Middle east explodes over anti-Islam film

[Joe]

Well as long as the media continues to focus on the 'backlash' and not the cause of it ie. the details of this video (although not its dubious origins, of course)

But the video itself is not really the cause. The cause is decades of US and Western mass murder of the people of the Middle East.

 

[meta-agnostic]

Well as long as the media continues to focus on the 'backlash' and not the cause of it ie. the details of this video (although not its dubious origins, of course)

But the video itself is not really the cause. The cause is decades of US and Western mass murder of the people of the Middle East.

I think this is a fundamental propaganda point of the whole situation, however much of it is real. If someone were to make a film insulting Christianity or Judaism, plenty of fundamentalist Christians or Jews would get upset, but how many of them would get violent? To your average Westerner who still believes the official story of 9/11, the reaction makes Muslims look like unstable savages, even if they have had a hard time lately overall. A few years ago it was a cartoon, now a movie, can't these people take any criticism without rioting? I don't agree with that assessment, I understand the whole thing is much more complicated and it appears to be much more orchestrated than spontaneous. But to your average Westerner already heavily biased against Islam, it seems kind of hard to argue the point.

 

[Ben]

Well as long as the media continues to focus on the 'backlash' and not the cause of it ie. the details of this video (although not its dubious origins, of course)

But the video itself is not really the cause. The cause is decades of US and Western mass murder of the people of the Middle East.

Of course, to clarify I meant the ostensible 'cause' in the way the story is being reported. Yet another dimension to the propaganda - distraction from the deeper, underlying issues that can be understood by anyone with conscience and have nothing to do with religion.

 

[loreta]

Sometimes I think that "they" provoke a situation to make people explode on something as trivial as a book or a movie like this one, to let off steam. So people unwind but nothing change, because the real problem is the social and political situation, the assassinations, the abuse. It is in fact a very manipulative situation. Why people explode about a movie and not because of the drones, for example?

 

[Thomas Alan]

I watched the trailer. Seems the best word to describe it is "stupid". I doesn't even rise to the level of satire. It does look like it is intended to provoke anger. Pretty nasty stuff.

It occurred to me that this might, at least in part, be an attempt to sway the US presidential election. Make Obama look weak, allowing the US to be humiliated.

Of course, the PTB can change the votes more easily now that it voting is mostly cyber. But they might want to get the polls closer so a Romney upset win would be at least plausible.

Mac

 

[Soluna]

I just want to add some more information on this event - I feel as though I am in an odd place to be able to do so.

The first time I heard about the event was when my husband came home from work and told me that someone he knew and had spoken to through an online game he played (and spoken to via voice communication) had been killed in a riot in Libya.
This person was a US diplomat - well, in broad terms, he was an 'IT guy' who worked in embassies I think.

He was well known through an online community : Quote by a poster named Kita : _http://forums.penny-arcade.com/discussion/163986/eve-ascii-penises-and-newbie-love/p6

(sorry for the name of the thread in the link - apparently it is considered 'humour' in that neck of the woods!)

Some of the information coming out about all this is today is sickening.

All signs are pointing to the guy creating the video (Sam Bacile) being a spook or an agent provocateur. At the very least, he doesn't really exist.

One of Vile Rat's last messages in Jabber apparently was worry that the guards were acting weird (taking photos et all) and expressing fear for his safety; and it's becoming apparent that this whole thing was a planned terrorist attack (under the guise of the riot). There's a rumor that the Libyan guards were warned about what was about to happen and chose not to tell the victims.

And of course it's had an... lets say "interesting" effect on US Politics over the past 24 hours.

Oh, and some fucker created a fake Vile Rat charity in game to scam people with. I'm hearing that CCP shut that shit down fast, though.


Vile Rat had a 3 minute segment on the Ed Show as well:
_http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/45755822/vp/49011802#49012247

In any case - anyone who is interested in the event, and perhaps looking at it through another perspective might be interested in reading the thread and comments posted at the link above.


I was confused that in another thread here : http://cassiopaea.org/forum/index.php/topic,29107.0.html : that the existence of the embassy was called into question. I hope that any information you might find by following the above links might help you shed light on any questions posed.

Awesome. I have been researching U.S. Embassies and Missions to find the location of the mysterious U.S. Embassy where the most recent events have transpired in Benghazi, Libya. From what I have been able to track down via the official US Department of States website - the only Embassy and Mission locations in Libya are in Tripoli. I have also checked Google Maps, Mapquest and other printed sources for insomuch as an outpost or hint of an American Institute in the city of Benghazi. Nothing. Zip. hmmmmmmmmmmmm.

This should be interesting.

Jeffery

 

[Renaissance]

I think this is a fundamental propaganda point of the whole situation, however much of it is real. If someone were to make a film insulting Christianity or Judaism, plenty of fundamentalist Christians or Jews would get upset, but how many of them would get violent? To your average Westerner who still believes the official story of 9/11, the reaction makes Muslims look like unstable savages, even if they have had a hard time lately overall. A few years ago it was a cartoon, now a movie, can't these people take any criticism without rioting? I don't agree with that assessment, I understand the whole thing is much more complicated and it appears to be much more orchestrated than spontaneous. But to your average Westerner already heavily biased against Islam, it seems kind of hard to argue the point.

It would be pretty useless to argue the point with those who accept the lies of 9/11, the murder of millions upon millions of people, the lies of terrorism, and who accept Muslims and Arabs as less-than human. But what I don't get is if you see these lies, how can you look at this situation as though it is a reaction to mere "criticism"??

 

[meta-agnostic]

I think this is a fundamental propaganda point of the whole situation, however much of it is real. If someone were to make a film insulting Christianity or Judaism, plenty of fundamentalist Christians or Jews would get upset, but how many of them would get violent? To your average Westerner who still believes the official story of 9/11, the reaction makes Muslims look like unstable savages, even if they have had a hard time lately overall. A few years ago it was a cartoon, now a movie, can't these people take any criticism without rioting? I don't agree with that assessment, I understand the whole thing is much more complicated and it appears to be much more orchestrated than spontaneous. But to your average Westerner already heavily biased against Islam, it seems kind of hard to argue the point.

It would be pretty useless to argue the point with those who accept the lies of 9/11, the murder of millions upon millions of people, the lies of terrorism, and who accept Muslims and Arabs as less-than human. But what I don't get is if you see these lies, how can you look at this situation as though it is a reaction to mere "criticism"??

"Criticism" was probably not a very good word choice. Insult would have been better, and we all know insults can lead to fighting. I still haven't seen any of the footage of this "insult" so I can't say much on this. But loreta makes a good point, there have been drone attacks going on in several of these countries for how long? But this movie is what unites people enough to provoke riotous demonstrations? It's just weird. Not to mention the whole continually shifting back story of the supposed producers of the movie. Supposedly one of them lived in the U.S. and had a connection to Israel, or not, or it was a pseudonym for several people. Was it ever suggested that the U.S. government was behind it? Maybe those crowds just have better intuition about these things, but if so, why play right into their hands? It makes little sense to smash a Starbucks when you are protesting corporate globalization, but to me it makes even less sense to smash an embassy and fast food restaurants from a country because a person/people from that country produced something insulting to you. And not for nothing, but how many people anywhere in the world would even be aware of the existence of this stupid movie if not for the riots?

I don't know, maybe after the Danish newspaper cartoon debacle TPTB saw a great opportunity for how to manipulate Muslims into rage, and they took the opportunity to use it to greater lengths and assisted it with covert ops this time. It seems a shame that so many people would play right into it, but they deserve no more or less blame than so many Americans do for accepting all the nonsense they are conned into on a daily basis.

 

[Joe]

Well as long as the media continues to focus on the 'backlash' and not the cause of it ie. the details of this video (although not its dubious origins, of course)

But the video itself is not really the cause. The cause is decades of US and Western mass murder of the people of the Middle East.

I think this is a fundamental propaganda point of the whole situation, however much of it is real. If someone were to make a film insulting Christianity or Judaism, plenty of fundamentalist Christians or Jews would get upset, but how many of them would get violent? To your average Westerner who still believes the official story of 9/11, the reaction makes Muslims look like unstable savages, even if they have had a hard time lately overall. A few years ago it was a cartoon, now a movie, can't these people take any criticism without rioting? I don't agree with that assessment, I understand the whole thing is much more complicated and it appears to be much more orchestrated than spontaneous. But to your average Westerner already heavily biased against Islam, it seems kind of hard to argue the point.

Argue the point in the way you just have. It makes sense.

 

[Muxel]

But loreta makes a good point, there have been drone attacks going on in several of these countries for how long? But this movie is what unites people enough to provoke riotous demonstrations?

Maybe they are so powerless (against drones) that the "accusation of religious intolerance" card is all they have to play, to get the world's attention, in the hopes that some "benevolent" dispenser of justice (UN/NATO) will have a look at their case.

It seems a shame that so many people would play right into it, but they deserve no more or less blame than so many Americans do for accepting all the nonsense they are conned into on a daily basis.

Do you want the Muslims to "stop overreacting"? It's not just the faux trailer that fuels their outrage, you know.

 

[Biomiast]

Hi,

For what is worth, I want to share my perspective of the situation, and hopefully I would like to put some light on the cultural differences between Middle East and Western country. Historically, Middle East is a place where people's life doesn't hold much significance. What are you, and what do you hope to achieve if you can get killed because of some blood feud, war, disease or terror attacks? You really have no future, but this is not so because U.S. is attacking just now, it was like this throughout history. Europe was like this also at certain times, but they also developed a sense of human value, individualization after Dark Ages.

Middle East has never experienced such a thing. In there, your life is still without any significance. And through all these pain and suffering, there is only one thing that can hold everyone together, that is Islam. Without their religion people in this region would go mad, but now they know if they die they will be in heaven. So far so good, but this unification also gives rise to herd mentality. People feeling powerless as individuals find the power of existence in their groups. To maintain and preserve this power, they can do anything, this includes protecting their belief system because it is what gives them value.

It is not always true, but for more fundamentalist Muslims you might get a bigger reaction for insulting Prophet as opposed to killing a family member. I have seen footage of 33 people burned alive in an hotel because some guy among them did not believe in what they believe about prophet and wanted to translate Salman Rushdie's book. This happened in Turkey, a secular country, in 1993. As the hotel burns, people were shouting: 'My God, this is your fire, it is the fire of hell'. For the record, Turkey was not attacked by any drones or whatever at the time, these guys had no issue voicing their opinions, on the contrary, they were the majority and acted as they were trained.

I think I tend to agree with meta-agnostic on this one, and I feel like Muslims that are not fundamentalists and have a decent understanding of the world without being lost in their religious group would not attend such protests, but they would say: 'All those people who mock our Prophet and our beliefs, may God curse you.' which is an understandable statement given their beliefs. Going around, yelling and shouting would not accomplish anything, let alone killing some foreign officials. However, this trend of taking what you want by force is on the rise in Middle East after the Arab Spring, the problem is, people don't know when to revolt, when to keep calm and decent people don't revolt anyway, they leave such things to God.

My two cents, fwiw.

 

[webglider]

This excerpt from Andrew M. Lobaczewski's book Political Ponerology. comforts me in a weird way because it makes it possible to understand the the reason for the events described in this thread and where they can lead. In a way it's kind of self-soothing because I get the feeling that understanding gives me some control over the situation when I know it doesn't. But I can only imagine how lost and helpless I would feel if I didn't have access to this information. At least I know enough not to try to reason with some people. It's really good in these times to know when to keep silent.

For some reason, when I understand something, even if it's horrific, I can handle it better at least emotionally.

THE HYSTEROIDAL CYCLE
http://ponerology.com/evil_2a.html

In the search for a good life, humanity first used the power of animals, then turned to exploiting their fellow humans. In such a way, the seeds of suffering and inequality can be found in our hedonistic pursuit of “happiness”. In this way good times give birth to bad times. The knowledge learned by the suffering in bad times leads to the creation of good times, and the cycle repeats.

When a society is hedonistic and the times are “good”, the perception of the truth about the real environment, and in particular, the understanding of what a healthy human personality is and how such personalities are nurtured, ceases first of all to be the highest social priority, then ceases to be generally understood, and finally ceases even to be remembered as a part of the inventory of human knowledge.

Understanding and accumulation of knowledge may seem to be a “done deal” (e.g., The “There’s nothing left to be discovered in physics” pronouncements at the end of the nineteenth century or “We are the end result and final goal of evolution”). The search for truth is then considered to be a pointless activity for the very reason that the times are good. This, unfortunately, is a confusion of the effect (the good times) with the cause (the dedicated effort to understand and the reality-matching social organizations created by that understanding which brought the good times into being). In-depth understanding may become “unfashionable” or even despised. For example, studious upper class Victorian youths were labeled “grinds”; today in America, such studious ones might be advised to “get a life.”

Having arrived at the very top of the wheel of fortune, many people forget that, without evolutionary transformation to another level, it is a wheel, and there’s nowhere to go but down. Here are the bare bones of the hysteroidal cycle with specific emphasis on the mental processes involved.

1. The search for truth reveals “inconvenient”, that is, morally embarrassing facts. For example, Christian slaveholders being reminded that holding slaves was not a very Christian activity; or otherwise unprejudiced Americans being informed that their tax dollars are being spent for racist goals, that is, to ethnically cleanse the Palestinians from the land coveted by Zionists. Hedonistic societies repress the fact that they profit on the suffering of others.

2. At first, when morally embarrassing facts are encountered, they are consciously avoided. For example, the subject is suddenly changed; or a discussion is tabled or concluded without going any further into the matter.

3. When the avoidance of morally embarrassing facts is done frequently enough, it ceases to be a conscious process and gets relegated to the subconscious; that is, it becomes a habit.

4. The habit of avoiding morally embarrassing facts is a contagious one. It becomes a socially accepted habit, the “in” thing to do. “The ‘very best people’ never discuss such things, and certainly not in public,” is a sentiment expressed innumerable times in the nineteenth century. Lobaczewski points out that Kaiser Wilhelm I had a brain trauma at birth, and numerous physical and psychological handicaps which were so completely concealed from the German people, that, for example, it is almost impossible to find a photograph of this emperor with his badly withered arm visible.

5. Reasoning to draw valid conclusions becomes impossible because of the gaps left by the suppressed “inconvenient” facts. The subconscious compensates by substituting morally less embarrassing “premises” so as to be able to continue to draw conclusions, although the conclusions now drawn are, necessarily, false. This is the chronic avoidance of the crux of the matter.

6. People grow perceptibly more egotistic, and the society as a whole more emotional and hysterical. There is a great deal of confusion about values and such societies grow to be seen as arrogant and hedonistic.

7. When the deviation from reality becomes great enough, the person or the society becomes pathological, and murder sprees or senseless world wars and bloody revolutions are in the offing.


In short, during good times, moral, intellectual and personality values devolve to the point where a society is ripe for manipulation by snake-charmers and con-men of Rasputin-like charisma. Individuals become emotionally volatile, egotistical, and intolerant of other cultures. The resulting suffering necessitate great mental and physical strength to fight for existence and human reason. Slowly, what has been lost is relearned. Difficult times give rise to the values necessary to conquer evil and produce better times.

Copyright 2008 Red Pill Press

 

[loreta]

This situation about the movie reminds me another situation about the book The Satanic Verses. I remember at that time the reaction of many Muslims that were very, very mad even if the majority did not read the book. Their reaction was incomprehensible for me and one day, around a table with two of my African Muslims friends we tried to understand why they where so mad. For a Muslim it is inconceivable to talk bad about Mahomet and also to put an image of him. But I wanted to know why. Why can not Mahomet be perceived as another human being? Why it was impossible to see him in love or loving a woman? My friends were unable to give a rational answer. And it was impossible to made them understand that one thing is the reality, the reality of Mahomet, and another what an artist can do with it. In that case the book of Salman Rushdie. No way. You can not touch Mahomet.

My friends where educated men, University men. They where not fanatics but during that supper I found them fanatic. I was young and ignorant. But now I accept their vision and surely if we where together around a table I would be silent. If they think that it is sin to give an "image" of Mahomet, whatever image is, I acepted it. Who I am to refuse their vision of their religion? I am against the herd mentality but for respect for their religion I think my silence is better than try to argue with them.

Some years ago I had Sahrawi friends. They where doing Ramadam. I asked the senior of the family why it is important not to eat during day during Ramadam. I wanted to see his vision of fast and if he had a personal idea about it. It was impossible. For him fast during Ramadan is what Mahomet said to do and that's it. Again I was with a herd response but at the same time I was myself more mature so I did not insist. I accepted his limitations. And I accepted also my limitations concerning the understandig of his religion.

We know that what is happening is a cover-up but apart from the movie, that is surely an insult to Mahomet, their reaction is something that I understand from their point of vue.


By the way...Do you remember the Scorsese's movie about Jesus, The Last Temptation of Christ? How the catholic reacted badly... without reason. Fanaticism is a bad thing, here, there, over there. But it is always important, I think, to put in context.