CAIRO -- Emad El-Tohamy was lifted onto the
shoulders of other Egyptian protesters Wednesday outside the U.S.
Embassy here and denounced America for allowing a film that depicts the
Islam prophet Mohammed in a vulgar, insulting manner.
MORE: Protesters storm U.S. Embassy in Yemen
"I
see the U.S. government allowed the Web to spread this link all over
the world without limiting freedom, without banning it," said Mohammad
Umma, who like many in the crowd believes that because America is a
democratic nation it should censor media that insult any religion.
"America
tells us they are the country of freedom, democracy and tolerance,"
Umma said. "We considered America democratic, but now with what
happened, we hate America."
Attacks in Libya
that left four U.S. diplomats dead -- including Ambassador Christopher
Stevens -- and a mob invasion of the U.S. Embassy in Cairo, in which the
U.S. flag was torn to shreds, have left many to wonder: How can people
the USA helped free from murderous dictators treat it in such a way?
"Many
Americans are asking -- indeed, I asked myself -- how could this
happen?" Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said. "How could this
happen in a country we helped liberate, in a city we helped save from
destruction? "
The Arab Spring was lauded in
the West for bringing in rapid succession the ouster of dictators like
Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali in Tunisia, Hosni Mubarak in Egypt, Moammar
Gadhafi in Libya and Ali Abdullah Saleh in Yemen.
Although
the revolutions brought democracy, they have also empowered leaders of a
stringent brand of political Islam to push for changes not always in
line with Western values such as freedom of expression.
And
they are using anti-Islamic material from the West to stir up
opposition to the West. The latest example is the use of a previously
unnoticed film produced in California that depicted Mohammed as a child
molester and murderer.
"The growth of
democracy in the Middle East is going to bring forward a lot of
anti-American sentiment that has been suppressed for a long time by
dictators who were seeking friendly relations with America," said Joshua
Landis, head of Middle Eastern studies at the University of Oklahoma.
"There
are a lot of people who are very resentful towards the West and believe
that the West is anti-Islamic so forth," he said. "I think we are going
to see a lot more of this. They are remaking their identities, and
America, the West and Islam are at the very center of how different
factions are going to position themselves."
"A deliberate attack"
It
remains unclear who was behind the attack on the consulate in Benghazi,
which came on the 11th anniversary of 9/11. In 2001, members of the
Islamist terror group al-Qaeda hijacked four planes and killed nearly
3,000 people.
U.S. officials investigating the Benghazi killings believe it was a deliberate attack and not the result of a spontaneous riot.
Two
senior administrations officials who spoke to reporters on the
condition of anonymity because they were unauthorized to discuss details
of the incident, described a harrowing, hours-long firefight between
heavily armed gunmen and U.S. and Libyan security personnel attempting
to defend the diplomatic mission.
Stevens, 52,
a career diplomat who Clinton said fell in love with the Middle East as
a young man when he traveled to Morocco as a Peace Corps volunteer, was
on a routine visit to the consulate in Benghazi when the compound came
under fire.
Within 15 minutes the gunmen were
in the compound. Stevens was in the building with Sean Smith, a foreign
service officer and Air Force veteran who was on assignment in
Benghazi. Smith also was killed.
Stevens was taken later to a Benghazi hospital. It is not clear whether he was dead at the time.
On
Wednesday, the Pentagon dispatched a team of Marines to secure the
embassy in the Libyan capital, Tripoli. Two warships were sent to the
region.
"This wasn't a riot. It was a
deliberate attack," said a Defense Department official who spoke on
condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak on the
record.
The protest in Egypt was a riot,
planned by extremist Egyptians known as Salafists, anti-Western clerics
and political representatives who used the video ridiculing Mohammed to
gain supporters, said Eric Trager, an analyst at the Washington
Institute for Near East Policy.
He said the
protest outside the U.S. Embassy in Cairo was announced Aug. 30 by Jamaa
Islamiya, a group the State Department has designated as a terrorist
organization. The demonstration was to protest the ongoing imprisonment
of its spiritual leader, Sheikh Omar abdel Rahman, who is serving a life
sentence in the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center.
When a movie trailer for Innocence of Muslims,
a film made by an unknown producer identified as Sam Bacile, started
circulating on YouTube, Nader Bakkar of the Egyptian Salafist Noor
Party, a hardline Islamist group that holds about 25% of the parliament
seats, called on people to protest.
On Monday,
the brother of al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahri, Mohamed, posted a
message on Twitter urging people to go to the Cairo embassy and "defend
the prophet," Trager said.
On Wednesday, Bakkar condemned the killings of the U.S. diplomats.
"This
bloody attack is very strange," Bakkar said. "We will never agree to
what happened in Libya, and we will never call for any violence against
embassies or consulates. "
The Egyptian Muslim
Brotherhood, whose political arm holds 47% of parliament seats and is
led by Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi, announced protests for Friday
at Tahrir Square. Morsi has said nothing of the incident.
The
attack raises the question: Can the U.S., or for that matter the
leaders of fledgling governments in Muslim states, do anything to tamp
down the vitriol that ignites such incidents?
"Violence
in the country is taking on a more ideological bent as radical Islamist
groups suppressed under the old regime begin to reassert themselves,"
said Richard Cochrane, who specializes on the Arab World at IHS analysts
in London.
The recent protests are not the first violent response to Western pop culture that has been deemed by some as anti-Islamic.
Dutch
filmmaker and writer Theo Van Gogh was killed in 2004 in response to
his works that were critical of Islam. After a Danish newspaper
published a series of cartoons caricaturing Mohammad in 2005 and early
2006, violent protests erupted around the world--leaving some 200 dead
in the Middle East and Africa.
Some Muslims believe that any depiction of Mohammed, positive or negative, is not allowed.
"Depicting
the prophet Mohammed isn't forbidden, but it is discouraged because
deifying a human being can distract the faithful from worshiping God,"
says M. Zuhdi Jasser, Muslim author of the book A Battle for the Soul of Islam: An American Muslim Patriot's Fight to Save His Faith.
"These
crowds are using the movie as an excuse to wreak violence on Americans
in Libya and Egypt," Jasser says. "Uneducated populations will
viscerally react. There is no quicker way to get a mob enraged than by
using religious intonations."
"I'm not politically correct"
Bacile
said that his movie -- which claims that the Mohammed is a fraud who
approved of child abuse -- was financed with the help of more than 100
Jewish donors. .
Steve Klein, who said he was a
consultant to the film, said Bacile is using a pseudonym to protect his
life and is proud of his film but frightened for his safety. "I don't
care if people call me names," Klein said. "I'm not politically correct.
I tell the truth. If they don't like it, I don't care. If they want to
kill me, I don't care."
Terry Jones, a Florida
pastor known for his virulent opposition to Islam, issued a statement
on his website defending the film. Gen. Martin Dempsey, chairman of the
Joint Chiefs of Staff, called Jones on Wednesday and asked him to
withdraw support for the video.
Two years
ago, then-Defense secretary Robert Gates asked Jones not to go through
with a public burning of the Quran, the threat of which had triggered
violence in Afghanistan; the public burning did not take place.
Stephen
Prothero, a religion professor at Boston University, says extremists in
the West and the Muslim world deserve blame. "You have people
essentially shouting â??Fire!' in a crowded theater. They know what's
going to happen," he said.
Some in Egypt
blame their own. "The movie is ridiculous; it's an insult to one of the
world's major religions," said Belal Farouk, 28, a poet in Cairo. "But I
blame the violent reaction too. The film doesn't represent the views of
the American people either, just a few fanatics."
Many believe that the extremists are drowning out the voices of the majority in the region, most of whom are moderate.
"It's
extremists on both sides playing with each other," Said Sadek, a
professor at the American University in Cairo, said, referring to those
who made the film and the hardliners who protested. "And the victims are
usually the moderates and the majority of people."
USA Today