected speech. While agreeing with the MTA that the ad was "demeaning a group of people based on religion," Engelmayer ruled that the group was entitled to the "highest level of protection under the First Amendment."

The American Freedom Defense Initiative gained notoriety when it opposed creation of a Muslim community center near the site of the Twin Towers, which were destroyed in the September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center.

http://ca.news.yahoo.com/ads-critici...232906064.html

[Corkey]

I wish these groups would grow the F up.

[Kobi]

Originally Posted by Corkey

I wish these groups would grow the F up.

Could you wish a little harder? Im beginning to believe the Mayan calender coming to an end on Dec 21st.


PARIS (Reuters) - A French magazine ridiculed the Prophet Mohammad on Wednesday by portraying him naked in cartoons, threatening to fuel the anger of Muslims around the world who are already incensed by a California-made video depicting him as a lecherous fool.

The drawings in the satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo risked exacerbating a crisis that has seen the storming of U.S. and other Western embassies, the killing of the U.S. ambassador to Libya and a deadly suicide bombing in Afghanistan.

Riot police were deployed to protect the paper's Paris offices after the issue hit news stands.

It featured several caricatures of the Prophet showing him naked in what the publishers said was an attempt to poke fun at the furor over the film. One, entitled "Mohammad: a star is born", depicted a bearded figure crouching over to display his buttocks and genitals.

The French government, which had urged the weekly not to print the cartoons, said it was shutting embassies and schools in 20 countries as a precaution on Friday, when protests sometimes break out after Muslim prayers.

Arab League Secretary-General Nabil Elaraby called the drawings outrageous but said those who were offended by them should "use peaceful means to express their firm rejection".

Tunisia's ruling Islamist party, Ennahda, condemned what it called an act of "aggression" against Mohammad but urged Muslims not to fall into a trap intended to "derail the Arab Spring and turn it into a conflict with the West".

http://ca.news.yahoo.com/french-week...075449808.html

[Martina]

Here is "The Satanic Video" by BILL KELLER

I was just gonna take out quotes, but I like the whole thing. I highlighted points that I thought were especially good.

THE alchemy of modern media works with amazing speed. Start with a cheesy anti-Muslim video that resembles a bad trailer for a Sacha Baron Cohen comedy. It becomes YouTube fuel for protest across the Islamic world and a pretext for killing American diplomats. That angry spasm begets an inflammatory Newsweek cover, “MUSLIM RAGE,” which in turn inspires a Twitter hashtag that reduces the whole episode to a running joke:

“There’s no prayer room in this nightclub. #MuslimRage.”

“You lose your nephew at the airport but you can’t yell his name because it’s JIHAD. #MuslimRage.”

From provocation to trauma to lampoon in a few short news cycles. It’s over in a week, forgotten in two. Now back to Snooki and Honey Boo Boo.

Except, of course, it’s far from over. It moves temporarily off-screen, and then it is back: the Pakistani retailer accused last week of “blasphemy” because he refused to close his shops during a protest against the video; France locking down diplomatic outposts in about 20 countries because a Paris satirical newspaper has published new caricatures of the prophet.

It’s not really over for Salman Rushdie, whose new memoir recounts a decade under a clerical death sentence for the publication of his novel “The Satanic Verses.” That fatwa, if not precisely the starting point in our modern confrontation with Islamic extremism, was a major landmark. The fatwa was dropped in 1998 and Rushdie is out of hiding, but he is still careful. His book tour for “Joseph Anton” (entitled for the pseudonym he used in his clandestine life) won’t be taking him to Islamabad or Cairo.

Rushdie grew up in a secular Muslim family, the son of an Islam scholar. His relationship to Islam was academic, then literary, before it became excruciatingly personal. His memoir is not a handbook on how America should deal with the Muslim world. But he brings to that subject a certain moral authority and the wisdom of an unusually motivated thinker. I invited him to help me draw some lessons from the stormy Arab Summer.

The first and most important thing Rushdie will tell you is, it’s not about religion. Not then, not now.

When the founding zealot of revolutionary Iran, Ayatollah Khomeini, issued his Rushdie death warrant in 1989, the imam was not defending the faith; he was trying to regenerate enthusiasm for his regime, sapped by eight years of unsuccessful war with Iraq. Likewise, Muslim clerics in London saw the fatwa against a British Indian novelist as an opportunity to arouse British Muslims, who until that point were largely unstirred by sectarian politics. “This case was a way for the mosque to assert a kind of primacy over the community,” the novelist said the other day. “I think something similar is going on now.”

It’s pretty clear that the protests against that inane video were not spontaneous. Antisecular and anti-American zealots, beginning with a Cairo TV personality whose station is financed by Saudi fundamentalists, seized on the video as a way to mobilize pressure on the start-up governments in Egypt, Tunisia and Libya. The new governments condemned the violence and called in police to protect American diplomatic outposts, but not before a good bit of nervous wobbling.

(One of the principal goals of the extremists, I was reminded by experts at Human Rights First, who follow the region vigilantly, is to pressure these transitional governments to enact and enforce strict laws against blasphemy. These laws can then be used to purge secularists and moderates.)

Like the fanatics in the Middle East and North Africa, our homegrown hatemongers have an interest in making this out to be a great clash of faiths. The Islamophobes — the fringe demagogues behind the Koran-burning parties and that tawdry video, the more numerous (mainly right-wing Republican) defenders against the imaginary encroachment of Islamic law on our domestic freedom — are easily debunked. But this is the closest thing we have to a socially acceptable form of bigotry. And their rants feed the anti-American opportunists.

Rushdie acknowledges that there are characteristics of Islamic culture that make it tinder for the inciters: an emphasis on honor and shame, and in recent decades a paranoiac sense of the world conspiring against them. We can argue who is more culpable — the hostile West, the sponsors, the appeasers, the fanatics themselves — but Islam has been particularly susceptible to the rise of identity politics, Rushdie says. “You define yourself by what offends you. You define yourself by what outrages you.”

But blaming Islamic culture dismisses the Muslim majorities who are not enraged, let alone violent, and it leads to a kind of surrender: Oh, it’s just the Muslims, nothing to be done. I detect a whiff of this cultural fatalism in Mitt Romney’s patronizing remarks about the superiority of Israeli culture and the backwardness of Palestinian culture. That would explain his assertion, on that other notorious video, that an accommodation with the Palestinians is “almost unthinkable.” That’s a strangely defeatist line of thought for a man who professes to be an optimist and a problem-solver.

Romney and Rushdie are a little more in tune when it comes to mollifying the tender feelings of irate Muslims.

In his new book, Rushdie recounts being urged by the British authorities who were protecting him to “lower the temperature” by issuing a statement that could be taken for an apology. He does so. It fills him almost immediately with regret, and the attacks on him are unabated. He “had taken the weak position and was therefore treated as a weakling,” he writes.

Of the current confrontation, he says, “I think it’s very important that we hold our ground. It’s very important to say, ‘We live like this.’ ” Rushdie made his post-fatwa life in America in part because he reveres the freedoms, including the freedom, not so protected in other Western democracies, to say hateful, racist, blasphemous things.

“Terrible ideas, reprehensible ideas, do not disappear if you ban them,” he told me. “They go underground. They acquire a kind of glamour of taboo. In the harsh light of day, they are out there and, like vampires, they die in the sunlight.”

And so he would have liked a more robust White House defense of the rights that made the noxious video possible.

“It’s not for the American government to regret what American citizens do. They should just say, ‘This is not our affair and the [violent] response is completely inappropriate.’ ”

I would cut the diplomats a little more slack when they are trying to defuse an explosive situation. But I agree that the administration pushed up against the line that separates prudence from weakness. And the White House request that Google consider taking down the anti-Muslim video, however gentle the nudge, was a mistake.

By far the bigger mistake, though, would be to write off the aftermath of the Arab Spring as a lost cause.

It is fairly astounding to hear conservatives who were once eager to invade Iraq — ostensibly to plant freedom in the region — now giving up so quickly on fledgling democracies that might actually be won over without 10 bloody years of occupation. Or lamenting our abandonment of that great stabilizing autocrat Hosni Mubarak. Or insisting that we bully and blackmail the new governments to conform to our expectations.

These transition governments present an opportunity. Fortifying the democratic elements in the post-Arab Spring nation-building, without discrediting them as American stooges, is a delicate business. The best argument we have is not our aid money, though that plays a part. It is the choice between two futures, between building or failing to build a rule of law, an infrastructure of rights, and an atmosphere of tolerance. One future looks something like Turkey, prospering, essentially secular and influential. The other future looks a lot like Pakistan, a land of fear and woe.

We can’t shape the Islamic world to our specifications. But if we throw up our hands, if we pull back, we now have a more vivid picture of what will fill the void.

[dreadgeek]

The whole thing, in all of its magnificence, is posted here:
http://www.thedailybeast.com/article...red-value.html

The parts I wanted to highlight, largely without comment excepting that all emphasis is mine, are below but the whole thing is worth reading.

It is solipsistic, if not narcissistic, to imagine that—because the culturally-specific features of contemporary American liberalism (that, after all, in our own history was long in the making and is still not fully accomplished) derive from certain Protestant Western European traditions—this is therefore the only context in which such values can be firmly rooted. By pretending to "understand" the illiberal attitude of what he imagines the protesters' mindset must be, Fish simultaneously privileges the American, Protestant and Western traditions (in that order) and implicitly dismisses all others as belonging to different experiences that cannot produce an adherence to values such as free speech.

Modernity may have originated in the West, but it no longer belongs exclusively to the West. Almost all existing societies participate in and help shape it. A few decades ago, Partha Chatterjee suggested that for the postcolonial world, modernity was always and inevitably "a derivative discourse," that would invariably be defined in the West. With the rise of numerous postcolonial powers, that argument looks harder to defend.

Obviously there are going to be significant differences in the ways in which modernity and liberalism take root in different societies. Even among societies emerging from the Protestant Western tradition, American free-speech rights are uniquely permissive. Canada bans hate speech. Britain has official secrets, prior restraint, anti-blasphemy and notoriously lax libel laws. Numerous countries in Western Europe have made it a serious crime to question the historicity of the Holocaust.

Given these variations within societies emerging directly from the Western Protestant Reformation—all of which can still be called liberal societies that value and protect free speech—it should be obvious that globally there will be even greater variations. It's wrong to think that the essential values embodied in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: freedom of conscience, freedom of expression, freedom of religion and so forth, only be grounded in Western traditions. These are universal values because there is something innate to modern humanity that strives to realize the essence of these freedoms, whatever culturally-specific variations may occur.

Here I'm going to make a brief comment. The things we term *human* rights really are universal. These are not 'Western' rights and while I am not as well-traveled or well-read as I might otherwise like to be, I have a hard time believing that too many people, given the choice, would prefer to have to look over their shoulder lest some secret police come knocking at the door because of an overheard remark. To take one example, the flow of people appears to be *out* of North Korea and not *into* it. I suspect that part of why people aren't bursting down the gates to get in to the DPRK (Democratic People's Republic of Korea) is that, alongside the lack of food, is the lack of freedom where the least overheard word might spell the camp for oneself and one's family as well as tainting one's lineage down two or three generations.

In an effort to be open-minded gone terribly wrong, Fish forecloses the idea that other cultures and traditions, specifically the Islamic and Arab ones, can inform and secure freedom of speech and, implicitly, other liberal values. A quick survey of freedom of speech around the world suggests he is wrong about the unique ability societies rooted in the Protestant Reformation to embody these values. They have already spread far and wide. There is no reason to think that the Arab or Islamic worlds, or any other major cultural block in the modern world, is somehow uniquely immune them.

Cheers
Aj

[Martina]

I was reading an article cited in the article Dreadgeek is quoting from. Not Stanley Fish's, but one they describe as admirably summing up the psychology of the protesters.

Anyway, I thought it was interesting that that writer agreed with Rushdie's point about how the protesters construct their identity:

Soon you have a subculture: a sub-community whose very cohesion is based almost exclusively on shared grievance. Then you have an identity that has nothing to say about itself; an identity that holds an entirely impoverished position: that to be defiantly angry is to be.

Frankly, Muslims should find that prospect nothing short of catastrophic. It renders Islamic identity entirely hollow. All pride, all opposition, no substance. ''Like the Incredible Hulk,'' observes Abdal Hakim Murad, a prominent British Islamic scholar, ''ineffectual until provoked.''

On the way home I was listening on the radio to the PBS news broadcast and was so happy to hear that Syrians are using these events to disarm some of the militias. And to bring them more under the rule of law. That is a wonderful turn of events. I wish the press were covering more of that story. Maybe Newsweek will be forced to after the twitter responders showed them up re their Muslim Rage cover.

I am going to go read the Fish article. I shudder after that review of it.

One of my college professors had Fish as his dissertation advisor at Johns Hopkins back in the day. We all read Surprised by Sin (about Milton), Self-Consuming Artifacts, and Is There a Text in this Class. Even then, before he was a college administrator and later a public intellectual, it was clear Fish was carried away with the idea of the community of interpreters creating reality. Great literary theory. Interesting philosophy. Not a world view.

I agree with Dreadgeek and the article she cites. There are universal values based on what is good and healthy for human beings. For example, torture is bad, and eating nutritious food is good. Those are pretty universal.

Freedom of speech and freedom of the press may not be the most essential values, but they protect us from us from having to endure serious human rights violations. Iran today has used the youtube video as an excuse to limit its people's access to google. Exactly what some people are saying is the motivation behind the protests. The film is an excuse to clamp down on secular influences.

I was thinking of Foxconn thing -- the workers rioting in the Chinese factory that makes, among other things, Apple products. It's just INSANE that we don't know what is happening on a day to day basis in those factories. This stuff could happen in a second in the United States. In a second -- if we didn't have our First Amendment rights. Did anyone see that report about the Microsoft data barns in Quincy, Oregon. Also in the Times.

First, a citizens group initiated a legal challenge over pollution from some of nearly 40 giant diesel generators that Microsoft’s facility — near an elementary school — is allowed to use for backup power.

Then came a showdown late last year between the utility and Microsoft, whose hardball tactics shocked some local officials.

In an attempt to erase a $210,000 penalty the utility said the company owed for overestimating its power use, Microsoft proceeded to simply waste millions of watts of electricity, records show. Then it threatened to continue burning power in what it acknowledged was an “unnecessarily wasteful” way until the fine was substantially cut, according to documents obtained by The New York Times.

“For a company of that size and that nature, and with all the ‘green’ things they advertised to me, that was an insult,” said Randall Allred, a utility commissioner and local farmer.

A Microsoft spokeswoman said the episode was “a one-time event that was quickly resolved.”

Internet-based industries have honed a reputation for sleek, clean convenience based on the magic they deliver to screens everywhere. At the heart of every Internet enterprise are data centers, which have become more sprawling and ubiquitous as the amount of stored information explodes, sprouting in community after community.

But the Microsoft experience in Quincy shows that when these Internet factories come to town, they can feel a bit more like old-time manufacturing than modern magic.

I guess one could argue that Western Europe is still free enough and safe enough (safer even) with some limitations on speech. But it's still hard to speak back to power in Europe. It's harder than it is here. The EU has regulation to protect folks (as should the U.S.), but if something is wrong that is in the best interest of the elites, good luck with that. Also, EU privacy laws may protect ordinary people from data mining using facial recognition software, but they also keep the halls of power pretty private and unapproachable.

In any case, we AREN'T Europe. As the article from the Daily Beast points out, the West is not monolithic. And freedom of speech and the press protect us from abuses like the ones attempted by Microsoft. They weren't that afraid of the regulators, I'd bet, but they sure are afraid of public opinion. Anyway, sorry for the rambling. I am getting to be an old crank. I can hear it in my tone.

Actually, not done yet. Also from that Daily Beast article Dreadgeek cited --

There are deep traditions of pluralism within Islamic theology and Arab culture. Moreover, there is no tradition of mob protests associated with insults against Islam or the Prophet Mohammed. This mob reaction to perceived insults is not "traditional," but rather grounded in a concatenation of circumstances, new interpretations of religion, and emergent political ideologies that developed during the 20th century.

Fish should know that. Anyway, if Fish's article is correctly characterized, then it is just a more sophisticated instance of throwing up one's hands and saying, "Oh, it’s just the Muslims, nothing to be done."