US
right loses sense over embassy
protests By Stephen Zunes
It seems bizarre that right-wing pundits
would be so desperate to use the recent
anti-American protests in the Middle East - in
most cases numbering only a few hundred people and
(except for a peaceful Hezbollah-organized rally
in Lebanon) in no cases numbering more than two or
three thousand - as somehow indicative of why the
United States should oppose greater democracy in
the Middle East. Even more strangely, some media
pundits are criticizing Arabs as being
"ungrateful" for US support of pro-democracy
movements when, in reality, the United States
initially opposed the popular movements that
deposed Western-backed despots in Tunisia, Egypt,
and Yemen, and remains a pre-eminent backer of
dictatorships in the region today.
Meanwhile, Mitt Romney falsely accused
President Obama of
"apologizing" for what
the Republican presidential nominee referred to as
"American values" and of "sympathizing" with those
who attacked diplomatic missions rather than
promptly condemning them. (What apparently
prompted this misleading attack was a tweet from
the US embassy in Cairo prior to the worst attacks
reiterating US opposition to "efforts to offend
believers of all religions" and "the actions by
those who abuse the universal right of free speech
to hurt the religious beliefs of others.")
What incited many of the protests was an
outrageously offensive anti-Islamic movie produced
by Christian extremists in California, but there
is a lot more to the protests than this triggering
event.
For years, the Christian right and
Islamic right have sought to provoke extremism and
hatred as part of an effort to seemingly validate
the stereotypes of the other. As Hani Shukrallah
remarked about the film in the leading Egyptian
newspaper Al-Ahram, "The obvious, outward motive
of such attempts is not difficult to discern: to
show Muslims as irrational, violent, intolerant
and barbaric, all of which are attributes
profoundly inscribed into the racist anti-Muslim
discourse in the West. And, it's a very safe bet
that there will be among us those who will readily
oblige."
The attacks on two US consulate
offices in Benghazi, which killed the US
ambassador and three other Americans in Libya, are
far more significant, though these appear to have
been the work of Ansar al-Sharia, an extremist
Islamist militia which took advantage of a protest
to launch their armed assault avenging the killing
of a Libyan-born al-Qaeda leader by a drone strike
in Pakistan. Ironically, the United States allied
with these extremists in the armed uprising
against the Gaddafi regime last year.
Indeed, last week's tragedy in Libya
should raise questions about the wisdom of backing
such armed uprisings, even against a brutal
dictator. In Egypt and Yemen, where dictatorships
were overthrown largely through mass nonviolent
action not supported by Washington, the worst
damage protesters at the US embassies could do was
to seize parts of the grounds and burn the
American flag.
In Libya, where the
dictator was overthrown in an armed revolution
that was supported by Washington, two consulate
buildings were destroyed and four Americans were
killed in a coordinated assault with automatic
weapons, mortars, and rocket-propelled grenades.
Historically, autocratic regimes overthrown by
armed struggle are far more likely to descend into
violence and chaos (and/or a new dictatorship)
than authoritarian regimes toppled through largely
nonviolent methods.
In a country of barely
6 million people, more than 200,000 Libyans are
armed members of militias outside the control of
the Libyan government. Even though the recent
Libyan elections appear to have been free and
fair, and the winners largely consisted of
moderates open to a democratic political system,
the legacy of the war and the NATO intervention
will likely remain a problem for some time to
come.
In the rest of the region, where
uprisings against dictatorships came largely in
the form of unarmed civil insurrections, radical
Islamists have been severely weakened, as the
popular revolts demonstrated how US-backed regimes
could be toppled without embracing terrorism or
extremist ideologies. The need to manipulate a
hysterical reaction to an obscure, albeit
offensive, film is indicative of just how
desperate the far-right-wing Islamists have become
in asserting their relevance.
These
extremists were able to stir up crowds in cities
in more than a dozen Islamist countries with false
claims that the film was a major Hollywood
production which, like movies in Egypt and many
other countries in the region, must have been
subjected to review and approval by government
censors before being released to the public.
Ironically, the Prophet Muhammad faced
worse defamation in his lifetime but refused to
curse his enemies, following the words of the
Koran to "Repel evil with something that is
better, lovelier."
In short,
anti-democratic forces in both the United States
and the Arab world want to discredit the
pro-democracy struggles in the Middle East: on the
one hand, Republicans and others who
unconditionally support pro-Western dictatorships,
US interventionism, and the Israeli occupation;
and, on the other extreme, radical Islamists who
want to counter their increasing marginality.
Fortunately, the reactions by these chauvinistic
forces are more a relic of the past than they are
a harbinger of the future.
In thinking
about an appropriate US response, it is important
not to repeat the mistakes of US policy in recent
years. It is extremely unlikely that such
vitriolic anti-American protests would have taken
place were it not for decades of US support,
during both Republican and Democratic
administrations, of allied dictatorships and the
Israeli occupation, not to mention the invasion
and occupation of Iraq and the ongoing military
strikes in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Yemen.
Indeed, interviews with demonstrators in Yemen and
elsewhere not surprisingly found grievances
towards the United States that went far beyond the
film itself.
It is also noteworthy that
the apparent producer of the offending film was a
Coptic Christian immigrant who presumably
developed his extreme hatred toward Muslims as a
reaction to the persecution of his fellow Copts in
his native Egypt. Much of that persecution was a
direct result of the US-backed Mubarak regime's
attempts to deliberately foment hatred and
division between Egyptian Muslims and Christians.
Despite the regime's discrimination and
oppression against the Copts - including the
infamous 2010 bombing of a Coptic Church in
Alexandria by agents from Mubarak's Interior
Ministry, which killed dozens - both Republican
and Democratic administrations provided the
Mubarak dictatorship with tens of billions of
dollars' worth of military and financial backing.
It is particularly tragic, then, that the
victims of last week's upsurge in violence
included Ambassador Christopher Stevens, one of
the United States' most knowledgeable and
respected diplomats. The outpouring of grief and
remorse from Libyans and others indicates that
most Arabs, despite their understandable
resentment of US policy, recognize that there can
still be good individuals representing the United
States abroad.
The best thing that can be
done in the memory of Stevens and other victims,
then, is to redouble efforts to end US support for
Arab dictatorships and Israeli occupation forces.
Indeed, the best defense against extremists are
political systems that honor people's demands for
freedom and justice.
Stephen
Zunes is a contributor to Foreign Policy In
Focus and a professor of politics at the
University of San Francisco.
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