Saturday, September 15, 2012

Why now: Obama and the Muslim protests

Whether the wave of violent Muslim protests around the world, including multiple attacks on American embassies and the murder of our ambassador and several former Seals, is a response to an offensive anti-Muslim video or a coordinated wave of attacks predating the release of that video is really beside the point. Why are these attacks happening now? Is it a coincidence that they're occurring on Obama's watch? I highly doubt it. (And BTW, it is utterly outrageous that a President sworn to uphold our Constitution, including our Bill of Rights, is capitulating in a backhand manner to Muslim demands that we "punish" the maker of that video.)

Quite likely some of the protesters would be happy to be martyrs on behalf of their religion -- but I doubt that every member of all these mobs has that immediate ambition. They're breaching our embassy walls, tearing down and burning our flags (and in some cases replacing them, on September 11th, with the flag of the organization that attacked us on that date), and murdering our people because they believe they can get away with it, without triggering the sort of retaliation that the world might once have expected. They believe that militant Islam's time has come, that Islam is in the ascendancy as a worldwide imperial movement, and that the West is in the process of capitulating.

I wonder why? . . .

P.S. The mobs may have been pleasantly surprised (if they didn't already know) that embassy security consisted of nationals of the host countries plus American security prohibited from carrying live ammunition. Now there's a symbolically telling detail.

1 comment:

Paul Hager said...

Mass movements are always animated by a "small minority". The more important issue is to what extent does the movement and its activists represent the larger polity. In the case of nominally "moderate" Islamic countries, the overwhelming majority have been shown by opinion polling to see Israel as, at best, a colonial outpost of the West and at worst a nest of evil Jews. The US is a tool of the Jews in the minds of these folks so naturally they hate us.

Public attitudes are not surprising, given the steady diet of anti-Semitic material to be found in the media in most of those countries. For example, a popular mini-series in Egypt a few years back was based upon the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. A wildly popular movie in nominal NATO ally, Turkey was "Valley of the Wolves: Iraq". It was viciously anti-American and virulently anti-Semitic. Gary Busey (who must have badly needed a paycheck) played a Jewish Doctor who harvests the organs of Palestinian children to send to Israel. Vile.

The reality of the Islamic world is constant anti-Semitic propaganda, often couched as being anti-Israeli or "anti-Zionist". It ain't, by any stretch of the imagination, a "small percentage" of Muslims.

Muslims in the US are a completely different matter. I would agree completely that only a microscopic percentage are like their brethren overseas. Most came to the US to escape from dictators and theocrats.