Meredith Tax: The politics of provocation
Feminists have been saying “Beware of fundamentalism” for the last twenty years, and we need to say it now louder than ever: anyone who whips up religious antagonisms to win political power is an enemy of human rights.
Three Christian fundamentalists make a film to insult Islam, blame it on Jewish fundamentalists, and succeed in provoking riots by Muslim fundamentalists. Here’s the tale to date:
According to Max Blumenthal in the Guardian, a trio of Southern California anti-Muslim bigots—let us call them the Three Little Pigs—Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, a Egyptian Copt convicted of check fraud; Alan Roberts, a one time director of soft core porn best known for The Happy Hooker Goes Hollywood; and Steve Klein, a Christian fundamentalist insurance salesman who calls himself a “counter-jihadist”—decided to make a movie. Think of this as one of those old MGM films where Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney put on a musical in the barn, only the point of this movie was to trash Islam, provoke Muslim fundamentalist riots, and overturn the Egyptian revolution. They lied to their actors about the story line, telling them they were shooting an epic calledDesert Warrior. (The casting call featured these parts: Male Roles: GEORGE (Lead); 40-50, Middle Eastern warrior leader, romantic, charismatic; HILLARY (featured) 18 but must look younger, petite; innocent.) After shooting with one script, the producers dubbed in another to turn the film into an aimed-to-offend biopic of the prophet Mohammed.
Also see: No spring for Arab women - Interview with Marieme Helie Lucas
Three Christian fundamentalists make a film to insult Islam, blame it on Jewish fundamentalists, and succeed in provoking riots by Muslim fundamentalists. Here’s the tale to date:
According to Max Blumenthal in the Guardian, a trio of Southern California anti-Muslim bigots—let us call them the Three Little Pigs—Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, a Egyptian Copt convicted of check fraud; Alan Roberts, a one time director of soft core porn best known for The Happy Hooker Goes Hollywood; and Steve Klein, a Christian fundamentalist insurance salesman who calls himself a “counter-jihadist”—decided to make a movie. Think of this as one of those old MGM films where Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney put on a musical in the barn, only the point of this movie was to trash Islam, provoke Muslim fundamentalist riots, and overturn the Egyptian revolution. They lied to their actors about the story line, telling them they were shooting an epic calledDesert Warrior. (The casting call featured these parts: Male Roles: GEORGE (Lead); 40-50, Middle Eastern warrior leader, romantic, charismatic; HILLARY (featured) 18 but must look younger, petite; innocent.) After shooting with one script, the producers dubbed in another to turn the film into an aimed-to-offend biopic of the prophet Mohammed.
The Three Little Pigs hired a hall for a day to show their film, now calledInnocence of Muslims. They made a trailer which hung around the web for a while without anyone noticing. Then they contacted Morris Sadek, a rabidly rightwing Copt based in DC, Daniel Burke of Religion Dispatches says was barred from returning to Egypt in May 2011 after he called for war against his own country. Sadek, who is associated with Koran-burning Florida preacher Terry Jones and is despised by more mainstream Copts, dubbed the film into Arabic, put it on his website, and on Sept. 6 emailed it to Egyptian and other journalists along with a press release for Terry Jones’s annual Sept. 11 “International Judge Muhammad Day.” A rightwing TV host in Egypt broadcast the video on Sept. 8.
The video went viral and on Sept. 11 mass protests “spontaneously” broke out against this new US insult to Islam. In Cairo the US embassy was besieged while the government did nothing. In Libya, the riots seem to have been used as a cover for a planned military attack that resulted in the death of ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other US citizens. No one has yet taken credit for this attack.
On Sept. 12, the AP and Wall Street Journal looked for the film’s director and did phone interviews with a man who called himself Sam Bacile. He told them that he was an Israeli-American who had made the film with $5 million financing from “100 Jewish donors.” In fact, as digging by other journalists was soon to reveal, the AP and WSJ had been conned by none other than Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, who—with the help of others in the mainstream press who spread the story—used them to telegraph the lie about “100 Jewish donors” all over the world. As Adam Novetzy explains in Tablet, the damage done by this kind of lazy reporting is significant. But, who knows, if the blood libel stimulates further conflict between Jews and Muslims, he and other Christian fundamentalists may see that as a bonus.
The fallout from the film continues. As of Sunday, Sept. 16, an American-run school in Tunis has been ransacked, and there have been new demonstrations against the US or attacks on US embassies in Bahrain, Bangladesh, Egypt (where 224 people have been injured in Cairo street fighting), the Egyptian Sinai, Gaza, India, Iraq, Kuwait, Lebanon, Libya, Malaysia, Nigeria, Pakistan, Qatar, Sudan, Syria, Tunisia, and Yemen, as well as on the English and German embassies in Khartoum.
So what are we to make of all this? Does the viral spread of a film meant to provoke, and the resulting deaths, mean we need heavier web censorship and laws against blasphemy? Not to me... Read more:
