"In light of the latest anti-islamic campaign, liberals in the west are arguing that violating the sacred is a sacred right.
What this flawed reasoning illustrates is that Liberalism is not an intellectual zero point which serves as benchmark to measure other ideologies, nor is it an ideologically neutral belief system which transcends the mythology inherent in other doctrines, but a secular religion that merely “tolerates” other systems of thought and belief which are invariably perceived as inferior to itself.
If we want to follow this logical fallacy to its conclusion, then Muslims can argue that violating the scared right to violate the sacred must be a scared right too."
The Cannonfire blogspot makes some very interesting observations and draws some convincing conclusions about the “Muslim Innocence” movie:
Think about it. Who the hell is going to loan Nakoula — a guy guilty of freakin’ bank fraud — the sum of five million dollars? Even if the actual budget was $50,000, how would this jailbird scrape up the dough? He was sent to prison for 21 months in 2010; how did he secure an early release?
You can’t make a movie of any kind — even a student film — if you can’t communicate via the internet.
How many times have we seen this pattern? First, a shady low-life gets into trouble with the law. Then the spooks find him, whisper in his ear, and promise to make all of his problems go away — as long as he plays along with some bizarre scheme.
And what sort of crook would make it his first order of business, after walking out of jail, to make a movie denigrating Mohammed — a film intentionally designed to create an international incident? If you had no job, no prospects, a prison record and a debt of more than three-quarters of a million dollars, would your first instinct be to make a damned movie? Even though you’ve never made a movie before in your life?
Believe me, that script was written weeks ago, maybe months ago. This whole thing is an operation.
I mean, what the hell could Nakoula (freshly released from the joint) have hoped to gain for his co-religionists in Egypt? Did he really think that his inane film would cause all the Muslims in Egypt to slap their heads and shout: “Oh no! We’ve been following the wrong religion! Time to switch!”?
Anyone with any sense could have foreseen that this cinematic stunt would incite outrage, riots and persecution of the Copts. Nakoula — or rather, his funders — wanted to get people killed.
Incidentally, a friend of mine “in the industry” has seen the YouTube material and estimates the budget of Nakoula’s film at around $30,000. I’d go higher, but not much higher. The rest of the $5 million budget was Nakoula’s payoff. It’s blood money.
Neocons in America and Israel concocted this plot long ago. I would stake my life on it.
We can state with the certainty of a geometrical proof that Sam Bacile is a Mossad asset — a “sayan” — and that he did what he did under orders, not of his own initiative. The motive is transparent: Likudniks want the United States to attack Iran, and they know that Obama won’t do it. Romney will. He has made that point very clear. Thus, Israeli war hawks concocted a plan to make sure Romney gets into office.
The conspirators made this film for the express purpose of provoking a violent reaction, which would, in turn give the Republicans a political cudgel to wield against the president.
I do not doubt for a second the presence of provocateurs on the ground in Cairo and Libya. (How did they even know about the YouTube clip?) I also believe that this plan would have remained “on hold” if Romney had attained a comfortable lead.
I’m pretty sure that CIA had nothing to do with this. Only Israeli intelligence is so reckless.
The blog’s analysis is all the more compelling when read in conjunction with these excerpts from an NYT piece here:
When a 14-minute trailer of it — all that may actually exist — was posted on YouTube in June, it was barely noticed. But when the video, with its almost comically amateurish production values, was translated into Arabic and reposted twice on YouTube in the days before Sept. 11, and promoted by leaders of the Coptic diaspora in the United States, it drew nearly one million views and set off bloody demonstrations….. The history of the film — who financed it; how it was made; and perhaps most important, how it was translated into Arabic and posted on YouTube to Muslim viewers — was shrouded Wednesday in tales of a secret Hollywood screening; a director who may or may not exist, and used a false name if he did; and actors who appeared, thanks to computer technology, to be traipsing through Middle Eastern cities….He said the film had been shown at a screening at a theater “100 yards or so” from Grauman’s Chinese Theater in Hollywood over the summer, drawing what he suggested was a depressingly small audience. He declined to specify what theater might have shown it, and theater owners in the vicinity of the busy strip said they had no record of any such showing….As the movie, “Innocence of Muslims,” drew attention across the globe, it was unclear whether a full version exists. Executives at Hollywood agencies said they had never heard of it. Hollywood unions said they had no involvement. Casting directors said they did not recognize the actors in the 14-minute YouTube clip that purports to be a trailer for a longer film. Production offices had no records for a movie of that name. There was a 2009 casting call in BackStage, however, for a film called “Desert Warrior” whose producer is listed as Sam Bassiel.”
So the Pope is now proposing a dialogue between religions in response to the Libyan Salafis’ attack on the US Ambassador.
Right, inter-religious dialogue is the solution because as Muslims, our real problem with the US/NATO is the clash of civilizations and not Western imperialism.The pope would do well to read Seyyid Hassan Nasrallah’s words:
“Neither America nor Israel cares about our prayers or fasting. Fast as you want, pray as you want, or perform pilgrimage as you want, but leave things, sovereignty, and the major political interests for America and Israel. The contradiction with the Islamic resistance factions in Gaza is not due to their ideological, religious, or intellectual affiliation. It is, however, due to the programme of the resistance.”
Confused about the US policy on Islamic jihadis? Maybe this will help clarify a little: the more jihadism overlaps with the secular concept of Moqawama (resistance) and pursues irredentist and liberationist goals (i.e. Palestine, Lebanon, Afghanistan, Kashmir), which are essentially DEFENSIVE and driven by a rejection of oppression, with no ambitions to cleanse the nation of “infidels”, then jihad
is terrorism. All other types (save the global jihad against the US and the West) are more than welcome, particularly the Salafi Takfiri and Wahhabi variants of jihad as well as the Qutbist variety, when they shift focus away from fighting the external enemy to the “enemy within”, i.e. fellow Muslims and minorities, as well as Arab/Muslim regimes on account of their perceived apostasy rather than their inherent injustice. While not entirely comfortable with jihadism, the US has learned to exploit it and hence favours offensive rather than defensive jihad, which strives to re-establish the “golden age” of Islam by forceful imposition because US policy works under the [sometimes erroneous] assumption that while Moqawama cannot be co-opted, Islamic rule can be.
I guess this puts all those Quran-burning, corpse mutilating, family-massacring “incidents” perpetrated by the Amerikkkan army in perspective. Excerpts from Wired.com: “The U.S. military taught its future leaders that a “total war” against the world’s 1.4 billion Muslims would be necessary to protect America from Islamic terrorists, according to documents obtained by Danger Room. Among the options considered for that conflict: using the lessons of “Hiroshima” to wipe out whole cities at once, targeting the “civilian population wherever necessary.” “We have now come to understand that there is no such thing as ‘moderate Islam,’” Dooley noted in a July 2011 presentation (.pdf), which concluded with a suggested manifesto to America’s enemies. “It is therefore time for the United States to make our true intentions clear. This barbaric ideology will no longer be tolerated. Islam must change or we will facilitate its self-destruction.” The course.. has since been canceled by the Pentagon brass. …The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff recently ordered the entire U.S. military to scour its training material to make sure it doesn’t contain similarly hateful material, a process that is still ongoing. But the officer who delivered the lectures, Army Lt. Col. Matthew A. Dooley, still maintains his position at the Norfolk, Virginia college, pending an investigation….”
Just finished reading the full transcript to Christiane Amanpour’s interview with Ehud Barak here . While we have become somewhat desensitized to Israeli racism, it’s always unsettling to view it through the lens of unquestioning mainstream western media. Take for example Barak’s reference to the Shi’ite doctrine of “taqiyya” (dissimulation) instituted in the wake of Imam Hussein’s martyrdom: “Have you heard the term atakia (ph), which means in Islam, especially in the Shia, a kind of permission from heaven to the leader to lie and mislead”. Aside from Barak’s confusion between the original term and Bashar al-Assad’s summer home in Latakia—which I am starting to believe reflects a general Israeli tendency to deliberately mispronounce the Arabic language—the ability of a public official to mock a central religious tenet with such impunity is indicative of Euro-American media’s increased tolerance for the defamation of Islam.
But more insidious still, is this old/new trend of psychopathologizing USrael’s enemies in the resistance axis as “irrational” or, to put it more euphemistically, as not being rational in the Western sense of the term. Airing footage from a CBS interview, Meir Dagan, former Mossad chief, answers an interviewer’s question about Ahmadinejad’s rationality: ”The answer is yes. Not exactly our rational. But I think that he is rational….No doubt that the Iranian regime is maybe not exactly rational based on what I call Western-thinking, but no doubt they are considering all the implications of their actions.” Dagan therefore categorizes Israel as belonging to the “western” type of logic, which Iran departs from even if does adopt a similar mean-ends type rationality characterized by its own unique internal consistency between beliefs/desires/expectations and actions. But ultimately, they remain irrational vis-a-vis western criteria for rationality, and hence the very otherness of this rationality is necessarily inferior. But one need not deconstruct Dagan’s response to arrive at this conclusion, given that the interviewer, Lesley Stahl, deemed it perfectly normal, and within the bounds of politically correct liberal discourse, to ask it in the first place.
An even more flagrant example of how such a neo-Orientalist notion has become normalized and mainstreamed in public discourse, is the following question Fareed Zakaria’s posed to General Martin Dempsey, Chairman, U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff: ”When you observe Iranian behavior, does it strike you as highly irrational? Does it strike you as sort of unpredictable? Or do they seem to follow their national interests in a fairly calculating way?” To which Dempsey enthusiastically responds “That is a great question,” effectively undermining his subsequent assertion that Iran is a rational actor.
Needless to say, the idea of questioning the inherent rationality or logic of any Western country or Israel on mainstream American media is inconceivable, let alone the notion of an Arab or Muslim statesman using such media as a platform from which to blaspheme Jewish doctrinal practices.
There are numerous other instances of such psychopathologization, not only of Iran but of Assad, Hizbullah and Palestinian militants too, but I am saving them for an article I will publishing on the issue (and re-posting here) in the not too distant future. Stay tuned.
