Those who engage in very superficial analysis and understanding complain that Muslims are psychotic masses and see the religion of Islam as a 'cancer'. The reality is that most people follow the religious beliefs of their families or at the very least of the majority of their cultures.
However much clergy try to characterize it otherwise, for most people, religions are not embraced because of innate qualities of superiority, but because of culture and geography. Any notion that Jews or Christians, Buddhists or Hindus, Muslims or Pagans are superior because of a religious preference is a mistaken one. People for the most part are just people, neither good or bad but instead a mixture of both. Religions, if you pursue and understanding of comparative religions, pretty much come up with the same core principles like the Golden Rule. Atheists and Agnostics can and often do demonstrate and follow the same virtues and condemn the save bad conduct as those who embrace a popular religion; we do not strictly need religion to tell us how to live to do so without being bad people.
Muslims are no different; nor is Islam any better or worse than other major religions. A close reading of the three Abrahamic religious texts shows tremendous overlap. Where we tend to differ in the west are over issues like polygamy (which is shared with the tradition of Mormonism in Christianity). Unlike the foundational Abrahamic religion of Judaism, and unlike most of the OTHER major world religions both Christianity and Islam require some degree of proselytizing to convert others, which sets them both on a course of conflict with each other.
The recent demonstrations by Muslims underlines that those kinds of demonstrations don't occur for the reasons which are offered as explanations. Rather demonstrations, or in the extreme cases, riots, occur because something acts as a catalyst, as a 'last straw' that triggers an underlying set of pressures and emotions. As was noted on the CNBC.com website back in February 2011, during the Arab Spring unrest, which was hugely larger than the very minor protests at our embassies and consulates, we have had our own share of riots in the U.S. -- for some of the same reasons:
In NONE of these riots was the pretext or the trigger really what caused the riot; rather it served as the trigger for the explosion of rage that had accumulated among the rioters for other, deeper and more long term reasons. This is equally true of all the violence taking place in the Muslim nations. Like the violence in our own riots, the target of the violence isn't necessarily the real originator of those pressures that explode in riots, but are only one part of the cause - and often a relatively minor one. We are no more, and no less violent than Muslims.
In my casual observation of riots during the course of my life, both foreign and domestic, I have been struck by how often an insult, or a perceived insult, on top of very real injuries (in the form of inequality or fundamental inequity) that is more of a trigger than any other factor. That would seem to be the case with the 'Innocence of Muslims', aka 'Innocence of bin Laden' aka 'Desert Warrior' youtube footage.
The NBC news analysis makes the same point about the Muslim disturbances:
Updated at 7:53 a.m. ET: CAIRO – It's been just over a week since hundreds, perhaps a thousand, angry and offended Egyptians gathered outside the U.S. Embassy's gates in Cairo. They carried Islamist banners and chanted, "The only God is God and Muhammad is his Prophet.''
At one point perhaps two dozen of the more brazen protesters scaled the wall and breached the embassy grounds. They lowered and destroyed the U.S. flag and raised a black, Islamic flag in its place. They fled when security guards (not the Egyptian police) fired warning shots over their heads.
This amounted to little violence, but the act itself was the psychological equivalent of taking a beachhead. Within hours reports emerged that a similarly sized group had stormed the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya. Some were calling it a copy-cat protest, but it was much more perilous: Four Americans were killed in the melee, including the U.S. ambassador. Within 48 hours the world would witness similar scenes unfolding at U.S. embassies, businesses and symbols of power in more than 20 countries.
Much of the mainstream media has played it as a spontaneous reaction to a disgusting film clip which denigrated Muslims and happened to be made and promoted in the USA.
But New York Times editorialist Ross Douthat argued it had nothing to do with a "genuine popular backlash," but everything to do with old-style power politics. For Jim Clifton, chairman of the pollster Gallup, it wasn't about religion or politics, but rather the desperate expression of young Arab males, deeply humiliated because they couldn't find jobs.
'Political manipulation'Egyptian analysts seem to be more in agreement: Many protesters outside the U.S. Embassy were genuinely offended by the film. But the real driving force behind the protest – in Cairo and Benghazi – were radical Islamist groups who know how to exploit rage for political gain.
[My observation - DG - is anger that the three individuals named so far - Steve Klein, Basseley/Bacile, and Jones , all tried as well to manufacture and exploit rage against America for political gain. Terry Jones, pseudo-pastor of the Florida crackpots is a self-styled presidential candidate for example. There is also so far unexplained money behind this effort to enrage Egyptians against Americans, both our foreign service personnel and our armed forces. We don't yet know why, but there is a better explanation to be found than "it's just what Muslims do".]
"A lot of people went to the U.S. Embassy not just because of the film, and after the film died down, it wasn't about the film anymore," Eltahawy explained. "They went because of anti-U.S. sentiment, because they know in this region how easy it is to fan the flames of anger."
Dr. Gamal Abdel Gawad, a highly respected Egyptian political analyst, agrees.
"I don't think it was spontaneous," he told NBC News. "People were gathering in one place at a certain time of day, so there was some mobilization behind it.''
[DG again -- that would seem to be supported by the information that a lot of the protesters weren't in fact protesters at all, but hired thugs.]
And it's clear to Gawad who did the mobilizing. "Radical Salafist groups orchestrated it to express their views and embarrass the [more moderate] Muslim Brotherhood because of competition between Islamic groups."
Post Arab-Spring power play
What's enfolding in Egypt – and to a large extent in Libya – is not just a series of isolated power plays. In both countries the leaders who emerged from the Arab Spring are struggling to eke out a political center in order to govern their new democracies, while under extreme pressure from more radical Islamist – sometimes jihadist – forces. Everything is still at stake.
This has led some Egyptians – like Eltahawy – to worry that their 18-month-old revolution will be hijacked by the extremists.
"I'm hoping that this right-wing drive of the past days is the dying pangs of a group that understands that the revolution was started by us, the majority, and we remain very much the majority."
Gawad is more sanguine about the future. "The revolution is over. The president is in power, and Egyptian political parties are busy preparing for elections and campaigns. The radical groups can't get significant numbers elected," he said. Still, as dramatic scenes over the past week have shown, those groups – often armed – can wreak havoc.
DG again - the riots did not reflect the majority of Muslims, and in effect, it didn't even reflect the actual ultra-conservative Muslim minority either, since they couldn't actually field enough people for a real demonstration.
Understanding these realities is essential if we are not to make the mistakes that Romney professes in his disastrous and ill-conceived foreign policy where he appears to genuinely believe that Palestinians don't want peace and that peace is not possible. He demonstrates both a failure to understand what the people in Arab Spring countries want, and what people want in the Asian Muslim nations as well. We can't afford that kind of ignorance; it is what embroiled us in Afghanistand and Iraq so unsuccessfully.
However much clergy try to characterize it otherwise, for most people, religions are not embraced because of innate qualities of superiority, but because of culture and geography. Any notion that Jews or Christians, Buddhists or Hindus, Muslims or Pagans are superior because of a religious preference is a mistaken one. People for the most part are just people, neither good or bad but instead a mixture of both. Religions, if you pursue and understanding of comparative religions, pretty much come up with the same core principles like the Golden Rule. Atheists and Agnostics can and often do demonstrate and follow the same virtues and condemn the save bad conduct as those who embrace a popular religion; we do not strictly need religion to tell us how to live to do so without being bad people.
Muslims are no different; nor is Islam any better or worse than other major religions. A close reading of the three Abrahamic religious texts shows tremendous overlap. Where we tend to differ in the west are over issues like polygamy (which is shared with the tradition of Mormonism in Christianity). Unlike the foundational Abrahamic religion of Judaism, and unlike most of the OTHER major world religions both Christianity and Islam require some degree of proselytizing to convert others, which sets them both on a course of conflict with each other.
The recent demonstrations by Muslims underlines that those kinds of demonstrations don't occur for the reasons which are offered as explanations. Rather demonstrations, or in the extreme cases, riots, occur because something acts as a catalyst, as a 'last straw' that triggers an underlying set of pressures and emotions. As was noted on the CNBC.com website back in February 2011, during the Arab Spring unrest, which was hugely larger than the very minor protests at our embassies and consulates, we have had our own share of riots in the U.S. -- for some of the same reasons:
The United States has endured its share of civil unrest as well. Some riots have been carefully planned in advance to protest government policies, and some have begun spontaneously in communities plagued by poverty and unemployment. But while riots start for many different reasons, they usually end the same way, with mass arrests, loss of life and damage to public and private property.CNBC then goes on to list ten of the most destructive U.S. riots, and why they occurred, beginning with 1. New York in 1863 where poor people rioted over the civil war draft, where any rich person with the modern equivalent of $5,000 which was out of the reach of most people, could buy their way out of being drafted. The riot lasted 4 days, and required government troops to end it; an uncounted number of African Americans became targeted for lynching and other violence. 2. Seattle, 1999 World Trade Organization Ministerial Conference, a reaction to police tactics resulted in $20 million in damage and 600 people being arrested; 3. New York City in 1977, there was $300 million in looting and rioting during a blackout; 4. Cincinnati Ohio in 2001, 3.6 million in damages, rioting occurred spartked by a police shooting; 5. Detroit, 1967, police violence sparked riots costing $40-80 million in damages; 6. Chicago in 1968, riots triggered by the assassination of Martin Luther King, did more than $10 million in damages and destroyed 28 square blocks due to arson; 7. Watts, 1965 caused $40 million in damages, with 32 dead; "Watts was a predominantly low-income community with a large African-American population, many of whom felt that in addition to high unemployment, poverty and racial discrimination, its residents were regularly on the receiving end of police brutality. These sentiments fueled a bitterness and resentment that wouldn’t need much prodding to turn violent. "; 8. Oklahoma State Penitentiary, 1973, $20 million in damages, in a riot triggered by severe overcrowding and other really really bad conditions; 9. Newark and Plainsfield New Jersey, riots were triggered by a false report of a black man killed while in police custody, with rioting causing more than $10 million in property damage and 26 fatalities; 10. Los Angeles, 1992, Rodney King riots resulted in more than $1 billion in damages and 53 people killed.
In NONE of these riots was the pretext or the trigger really what caused the riot; rather it served as the trigger for the explosion of rage that had accumulated among the rioters for other, deeper and more long term reasons. This is equally true of all the violence taking place in the Muslim nations. Like the violence in our own riots, the target of the violence isn't necessarily the real originator of those pressures that explode in riots, but are only one part of the cause - and often a relatively minor one. We are no more, and no less violent than Muslims.
In my casual observation of riots during the course of my life, both foreign and domestic, I have been struck by how often an insult, or a perceived insult, on top of very real injuries (in the form of inequality or fundamental inequity) that is more of a trigger than any other factor. That would seem to be the case with the 'Innocence of Muslims', aka 'Innocence of bin Laden' aka 'Desert Warrior' youtube footage.
The NBC news analysis makes the same point about the Muslim disturbances:
Updated at 7:53 a.m. ET: CAIRO – It's been just over a week since hundreds, perhaps a thousand, angry and offended Egyptians gathered outside the U.S. Embassy's gates in Cairo. They carried Islamist banners and chanted, "The only God is God and Muhammad is his Prophet.''
At one point perhaps two dozen of the more brazen protesters scaled the wall and breached the embassy grounds. They lowered and destroyed the U.S. flag and raised a black, Islamic flag in its place. They fled when security guards (not the Egyptian police) fired warning shots over their heads.
This amounted to little violence, but the act itself was the psychological equivalent of taking a beachhead. Within hours reports emerged that a similarly sized group had stormed the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya. Some were calling it a copy-cat protest, but it was much more perilous: Four Americans were killed in the melee, including the U.S. ambassador. Within 48 hours the world would witness similar scenes unfolding at U.S. embassies, businesses and symbols of power in more than 20 countries.
Much of the mainstream media has played it as a spontaneous reaction to a disgusting film clip which denigrated Muslims and happened to be made and promoted in the USA.
But New York Times editorialist Ross Douthat argued it had nothing to do with a "genuine popular backlash," but everything to do with old-style power politics. For Jim Clifton, chairman of the pollster Gallup, it wasn't about religion or politics, but rather the desperate expression of young Arab males, deeply humiliated because they couldn't find jobs.
'Political manipulation'Egyptian analysts seem to be more in agreement: Many protesters outside the U.S. Embassy were genuinely offended by the film. But the real driving force behind the protest – in Cairo and Benghazi – were radical Islamist groups who know how to exploit rage for political gain.
[My observation - DG - is anger that the three individuals named so far - Steve Klein, Basseley/Bacile, and Jones , all tried as well to manufacture and exploit rage against America for political gain. Terry Jones, pseudo-pastor of the Florida crackpots is a self-styled presidential candidate for example. There is also so far unexplained money behind this effort to enrage Egyptians against Americans, both our foreign service personnel and our armed forces. We don't yet know why, but there is a better explanation to be found than "it's just what Muslims do".]
"A lot of people went to the U.S. Embassy not just because of the film, and after the film died down, it wasn't about the film anymore," Eltahawy explained. "They went because of anti-U.S. sentiment, because they know in this region how easy it is to fan the flames of anger."
Dr. Gamal Abdel Gawad, a highly respected Egyptian political analyst, agrees.
"I don't think it was spontaneous," he told NBC News. "People were gathering in one place at a certain time of day, so there was some mobilization behind it.''
[DG again -- that would seem to be supported by the information that a lot of the protesters weren't in fact protesters at all, but hired thugs.]
And it's clear to Gawad who did the mobilizing. "Radical Salafist groups orchestrated it to express their views and embarrass the [more moderate] Muslim Brotherhood because of competition between Islamic groups."
Post Arab-Spring power play
What's enfolding in Egypt – and to a large extent in Libya – is not just a series of isolated power plays. In both countries the leaders who emerged from the Arab Spring are struggling to eke out a political center in order to govern their new democracies, while under extreme pressure from more radical Islamist – sometimes jihadist – forces. Everything is still at stake.
This has led some Egyptians – like Eltahawy – to worry that their 18-month-old revolution will be hijacked by the extremists.
"I'm hoping that this right-wing drive of the past days is the dying pangs of a group that understands that the revolution was started by us, the majority, and we remain very much the majority."
Gawad is more sanguine about the future. "The revolution is over. The president is in power, and Egyptian political parties are busy preparing for elections and campaigns. The radical groups can't get significant numbers elected," he said. Still, as dramatic scenes over the past week have shown, those groups – often armed – can wreak havoc.
DG again - the riots did not reflect the majority of Muslims, and in effect, it didn't even reflect the actual ultra-conservative Muslim minority either, since they couldn't actually field enough people for a real demonstration.
Understanding these realities is essential if we are not to make the mistakes that Romney professes in his disastrous and ill-conceived foreign policy where he appears to genuinely believe that Palestinians don't want peace and that peace is not possible. He demonstrates both a failure to understand what the people in Arab Spring countries want, and what people want in the Asian Muslim nations as well. We can't afford that kind of ignorance; it is what embroiled us in Afghanistand and Iraq so unsuccessfully.
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