The mainstream media is focusing like jackals on the Muhammad video, endangering the lives of the innocent people who produced the video, and pressing on the basis of the video for restrictions on the freedom of speech.
But as I’ve been saying, the video did not provoke the riots. The riots were orchestrated and planned long in advance, to get the Blind Sheikh freed — and to intimidate the West into destroying the freedom of speech.
“Deadly embassy attacks were days in the making,” by Sara Lynch and Oren Dorell for USA TODAY, September 13:
CAIRO — Days of planning and online promotion by hard-line Islamist leaders helped whip up the mobs that stormed the U.S. Embassy in Egypt and launched a deadly attack on the U.S. Embassy in Libya that killed an ambassador and three others.
As the U.S. tightened security worldwide at embassies and Libya’s president apologized for the attack, details emerged of how the violence began, according to experts who monitor Egyptian media.
Christopher Stevens, 52, the U.S. ambassador to Libya, was killed, along with three other Americans, on Tuesday night when a mob of protesters and gunmen stormed the embassy in the eastern city of Benghazi.
In response, the Obama administration sent an anti-terrorism detail of Marines to reinforce security at U.S. diplomatic facilities, and the Pentagon said two warships were moving toward the Libyan coast.
The killings in Libya followed demonstrations in front of Cairo’s U.S. Embassy, where protesters tore down the U.S. flag and scaled the embassy’s wall.
The protest was planned by Salafists well before news circulated of an objectionable video ridiculing Islam’s prophet, Mohammed, said Eric Trager, an expert at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.
The protest outside the U.S. Embassy in Cairo was announced Aug. 30 by Jamaa Islamiya, a State Department-designated terrorist group, to protest the ongoing imprisonment of its spiritual leader, Sheikh Omar abdel Rahman. He is serving a life sentence in the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center.
When the video started circulating, Nader Bakkar, the spokesman for the Egyptian Salafist Noor party, which holds about 25% of the seats in parliament, called on people to go to the embassy. He also called on non-Islamist soccer hooligans, known as Ultras, to join the protest.
On Monday, the brother of al-Qaeda leader Ayman al Zawahiri, Mohamed al Zawahiri, tweeted that people should go to the embassy and “defend the prophet,” Trager said.
Zawahiri justified al-Qaeda’s 9/11 attacks in an interview with Al Jazeera last month.
“If America attacks the Arab peoples and their regimes do not defend them, somebody who does defend the Arab and Muslim peoples should not be considered a criminal,” Zawahiri told the television network, according to a translation by MEMRI. “We have done nothing wrong.”…
The Muslim Brotherhood’s political arm, the Freedom and Justice Party (FJP), condemned the film in a statement Tuesday.
“The party considers the film a racist crime and a failed attempt to provoke sectarian strife between the two elements of the nation: Muslims and Christians,” a statement said on the FJP’s English-language website. “Moreover, the FJP considers this movie totally unacceptable, from the moral and religious perspectives, and finds that it excessively goes far beyond all reasonable boundaries of the freedoms of opinion and expression.”
President Obama on Wednesday condemned the attack and ordered stepped-up security at diplomatic installations around the world.
“There is absolutely no justification for this type of senseless violence. None,” the president said.
Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said, “This was an attack by a small and savage group, not the government” or the people of Libya.
Someone knew where Ambassador Stevens was hiding and tipped off the rioters.
She said it should “shock the conscience of people of all faiths around the world.”
“Violence like this is no way to honor religions or faith, and as long as there are those who will take innocent lives in the name of God, the world will never know true and everlasting peace,” she said….
No kidding, really?
Sam Bacile, a 56-year-old California real estate developer who identifies himself as an Israeli Jew and who said he produced, directed and wrote the two-hour film, Innocence of Muslims, said he had not anticipated such a furious reaction.
Video excerpts posted on YouTube depict the Prophet Muhammad as a fraud, a womanizer and a madman in an overtly ridiculing way, showing him having sex and calling for massacres.
Speaking by phone from an undisclosed location, Bacile, who went into hiding Tuesday, remained defiant, saying Islam is a cancer and that he intended his film to be a provocative political statement condemning the religion.
“Islam is a cancer, period,” he repeatedly said.
Florida pastor Terry Jones, the Gainesville-area pastor known for his virulent opposition to Islam, issued a statement on his website defending the film.
“The film is not intended to insult the Muslim community, but it is intended to reveal truths about Muhammad that are possibly not widely known,” Jones said in statement.
Wednesday morning the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen Martin E. Dempsey, called Jones.
“In the brief call, Gen. Dempsey expressed his concerns over the nature of the film, the tensions it will inflame and the violence it will cause,” said Marine Col. Dave Lapan, a spokesman for the Joint Chiefs of Staff. “He asked Mr Jones to consider withdrawing his support for the film.”
Appalling that the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff is asking an American citizen to submit to Sharia.
Some Muslims believe that any depiction of the prophet Mohammed, positive or negative, is not allowed.
“Depicting the prophet Mohammed isn’t forbidden but it is discouraged because deifying a human being can distract the faithful from worshiping god,” said M. Zuhdi Jasser, a devout Muslim and author of the book A Battle for the Soul of Islam: An American Muslim Patriot’s Fight to Save His Faith.
Those who believe that you can commit violence against those who depict the prophet are considered radical groups, Jasser said. He said that the attacks in Libya are “nothing short of pure evil and in no way representative of the teachings and practices of the faith of Islam.”…
Nonsense. Jasser knows that Islam mandates death for blasphemy. The rioters hold the U.S. Government responsible for the actions of American citizens, so they attack embassies. There is nothing un-Islamic about these attacks at all. But Jasser has long held to his own private Islam that has nothing to do with traditional, mainstream Islam, so he may be unaware of Islam’s blasphemy laws — or he may not want you to know about them.
Anti-American sentiments are so deep in much of the Arab world that the film that angered Egyptian and Libyan protesters should be seen “not as a cause of the protests, but a pretext,” said Shadi Hamid, director of research for the Brookings Doha Center….
Anti-American sentiments are less strong in Libya, where the U.S. helped oust Gadhafi, but unlike in Egypt, the Salafis in Libya are armed, which contributed to the level of violence, Hamid said.
Arab Muslims also “are not comfortable with the idea that freedom of speech can be used to attack religion,” he said….
No kidding, really?