Did an inflammatory anti-Muslim film trailer that appeared spontaneously on YouTube prompt the attack that left four US diplomats dead, including US ambassador to Libya Christopher Stevens? American officials have suggested that the assault was pre-planned, allegedly by of one of the Jihadist groups that emerged since the Nato-led overthrow of Libya's Gaddafi regime. So even though the deadly scene in Benghazi may not have resulted directly from the angry reaction to the Islamophobic video, the violence has helped realize the apocalyptic visions of the film's backers.
Produced and promoted by a strange collection of rightwing Christian evangelicals and exiled Egyptian Copts, the trailer was created with the intention of both destabilizing post-Mubarak Egypt and roiling the US presidential election. As a consultant for the film named Steve Klein said: "We went into this knowing this was probably going to happen."
The Associated Press's initial report on the trailer – an amateurish, practically unwatchable production called The Innocence of Muslims – identified a mysterious character, "Sam Bacile", as its producer. Bacile told the Associated Press that he was a Jewish Israeli real estate developer living in California. He said that he raised $5m for the production of the film from "100 Jewish donors", an unusual claim echoing Protocols of the Elders of Zion-style fantasies. Unfortunately, the extensive history of Israeli and ultra-Zionist funding and promotion of Islamophobic propaganda in the United States provided Bacile's remarkable statement with the ring of truth.
[. . .]
Before Nakoula was unmasked, the only person to publicly claim any role in the film was Klein, an insurance salesman and Vietnam veteran from Hemet, California, who emerged from the same Islamophobic movement that produced the Norwegian mass murderer Anders Behring Breivik. Styling themselves as "counter-Jihadists", anti-Muslim crusaders like Klein took their cues from top propagandists like Pamela Geller, the blogger who once suggested that Barack Obama was the lovechild of Malcolm X, and Robert Spencer, a pseudo-academic expert on Muslim radicalization who claimed that Islam was no more than "a developed doctrine and tradition of warfare against unbelievers". Both Geller and Spencer were labeled hate group leaders by the Southern Poverty Law Center.
Klein is an enthusiastic commenter on Geller's website, Atlas Shrugged, where he recently complained about Mitt Romney's "support for a Muslim state in Israel's heartland". In July 2011, Spencer's website, Jihad Watch, promoted a rally Klein organized to demand the firing of Los Angeles County sheriff Lee Baca, whom he painted as a dupe for the Muslim Brotherhood.
On his personal Facebook page, Altar or Abolish, Klein obsesses over the Muslim Brotherhood, describing the organization as "a global network of Muslims attacking to convert the world's 6 billion people to Islam or kill them". Klein urges a violent response to the perceived threat of Islam in the United States, posting an image to his website depicting a middle-American family with a mock tank turret strapped to the roof of their car. "Can you direct us to the nearest mosque?" read a caption Klein added to the photo.
In 2011, during his campaign to oust Sheriff Baca, Klein forged an alliance with Joseph Nasrallah, an extremist Coptic broadcaster who shared his fear and resentment of the Muslim Brotherhood. Nasrallah appeared from out of nowhere at a boisterous rally against the construction of an Islamic community center in downtown Manhattan on September 11, 2010, warning a few hundred riled-up Tea Party types that Muslims "came and conquered our country the same way they want to conquer America".
Organized by Geller and Spencer, the rally was carefully timed to coincide with the peak of the midterm congressional election campaign, in which many rightwing Republicans hoped to leverage rising anti-Muslim sentiment into resentment against the presidency of Obama.
We live in a world where American provocateurs can easily arouse the militancy of Muslim extremists who are more ubiquitous than even I would like to admit, or, at the very least, allow bad people to use extant anti-American sentiment to whip crowds into frenzies. In either case, innocent people, including Americans, die.
On Twitter, the first instinct of a lot of Americans was retributive justice. But the U.S. government's sensitivity about the mood of the violent protesters is maddening but necessary. Being aggressive would cause more unnecessary dying.
Those who use the gift of institutionally and legally-protected free speech to exploit and prey upon the vulnerability of certain people to violence ought to be shamed.
At the same time, the people who killed people; protesters, thugs, militants, whomever, are ultimately responsible for their actions. If the U.S. government is going to discourage our own idiots from provoking people, then the governments of Egypt and Libya should act to corral those within their own nations who would storm an embassy on the pretext that a film offends. Well, barely, a film. A piece of anti-Muslim bigotry that was made to make the filmmakers feel good and others feel bad. If, as an American, I feel embarrassed that so many of my fellow Americans are bigots, I would, as an Egyptian or a Libyan, be even more horrified that the majority in my country seemed unable to stop (and barely condemn) the even more deplorable violent religious extremism of a minority.
The Arab Spring is incredibly messy and it is hard to see how American values and sensibilities about religious speech will ever take hold in some countries there. That’s incredibly depressing, but I do know this: The barrels of our own guns won't help anything either.
I will end on a tweet from a former FBI counter-terrorism agent, David Gomez, whose avatar is @AllThingsHLS: "When innocent people die because of what you say, it's time to man up. Terry Jones go to Benghazi and defend your film!"
Online and on talk radio, the mayor still enjoys a measure of support from the diehards. His heart is in the right place, they say. He is a lovable bear of a man. He is helping underprivileged kids. The mayor should be praised for volunteering. Charges of conflict of interest and misuse of taxpayers’ money are petty.
Hmmmm. Didn’t Ford rise to fame by attacking city councillors for their “misuse” of taxpayers’ money? Wasn’t that the foundation of his run for mayor, why people fell in love with him?
Ford attacked councillors who used their office budget to buy cellphones. He railed against one councillor for buying an espresso machine to supply beverages for constituents who visited city hall.
When a councillor rented a bunny costume for the local Easter parade in her ward, he led the protest against her.
Donate $250 from the office budget toward a local baseball team for kids in the ward, and Rob Ford would slag the councillor for waste. In fact, he lumped all those expenditures as the “gravy” he would scoop out of city hall.
Now, it seems, the mayor refuses to see distinct and unmistakable evidence of conflict and inappropriate spending in his own office.
The reason he was in court last week was because he refused to heed concerns about his clear conflict of interest with his football foundation. Ford used city letterhead to solicit money from lobbyists for the foundation. He didn’t stop when the integrity commissioner asked him to. He refused to return the $3,150 he collected. And he voted on the matter when it came to council with a recommendation he pay up — clearly a conflict of interest.
[. . .]
Anyone who has dispassionately examined the mayor knows this: He doesn’t care what anybody thinks. He has a nose for trouble. He thumbs his nose at the world. And he is still that rich kid from north Etobicoke who gets away with bullying those around him, because he can.
Homosexuality was declassified as a mental illness in China a decade ago, but prejudice remains deep. So when an editor at the government education department in the city of Hangzhou was compiling a pamphlet recently to help parents guide their children through puberty, she included a warning about “deviant” behaviour.
What she may not have expected was an irate open letter in response from a group of mothers of gay children. Eighteen mothers, from all over China, affiliated with Parents, Families and Friends of Lesbians and Gays, an NGO known as PFLAG China, signed the letter. It called for the book to be withdrawn.
“We’re extremely angry about this,” one of the signatories says who asked only to be identified by her internet name: Romantic Mum from Hebei. “Understanding and accepting gay people starts with education,” she continues. “But if kids continue to get this kind of education, the prejudice will remain.”
The mother says her own “unsuitable education” meant that she was devastated when her son came out to her at the age of 15: “I kept asking myself what I had done wrong in bringing him up.” But last year, after joining some online discussion groups, she accepted that her son was not going to change. Now she helps run PFLAG’s hotline, which offers advice to parents of gay children.
PFLAG’s director, Hu Zhijun, says that ten years ago very few children came out to their parents. Now, with more information available online, a new generation of gay people are more confident. “They’re more likely to tell their parents and classmates,” he says.
The government editor’s response was encouraging too: she invited the volunteers for a chat, apologised for not knowing much about gay people, and said there will be changes in the next edition of the book.
Wired: [P]eople always talk about how prophetic Neuromancer was and how your books are so accurate in so many ways, in their predictive capacity.
Gibson: No, they do, but that’s part of this cultural thing we do as a culture, that we do with prediction. Science fiction writers aren’t fortune tellers. Fortune tellers are fakes. Fortune tellers are either deluded or charlatans. You can find science fiction writers who are deluded or science fiction writers who are charlatans — I can think of several of each in the history of the field. Every once in a while, somebody extends their imagination down the line, far enough with a sufficient lack of prejudice, to imagine something that then actually happens. When it happens, it’s great, but it’s not magic. All the language we have for describing what science fiction writers and futurists of other stripes do is nakedly a language of magic.
I’m having a week where some well-intentioned person on the internet describes me as “oracular.” As soon as one of the words with a magic connotation is attached — I know this from ongoing experience — as soon as someone says “oracular,” it’s like, boom! It’s all over the place; it’s endlessly repeated. It’s probably not bad for business. But then I wind up spending a lot of time disabusing people of the idea that I have some sort of magic insight…. You can also find, if you wanted to Google through all the William Gibson pieces on the net, you can find tons of pieces, where people go on and on about how often I’ve gotten it wrong. Where are the cellphones? And neural nets? Why is the bandwidth of everything microscopic in Neuromancer? I could write technological critique of Neuromancer myself that I think could probably convince people that I haven’t gotten it right.
Because the thing that Neuromancer predicts as being actually like the internet isn’t actually like the internet at all! It’s something; I didn’t get it right but I said there was going to be something. I somehow managed to convey a feeling of something. Curiously, that put me out ahead of the field in that regard. It wasn’t that other people were getting it wrong; it was just that relatively few people in the early 1980s, relatively few people who were writing science fiction were paying attention to that stuff. That wasn’t what they were writing about.
I was very lucky — ridiculously lucky in the timing of my interests with a science fiction novel about the digital. Ridiculously lucky. When I was writing it, or actually even before, like a couple of years before, when I was writing the two short stories that Neuromancer sort of emerged from, that the world of Neuromancer emerged from — when I was writing them, they took like a week or two to write, each one. When I was writing each one, it was, “Oh please please let me get this thing published before the 20,000 other people writing exactly the same story right now get theirs published.” Because I just thought it was so obvious. I thought, “This is it. This is what science fiction writers call steam engine time for this kind of story.”
You know steam engine time? Humans have built little toys, steam engines, for thousands of years. The Greeks had them. Lots of different cultures. The Chinese had them. Lots of different cultures used steam to make little metal things spin around. Nobody ever did anything with it. All of a sudden someone in Europe did one out in a garden shed and the industrial revolution happened. That was steam engine time. When I was writing those first stories, I didn’t even know to call the thing the digital. But it was steam engine time. It was happening.
Some guy in England was selling a computer the size of a dictionary. I didn’t know — and it wouldn’t have mattered to me — that the dictionary-sized computer that guy was selling was as powerful as a Casio wristwatch was going to be in a few years, but that was all I needed to know was that you could order these things in magazines and they were small. So I thought, OK, they’re going to be cheap and ubiquitous, increasingly so. What are people going to do with them? It just seemed to fall together so naturally. I was kind of amazed for years after that, that there hadn’t been this huge wave of science fiction writers rushing up behind me, and squashing me flat as I got out the gate with my little cyberspace thing. But actually they did; it took a while. It was very strange. It was good for me, that.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
branchandrootdancing_serpent
