Step
back from the news cycle a moment and what you see is a week in which
toxic, wildly irresponsible right-wingers have been trying to set a
series of fires around the world, stoking their mythical "clash of
civilizations" out of religious bigotry or for political gain, or a
little bit of both.
That's the context in which Mitt Romney has had a couple of very rocky days, although as we’ll soon see, he is far from alone.
The
Romney-Ryan campaign achieved a new low on September 11. In the
morning, Romney promised reporters that he has detailed foreign policy
plans, but refused to offer any details. But before the day was out, his
campaign was spreading a blatant falsehood about a series of riots in
Egypt and Libya that had left four Americans dead, including ambassador
J. Christopher Stevens. Romney shamelessly claimed that Obama's “first
response was not to condemn attacks on our diplomatic missions, but to
sympathize with those who waged the attacks.” He was referring to a
statement issued by the embassy in Cairo
before the deadly attacks, condemning a ridiculous anti-Islam film that was believed to have sparked the riots.
Then,
on Wednesday morning, Romney scheduled a press conference a half-hour
before Obama was scheduled to address the nation from the White House.
Romney doubled-down on his claim, saying, “It's a terrible course for
America to stand in apology for our values.” As if Terry Jones'
overheated religious bigotry isn't in fact antithetical to our values.
(Romney, ever the opportunist,
had condemned Jones' Islamophobic provocation in 2010, and in typical form,
he did in fact condemn the movie later on Wednesday, just as the Egyptian embassy had the previous night.)
Hours later, it got worse when the
New York Times reported
that there may not have been a direct connection between the film and
the deadly attacks in Benghazi. While “initial accounts of the assault
in Benghazi were attributed to popular anger over what was described as
an American-made video that lampooned the Prophet Muhammad,”
reported Peter
Baker, David Kirkpatrick and Alan Cowell, “administration officials in
Washington said the attack in Libya may have been plotted in advance.”
While
the protesters in Cairo appeared to be genuinely outraged over the
anti-Islam video, the attackers in Benghazi were armed with mortars and
rocket-propelled grenades. Officials said it was possible that an
organized group had either been waiting for an opportunity to exploit
like the protests over the video or perhaps even generated the protests
as a cover for their attack.
CNN reported that “the
attack immediately followed a call from al Qaeda leader Ayman
al-Zawahiri for revenge for the death in June of a senior Libyan member
of the terror group Abu Yahya al-Libi,” and was likely perpetrated by a
pro-Al Qaeda group known as the “Imprisoned Omar Abdul Rahman Brigades.”
Romney
had, as Obama later said, shot first and aimed later. This was the
moment that Mitt Romney lost the mainstream media entirely, and quite
possibly the campaign. The problem wasn't just Romney's utter lack of
class in politicizing a deadly attack on Americans abroad
while that attack was ongoing, it
was his facial expression – he wore a smug, self-satisfied smirk as he
left the podium, and that image is likely to dog him in the coming days.
But
it's worth pausing and considering the larger narrative on which the
Romney camp is basing its claim that Obama is ultimately at fault for
the riots in Egypt and Libya. According to a set of talking-points the
Romney campaign issued to its supporters and surrogates, the underlying
issue is this: “We have seen a foreign policy of weakness, indecision,
and a decline in American influence and respect – and yesterday we saw
the consequences.”
Ordinary people will find this assertion to be
nothing less than bizarre. Obama, after all, escalated the conflict in
Afghanistan, turned drone strikes from a military capability into an
administration policy and ordered the assault that led to the killing of
Osama bin Laden. But Romney has surrounded himself with
neoconservative extremists like
John Bolton, who are heavily invested in the idea that there is a
"clash of civilizations" dividing East and West. Reading between the
lines, the problem is not Obama's concrete policy choices so much as his
refusal to condemn Islam as a death-cult or indulge Israeli Prime
Minister Bibi Netanyahu's apocalyptic view that Iran poses an
existential threat to the state of Israel.
They are not alone.
Right-wing religionists – Christian, Jewish and Muslim – all have a
vested interest in making their imagined global conflict a reality. It
was Osama bin Laden's goal, just as it's the goal of Pam Geller or those
on the fringes of the Israeli settler movement.
And there are
more. Here are some other actors that have recently tried to blow up the
world in service of their perverse ideologically and theologically
informed hatreds, damn the consequences.
Conservative Islamists in Libya and Egypt; Egyptian Right-Wing Media
A 13-minute trailer for a wildly provocative film called either
The Innocence of Muslims or
Mohammed, Prophet of the Muslims (but which could have been called
The Chronicles of the Elders of Islam) was uploaded to YouTube in July and received little notice. According to the
Daily Mail,
the trouble started when someone translated the trailer into Arabic and
uploaded it to YouTube. It was “since featured on Egyptian media
reports for several days with ultraconservative clerics going on air to
denounce it.”
While Muslims across the political spectrum were
offended, according to multiple reports those who rioted in Cairo and
Benghazi were “conservative Islamists,” whose thin skin and lack of
tolerance led to the chaos.
It wasn't “Muslims,” writ large, who
perpetrated the outrageous attacks. It was the Islamic religious right,
which sees itself under siege from modern, secular society in much the
same way our own Christian right sees itself as under constant siege by
perfidious secular humanists.
On Wednesday, hundreds of residents of Benghazi took to the streets to condemn the attacks on the Embassy. Their message:
Whomever's Behind That Stupid, Bigoted Film
As the
New York Times notes,
the origins of the film are “shrouded in mystery.” Early reports
suggested that the film was produced by an Israeli-American real estate
developer named Sam Basile, but no such person could be tracked down.
Some have suggested that “Sam Basile” is a pseudonym. But someone
claiming to be Basile offered several interviews with media outlets,
during which he “called Islam 'a cancer,' and said he had raised $5
million from about 100 Jewish donors” to fund the film.
Rumors of
who was behind the film – all unconfirmed – abound. Some have suggested
the usual suspects: Pam Geller or Robert Spencer or their fellow
travelers. The one person who has publicly admitted to being involved
with the film is a man named Steve Klein, whom Max Blumenthal
describes as “a Hemet, California-based insurance salesman who claims to have led a 'hunter-killer team' in Vietnam.”
Klein
is a right-wing extremist who emerged from the same axis of
Islamophobia that produced Anders Behring Breivik and which takes
inspiration from the writings of Robert Spencer, Pamela Geller, and
Daniel Pipes.
It appears Klein (or someone who shares his name and
views) 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 alongside the anti-Muslim
Coptic extremist Joseph Nasrallah to demand the firing of LA County
Sheriff Lee Baca, whom they painted as a dupe for Hamas.
The
Atlantic's Jeffrey Goldberg
interviewed Stein,
who said of the 15 or so people behind the film, “They're from Syria,
Turkey, Pakistan, they're some that are from Egypt. Some are Copts but
the vast majority are Evangelical." Copts are an Egyptian Christian sect
that has long faced persecution in its own long-standing conflict with
the country's Muslim majority.
The film was designed to provoke a
reaction, to push their right-wing religionist counterparts to acts of
hatred and stupidity. On Wednesday, a lot of confused people suggested
that the embassy's statement condemning this trash somehow conflicts
with our First Amendment right to free speech, which might make some
sense if anyone, anywhere, had suggested the filmmakers weren't within
their constitutional rights in producing the film. Or if the First
Amendment was a guarantee that you could say whatever you wanted and not
be criticized. Of course, just because you have the right to do awful
things that you know are likely to lead to bloodshed doesn't mean you
should do awful things that are likely to lead to bloodshed. Make no mistake: they got what they wanted in sparking those riots.
American Islamophobes Terry Jones, Morris Sadik
The
New York Times reports that
another “ultraconservative cleric,” Terry Jones, “began promoting the
video along with his own proclamation of Sept. 11 as ‘International
Judge Muhammad Day.’” Jones sparked deadly riots in 2010 when he
threatened to burn a stack of Korans in a high-profile quest for
attention (Defense Secretary Robert Gates reportedly talked him out of
the stunt).
According to the
Guardian,
“The film clip was also spotted and promoted last week by Morris Sadik,
an Egyptian Coptic Christian based in California who runs a small
virulently Islamophobic group called the National American Coptic
Assembly. It was later denounced by mainstream Copts in Egypt, but it
was too late to stop it going viral.”
Extremists everywhere you look.
Bibi
All
of this happened just days after another far-right ideologue tried to
use the high stakes of the presidential race to blackmail the United
States into supporting a disastrous war in the Middle East.
Bibi
Netanyahu is a secularist, but his administration is heavily influenced
by Israel's religious right, and he has cast the conflict over Iran's
nuclear enrichment as part of the clash of civilizations, saying again
and again that it's an existential threat to Israel's existence.
In
the past weeks, Netanyahu has insisted that the United States lay out
specific “red lines” that Iran couldn't cross without inviting American
military action, and added the implied threat that if no such statement
was forthcoming, Israel might embroil the whole region in chaos with a
unilateral strike.
Netanyahu was playing a weak hand because he
sensed he had to play it now. He knows that his leverage decreases
dramatically after the election – especially if Obama wins – and was
trying to push for an “end-game” in the standoff over Iranian
enrichment.
Time magazine's Joe Klein
said of
the blackmail attempt, “I don’t think I’ve ever, in the forty years
I’ve been doing this – and I’m trying to search my mind through history –
have heard of another example of an American ally trying to push us
into war as blatantly, and trying to influence an American election as
blatantly as Bibi Netanyahu and the Likud party in Israel is doing right
now. I think it’s absolutely outrageous and disgusting. It’s not a way
that friends treat each other. And it is cynical and it is brazen.”
Then,
earlier this week, Likud officials tried to ratchet up the sense that
it's in “conflict” with Washington by leaking a story that Netanyahu,
who will be in New York for a United Nations conference, had requested a
meeting with Obama and been turned down. National security reporter
Laura Rozen first
reported that
a number of countries had been informed that Obama would not be
available to meet on the sidelines of the UN confab, and that Israel was
“the only one to raise [an] outcry.” She later
noted that a National Security Council spokesperson denied that such a meeting had been requested in the first place.
...
and the Iranians
But
let's not give the Iranian regime a pass. There's no evidence to
suggest Iran is seeking nuclear weapons -- and it does have a right to
enrich nuclear materials for non-military purposes under the nuclear
Non-Proliferation Treaty – but its stubborn refusal to definitively
settle the question by giving international inspectors everything
they've requested has led to crippling sanctions that have done an
enormous amount of harm to the Iranian economy, and in turn to ordinary
Iranians. In part, Iran is “standing on principle” so it can blame the
West for its domestic problems, but in part it's because Iran too
genuinely sees itself engaged in a clash of civilizations.
The Good News
These extremists are playing a very dangerous game. As Al-Monitor
notes,
“Pro-Western, secular forces in the Middle East are already in peril,
and fragile new democratic governments cannot adequately police their
frustrated and angry young constituents.”
But the good news is
that these craven attempts to capitalize on people's fear of the "other”
won't work. The Obama administration has
pushed back forcefully on
Netanyahu's strong-arm tactics, essentially calling his ill-advised
bluff. Hillary Clinton said that the U.S. is “not setting deadlines,”
and insisted that sanctions were the administration's tool of choice for
pressuring Iran. Seventy percent of Americans
agree with that approach, and Bibi only weakened himself with the gambit.
As
for the religious fundamentalists -- here and abroad, Christian, Muslim
and Jewish -- they've been trying to stoke a clash of civilizations for
over a decade, and have only succeeded in persuading a small minority
of mentally challenged people to follow their lead. They remain a danger
– as we've seen time and time again – but they will continue to reside
at the margins. Most people just want to rasie their kids in peace.
As
for Romney, his antics on Tuesday and Wednesday may well be the end of
his campaign. With even many of his Republican supporters
running away from him as
if he were on fire, the media establishment judged that the candidate
had inserted his foot directly into his mouth in a very serious way. It
was a desperate attempt to shift the dynamics of the race – a Hail-Mary
pass by a candidate looking at a 7-point deficit in Gallup's tracking
poll – and it didn't work.
