Last Friday, the Guardian’s Glenn Greenwald took on Bill Maher over the supposedly ‘unique’ danger of Islam on Maher’s show ‘Real Time’ on HBO. Maher has long contended that Islam is an inherently violent religion that poses a greater threat than all other religions.

Greenwald took it to Maher on Friday, and to be frank, made Maher look pretty silly. Maher argued that whenever Muslims are given political freedom, they choose theocracy and extremism. Greenwald pointed out that US involvement in the Middle East is the driving force behind extremism, and that other religions are equally ‘dangerous’ when it comes to promoting violent and oppressive policies (Israel’s occupation of Gaza being a good example).

Greenwald posted this clip blog with the major exchanges:

The Arabic word for God is ‘Allah’. In Aramaic (the language Jesus Christ most likely spoke) word for God is ‘Allaha’. In Hebrew, the word is ‘Eloah’ (singular of ‘Elohim’).

Anyone not dogmatically devoted to a particular religious doctrine should be able to see that the three major religions originating in the Middle East have an awful lot in common. Both Islam and Christianity agree that Jesus was a divine prophet, born of a virgin and revealed God’s word. Both believe in one omnipotent God and both believe in heaven and hell. Hebrew, Aramaic and Arabic are all Semitic languages with the same root, and words used to describe the divine are almost identical.

The French word for coffee is café. It doesn’t take too much brain power to figure out they have the same root and are describing the same thing. But in the world of religious fundamentalism, as soon as someone uses a slightly different sounding word, it automatically means something completely different. ‘Allah’ and ‘Allaha’ become two distinct entities, and followers of each must fight to prove their respective God’s superiority.

Which brings us to Christian tribalist Pat Robertson and his incessant war on Islam.

The marijuana advocate and End-Times Evangelist believes the United States should not pursue peace in the Middle East, because giving concessions to Palestinians will incur “The wrath of Almighty God to fall on this nation”. Speaking about John Kerry’s visit to Israel, the 700 club host stated that:

I think this is headed for disaster for the United States. God says, they divided my land, there is something about dividing God’s land, he said this is my land, I gave it to Abraham and his descendants and I don’t want it taken away from them and Jerusalem is the eternal capital of Israel. For the United States to get into a deal where they’re trying to split Jerusalem and take it away from the Israelis and split up their capital, huge mistake. You are asking for the wrath of Almighty God to fall on this nation and when it falls it won’t be fun, it won’t be fun. We should do everything we can to restrain our leaders from this course of folly and it is and it is a course of folly and it will result in terrible suffering for people in the United States.

As RightWingWatch notes, Robertson has a history of linking international relations to acts of divinity:

Previously, Robertson asserted that Ariel Sharon’s debilitating stroke and the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin were signs of divine punishment for their attempts to put together a peace deal.

It is unclear where Robertson stands on the 330,000 Palestinian Christians living in the West Bank, Gaza and Israel, but one thing is for sure – if anyone gets in the way of the Israel’s role in the coming Armageddon (as predicted by the esteemed futurists in the Book of Revelation), they must be forsaken. And according to Robertson, that pretty much means anyone of Arab descent.

Robertson’s fear of Allah – a sky being locked in battle with his own bearded super deity in the clouds, seems to have tipped him over the edge. Kerry’s dangerous proposal to ease tensions in the area and possibly extend more legal rights to people with dark skin and funny names in the land they were born in is, according to Robertson, a direct affront to the Christian God and must be stopped at all costs.  Writes Robertson of the pre-battle:

If God’s chosen people turn over to Allah control of their most sacred sites-if they surrender to Muslim vandals the tombs of Rachel, of Joseph, of the Patriarchs, of the ancient prophets-if they believe their claim to the Holy Land comes only from Lord Balfour of England and the ever fickle United Nations rather than the promises of Almighty God-then in that event, Islam will have won the battle.

You’ve got to give it to him in terms of sheer imagination and willingness to ignore reality. It takes a special person to confidently and publicly espouse beliefs so ludicrous that a well schooled 9 year old would laugh at them. There’s probably no point trying to make Robertson see nuance given he has built his career peddling childish fantasy theories, but liberals should dismiss him completely. We don’t know whether Robertson does actually smoke the green stuff, but if he is, it might be worth finding out where he gets it.

It must be pretty potent.

 

I’m a fan of Sam Harris. A very big fan, in fact, despite not agreeing with him across the board. His 2004 book, The End of Faith, is just about the seminal guide to refuting faith-based religion through bulletproof fact and near-flawless argumentation. If you’re an atheist, it’s basically, well, your Bible. Harris prides himself on his intellect and on an absolute reliance on reason, which means that he’s a formidable foe to debate simply because his logic is generally made of concrete and titanium. I admit that while Harris himself dislikes having to constantly defend himself against the same ridiculous attacks on his beliefs over and over again — typically from those who either misunderstand statements he’s made perfectly clear or who feel like they need to purposely twist his arguments to serve their own ends — I enjoy watching him rip those who go up against him to shreds. He does it with such confidence but, provided the adversary in question isn’t just being an asshole, with such respect that it makes you glad people like him exist to act as intellectual super heroes when our culture needs them.

One of the more ludicrous accusations that’s been leveled at Sam Harris throughout the years has to do with his supposed tendency toward “Islamophobia.” As with his contemporaries in the “new atheist” movement, people like Richard Dawkins and the late Christopher Hitchens, Harris believes that radical Islam represents an especially insidious and dangerous form of faith simply because it often manifests itself in physical violence aimed at both non-believers and believers alike. It may be politically incorrect to say that Islam is the most pervasive and immediate religious threat our world is facing at this moment in its history, but it’s not necessarily factually incorrect. Harris has said many times, while simultaneously pointing out that absolute faith of any kind is a bad and backward thing, that Islam is one of the few religions at the moment that can literally be perverted to the point where it can destroy en masse. He’s also pointed out that while the liberal tendency toward acceptance and multiculturalism is at face value a noble policy, it shouldn’t ever be applied to the exclusion of common sense and a willingness to confront reality. His point is generally that embracing superstition is never a good thing but to wrap your arms around a superstition that can get you killed, simply because it makes you feel like a tolerant person to do so, is madness.

Harris has been pretty damn clear about this. And yet the indignant and sanctimonious articles and essays from members of the professional left still come at lightning speed, aimed at proving Harris is a racist and an Islamophobe for daring to state the incredibly obvious: that Islam, more directly than almost any other religion right now, can indeed be dangerous and humanity pretends that’s not true at its own peril. There have been two such articles in just the past week or so, one at Al Jazeera and the other at Salon.

The regularity and tediousness of these kinds of pieces make them, in Harris’s own words, typically not worth trying to refute at length. Harris figures he’s made his arguments as rationally as possible and his meaning should be crystalline to anyone not either dense or just looking for something to be outraged about. But, surprisingly, he broke down and decided to confront someone over the two most recent attacks on him. What’s really interesting is that he didn’t bother going after the authors of the columns, he instead took issue with someone who had circulated the pieces via Twitter and endorsed their overall points. He did this, it seems, because he couldn’t quite understand why someone he considered a “fellow liberal” and, presumably, a staunch intellectual would miss the point of his statements and perpetuate flawed arguments that amount to a kind of defamation against him. And that would be one of the first inarguable fuck-ups I’ve seen Sam Harris make: assuming that the person he decided to confront was both liberal and an intellect unsullied by agenda.

The person Harris engaged via an e-mail back-and-forth, a transcript of which he published online late last night?

Glenn Greenwald.

I realize that we do a lot of beating up on Greenwald around here at The Daily Banter and I was genuinely loathe to bring his name up yet again, particularly being that I’m the one columnist here who shows him absolutely no respect or deference. But watching an intellectual heavyweight like Sam Harris inexplicably try to reason with Greenwald as a kind of equal, or at the very least someone whose opinion he values, made me want to throw my laptop through a window. It’s one thing to see Glenn Greenwald do his usual smug intransigence shtick on Twitter, blithely batting away the mosquitoes that dare to be a nuisance to him and tossing out his go-to accusations of intellectual dishonesty and blind submission to the cult of political personality, what Greenwald is, of course, above; it’s another thing entirely to watch him have the galactic balls to condescend to someone like Sam Harris. I’m not sure what’s more offensive, that Greenwald arrogantly thought he could punch way above his intellectual weight class or that Harris attempted to treat him as a peer, assuming wrongly that he could have a rational discussion with him and penetrate his force field of pure piety and absolute moral certitude with something as inadequate as logic. Granted, Harris appears irritated with Greenwald right out of the gate in the interaction that he himself instigated, but given that Greenwald was the one who drew first blood by putting his tsk-tsking stamp-of-approval on two columns that accused Harris of racism, it’s not difficult to understand why.

Do yourself a favor and go take a look at the exchange for yourself; it’s not too long, but it’s not something I want to publish here in its entirety and it’ll lose something if I quote it piecemeal.

I think there is one very salient point that Harris makes while frustratedly trying to get through to Greenwald and it has to do with the difference between being against someone personally and being against the ideas he or she believes and espouses. It’s Harris’s answer to the charge of racism:

“Needless to say, there are people who hate Arabs, Somalis, and other immigrants from predominantly Muslim societies for racist reasons. But if you can’t distinguish that sort of blind bigotry from a hatred and concern for dangerous, divisive, and irrational ideas — like a belief in martyrdom, or a notion of male “honor” that entails the virtual enslavement of women and girls — you are doing real harm to our public conversation. Everything I have ever said about Islam refers to the content and consequences of its doctrine.“

To me, this argument has always made perfect sense. It’s the one that’s been at the crux of Harris’s criticism of Islam since the very beginning and in an ironic “hate the sin, love the sinner” way has also been a centerpiece of my own assessment of faith-based religion at the beginning of the 21st century. No one is saying that each and every man or woman who practices a religion — not Islam nor anything else — is a bad person who’s doomed to do horrible things. Very far from it. Unless someone has shown that he or she truly is an extremist bent on taking faith to its most dangerous, but strangely logical, conclusion, that person deserves respect. It’s the faith itself, however — the irrational belief system based on little more than speculation and wishful thinking — that doesn’t automatically deserve to be shown respect and deference. It’s only our culture’s willingness to let a brand of irrationality slide that we’ve bizarrely deemed is somehow socially acceptable that leads to the notion that criticism of religion equals bigotry. Again, Harris’s point that fundamentalist Islam is a different animal within our global culture than, say, fundamentalist Bahá’í — and that purposely not acknowledging this is a political decision rather than a rational one — is essentially right on the money. It may seem as if Harris is specifically targeting Islam in his blistering critiques of faith, but you have to keep in mind that this is a guy who wrote an entire book addressing what he sees as the serious problem of America’s involuntary acceptance of and adherence to Christianity.

But back to the Harris/Greenwald battle. If we were talking about anyone else but the insufferable Glenn Greenwald, I’d be willing to give him or her the benefit of the doubt in the e-mail back-and-forth with Harris, given that Harris is obviously in attack mode right off the bat. But if you think Greenwald would’ve somehow responded in a less prickish and more respectful manner had Harris approached him with a box of chocolates rather than a stern but entirely legitimate line of questioning, you really don’t know Glenn Greenwald. Two years ago we watched him have the colossal nerve to attack Harris’s contemporary, Christopher Hitchens, as a “war zealot” — of course, in another tweeted link to someone else’s story — because of Hitchens’s initial support of the Iraq war while failing to acknowledge his own support of that very same war. It’s silly to assume that he considers anyone — certainly anyone who holds a different opinion from his own — an intellectual equal and someone worthy of uncommon consideration. If you think so much of yourself that you see nothing perilous in condescending to Christopher Hitchens — not fearlessly debating but petulantly condescending to — you’re well beyond being able to be reasoned with.

Greenwald exists in a world of self-created mythology, fueled by a handful of fawning acolytes and a bunch of other people who thought enough of him to take a split second out of their day to click “follow” on his Twitter feed. While he’s generally no match for many of those who choose to confront him on the holes often found in his supposedly bulletproof arguments, he’s absolutely no match for Sam Harris. No one’s saying that Harris is always right, because he’s certainly taken stands that I happen to vehemently disagree with, but his logic is more often than not sound because it represents the very core of his status. His reputation as a thinker and as a critic of religion is based entirely on his ability to wield logic and reason dispassionately, a fact which should be taken into account by those who choose to take him on. A fact which, of course, doesn’t concern a guy like Greenwald one bit, because logic and reason aren’t as important believing that he’s never, ever wrong.

Adding: Greenwald has penned a characteristically lengthy piece about his exchange with Harris in today’s Guardian. I’ll give him this: He spells out his arguments against Harris in a much more cogent fashion than in the e-mails. The problem, though, remains: While it’s fair to say that Harris has been adamant in his criticism of Islam as the most “weaponized” faith currently in existence in the civilized world, you have to take into consideration that not criticizing Islam would again be a political move rather than a rational one. Harris beats up on all faith-based religions and one of his primary complaints about Islam is that it could very well be the only religion in the world right now that people are afraid to criticize because its most extreme adherents will promise violence as a consequence. Also, it practically goes without saying that Greenwald attacks the various sins of the United States when it comes to war, violence and suppression and engages in his special brand of moral relativism to claim that pockets of Christianity are just as physically, immediately dangerous as Islam on the whole. The U.S. has done and continues to do some truly awful things abroad and there’s no denying that your perspective on this is largely based on where you live and what your politics are, and Christianity, meanwhile, is guilty of violence in other ways besides purely physical — although physical would’ve been the order of the day across the board centuries ago. But as a country we’ve never attempted to utterly eradicate through violence Islam or those who practice it; we tend to rise up and smack down those among us who do. And progressives who wish to see Islam made a thing of the past don’t generally hope that Muslims will simply conform to some other religion; they want faith-based religion itself dismissed in the name of reason and rationality.

On that note, and before the comments and e-mails start pouring in, I’m not a fan of Islam the same way that I’m not a fan of Christianity or any other faith; in fact, I spend far more time writing about Christianity — because I find it to be the most oppressive religion in the U.S. by virtue of its ubiquity — than I do about Islam. I’m all about trying to build bridges of understanding and I certainly would never claim that all adherents to any religion are terrible people, but as far as I’m concerned there’s no defense for wholeheartedly believing a notion for which there’s absolutely no evidence.

By Lawrence Davidson: On Aug. 1, I posted a piece entitled History on a Billboard, reporting on the placement, in the northern suburbs of New York City, of informational billboards with maps of Palestine showing the steady growth of Israeli confiscated territory and the corresponding shrinkage of territory available to the indigenous Palestinians.

It also told the observer that “4.7 million Palestinians are classified by the UN as Refugees.” Although Zionists labeled the billboard as “anti-Semitic,” it was nothing of the kind. It was wholly informational, and completely accurate.

As it turns out that informational effort is now part of a growing number of ads, signs and messages which collectively make up what I call the “billboard wars.” From San Francisco to Washington D.C. and New York City, both Zionists and pro-Palestinian groups have launched competing billboard efforts. This is going on mostly in publicly owned spaces because Zionist pressure often results in private billboard companies refusing to display pro-Palestinian messages.

Now, depending on how you want to read the message of the latest Zionist effort, this billboard-wars battleground has widened beyond the issue of Palestine to encompass a worldwide clash between the “civilized” and the “savage.” It is to be noted that this was the sort of language used by imperial colonizers, including the U.S. in its conquest of the American Indians, to favorably compare the colonizers to the indigenous populations they oppressed.

There is a Zionist group calling itself “American Freedom Defense Initiative” (AFDI) led by the infamous American Islamophobe Pamela Geller. This organization has produced a sign that reads, ”In any war between the civilized man and the savage, support the civilized man. Support Israel. Defeat Jihad.”

Geller and AFDI aimed at placing this message on buses, subways and in other public venues but initially had difficulty because most transportation agencies saw it as discriminatory and provocative. However, AFDI went to court and a federal judge found that their sign was an act of “free speech” protected by the First Amendment.

Therefore, in late September, those people of New York City who ride the buses and subways found Pamela Gelller’s message in their faces. Most, of course, will pay it little mind. Yet, we should not ignore it. It is part of a propaganda effort with potentially damaging consequences.

Analyzing the Message

First, the AFDI and Geller juxtapose Israel on the one side and Jihadists on the other. My experience with over a thousand college students since 9/11 is that, for Americans, the term Jihadists means Al-Qaeda operatives. Most Americans do not associate this term with Palestinians.

And, believe it or not, while those associated with Al Qaeda have badmouthed Israel, they have yet to make war on that country. So, what are these Zionists talking about? Well, they are probably trying to broaden out the definition of a Jihadist to include not only Palestinians, but the entire Muslim world. That would be consistent with their Islamaphobe worldview.

In addition, they are saying that Israel represents “the civilized man” who has declared war on the same enemy that has made war on the United States. By asking Americans to “support Israel,” they are reinforcing the notion that the U.S. and Israel are allies.

Second, is the AFDI correct in telling us that Israel is the “civilized man?” Only in their own ahistorical fantasy. If you care to live in a world driven by the facts then Israel is rendered “the savage.” There is a lot of evidence for this.

On Oct. 10, the Harvard researcher Sara Roy gave a devastating critique of what Israel, backed up by the United States, has done in the Gaza Strip. Gaza, with its population approaching two million Palestinians, is now the most densely populated place on earth. It is also the world’s most crowded open-air prison.

The Israeli blockade, illegal under international law, has slowly but surely destroyed the water supply, the sewage systems, the economic structure as a whole. The Israelis will tell you that Hamas, which governs Gaza, wants to destroy Israel. But that is only wishful thinking on the part of Hamas for they haven’t the ability to destroy anything.

Israel, on the other hand, wishes to destroy the Palestinian people and they do have that capacity. In Gaza, as well as the West Bank, they are slowly doing so. This is genocide in slow motion.

Sara Roy is an extremely knowledgeable American Jewish academic, but there are plenty of other sources, some of them Israeli, that will back up and expand on her critique. Here are a few of them:

– B’tselem, the Israeli Information Center for Human Rights

– Rabbis For Human Rights

– Palestine Center for Human Rights

– Jewish Voices for Peace

Looking at the websites of these organizations reveals a litany of ongoing barbaric policies and actions perpetrated upon mostly unarmed Palestinians who have nothing at all to do with Jihadists. Indeed, to act as Israel does in this regard is to qualify a good number of its citizens (though not all) as savages. So to be true to the facts AFDI’s sign should really read as follows,

“In any war between savage one (Israel) and savage two (Al Qaeda), AFDI urges Americans to support savage number one. This is so even though Israel is not fighting Jihadists but rather genocidally destroying Palestinians.” That would be historically accurate, although it would put the situation in a distinctly different light than does Ms Geller’s propaganda.

The end of the billboard wars is not yet in sight. AFDI’s message is aimed at an American audience and thus can also be read as an attempt to promote Islamophobia just before a presidential election.

To counter the racist aspect of this message, the Council of American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) has placed 16-foot signs in the metro stations of Washington D.C. that are designed to “promote mutual understanding and challenge hate.” Their signs quote from the Quran: “show forgiveness, speak for justice and avoid the ignorant.”

The unfortunate thing is that, in these sorts of confrontations, Geller and her ilk have the odds on their side. This is because all the peace seekers are ultimately at the mercy of the violent and hateful extremists on both sides. However, in the U.S. the media will only tell you about the Jihadists.

Therefore, all it takes is one Al-Qaeda attack on an American target to send the CAIR message into oblivion. On the other hand, the Israeli government and its settler allies can act out the Zionist version of ethnic cleansing daily and the American public will rarely, if ever, hear about it.

The truth is there are fewer civilized men and women than we like to believe. The ones in power, regardless of the nation-state, only rarely behave in civilized ways. The bulk of the citizens either give support to or are indifferent toward their leader’s actions. The small remainder, who are indeed candidates for the category of civilized people, are left to struggle against a strong and consistent counter-current. This is nowhere more true than in the state of Israel.

Such then, for all of us, is the heart of darkness.

Lawrence Davidson is a history professor at West Chester University in Pennsylvania. He is the author of Foreign Policy Inc.: Privatizing America’s National Interest; America’s Palestine: Popular and Official Perceptions from Balfour to Israeli Statehood; and Islamic Fundamentalism.

(Originally posted at ConsortiumNews.com)

By Lawrence Davidson: When I finish one of my analyses, I usually look forward to a week to 10-day hiatus and sometimes even wonder if I will have to hunt around for the next topic. It rarely works out that way. Usually, within three or four days, something happens which strikes me as worthy of attention. Often other commentators have moved more quickly than I to report on the event. However, there are always more questions to be asked and different perspectives to be offered.

So it is with the death of four American diplomats, including Ambassador Chris Stevens, in Libya on Sept. 12. There are two mutually reinforcing parts to this tragedy: one takes place here in the U.S., and the other in Libya, Egypt and several other places in the Middle East. Let’s take them in sequence based on the currently available evidence:

In summer 2011, a convicted felon by the name of Nakoula Bassely Nakoula, aka Sam Bacile (whose crime was bank fraud) decided to make a movie about the religion of Islam. Nakoula is an Islamophobe of Egyptian Coptic Christian background who lives in California. The movie was to be one of those propaganda pieces like the film “Obsession” back in 2005, but cruder and with more “shock value.”

Nakoula went about contacting other Islamophobes to raise the money and otherwise promote the project. Among those he recruited were Morris Sadek, a fellow Copt who also resided in the U.S. and whose long-term goal was to undermine the new Islamic government in Cairo.

Another was a Christian fundamentalist extremist by the name of Steve Klein who also seems to have an obsessive hatred of Muslims. Hovering around the margins of the project was the extremist “pastor” Terry Jones from Gainesville, Florida, who is an expert at inciting riots, having publicly burnt a Quran in 2011 sparking violence in Afghanistan that resulted in the death of 30 people.

Eventually, Nakoula put together a cast and crew by setting up what can only be described as a confidence game. He told the actors and stage technicians that the movie was about a “desert warrior” living in the remote past, ”a benign biblical epic” about past life in the Middle East. The initial working title was “Desert Warrior.”

Later, the film was reedited and new dialogue was dubbed over the original script thereby transforming it into an anti-Muslim diatribe with a new, supposedly ironic, title “Innocence of Muslims.” Among other things, the film depicts Mohammad as a fraud and a lecher. Subsequently, CNN received a statement from those who worked on the project indicating that “the entire cast and crew are extremely upset. … We are 100% not behind this film and were grossly misled about its intent and purpose.”

Of particular import is the strong suspicion that the real purpose of the film was to incite a violent reaction in the Muslim world. According to Steve Klein, interviewed after the eruption of protests in the Muslim world, “we went into this knowing this was probably going to happen.”

Klein told Nakoula, “you are going to be the next Theo van Gogh,” the Dutch film maker who was murdered in 2004 after making a film that defamed Islam. Subsequently, Nakoula’s accomplice, Morris Sadek, contacted an Egyptian newspaper reporter, Gamel Girgis, and told him he had an exclusive story about a American who made an anti-Muslim video. Sadek’s obvious intention was to make the video known to the Egyptian public.

The Story in the Middle East

In July 2012, soon after “Desert Warrior” was morphed into “Innocence of Muslims,” a “trailer” for the film was posted on YouTube. It is still there (except in Egypt where it’s been blocked) and to date has garnered hundreds of thousands of hits. Just this month (September 2012), the video was dubbed in Arabic and posted on the Internet. That posting sparked anger in Egypt and elsewhere in the Muslim world.

Someone at the U.S. embassy in Cairo immediately sensed the danger that the film created. In an effort to defuse tensions, the embassy staffer posted a statement on the local Egyptian Internet that said in part, “The Embassy of the United States in Cairo condemns the continuing efforts by misguided individuals to hurt the religious feelings of Muslims – as we condemn the efforts to offend believers of all religions. … We firmly reject the actions by those who abuse the universal right of free speech to hurt the religious beliefs of others.”

However, the statement failed to prevent an assault on the U.S. Embassy in Cairo, the fatal attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya, and other protests around the Muslim world.

Though too late to stop the Cairo and Benghazi assaults, most Muslim governments moved to quell or contain the public anger. The Libyan government, which is beholden to the U.S. for its support in the overthrow of the Gaddafi regime, issued an apology for the Benghazi attack and began an immediate investigation. The militant group that stormed the consulate and killed Ambassador Stevens was readily identified, in part, because most of the violence was captured on film.

In Egypt, the newly elected president, Mohammed Morsi, himself a member of the Society of Muslim Brothers, was more nuanced in his reaction. He noted that Egyptians had guaranteed rights to “expressing opinion, freedom to protest and announcing positions … but without assaulting private or public property, diplomatic missions or embassies.”

In a telephone conversation with President Barack Obama, Morsi “pledged to protect foreigners in Egypt.” But he also told Obama that there was a need for “deterrent legal measures against those who want to damage relations between peoples, and particularly between the people of Egypt and the people of America.” It is a need that Americans should take seriously.

Besides the immediate death and destruction, this incident has exposed a deep vein of anger against the United States that runs through the Muslim world. This anger is nothing new and we continue to ignore it at our peril.

After the 9/11 terror attacks, U.S. politicians refused to consider the context from which those attacks came, asserting simply that the violence against the United States was absolutely wrong and so there was no need to examine what had caused it. Well, that might be good politics stateside, but it guaranteed that the policies and behavior that led up to the 9/11 attacks would carry on into the future, such as imposing sanctions that ruin the lives of countless innocents, intervening militarily in Muslim countries, the arming and protection of dictators, and the carte blanche support of Israeli policies against the Palestinian people.

In other words, between 9/11/01 and 9/11/12 nothing substantial about U.S. behavior has changed. That means the Muslim world continues to be a tinder box that someone living in the West, someone like Nakoula Bassely Nakoula, can throw a match into and spark more violence.

At this point, many will argue that Nakoula’s perverse film is protected under the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, which prohibits the abridgment of speech and press. But this may not be entirely true. Free speech does not excuse purposeful efforts to incite a riot.

An enterprising prosecutor might be able to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the entire enterprise that created “Innocence of Muslims” was a premeditated effort to produce exactly the type of violence that we have seen. If that’s the case, Nakoula Bassely Nakoula, Steve Klein and Morris Sadek could be potential targets of a criminal investigation into the promotion of hate speech that contributed to murder.

The governments of the Muslim world, and indeed all governments, have the legal and moral obligation to protect foreign diplomats, embassies and consulates. And, the U.S. government has the responsibility to do all that is reasonable and practicable to protect its citizens. That includes the prevention of another 9/11-style attack or any variant on that theme.

Moving to prosecute those here in the United States who would purposely incite such attacks seems an obvious step – and, in the long run, a step that is more useful than filling the skies with drones in search of alleged enemies.

Yet, as obvious and warranted as such a prosecution might be, will it be pursued? Do not look to Mitt Romney to propose such a preventative action. His sole concern is taking political advantage of the crisis by claiming that the State Department statement cited above proved that the Obama administration had more sympathy for the Muslims than for our own dead diplomats.

That is, of course, cynical nonsense. Yet, one cannot look to President Obama for much preventative action either. He is afraid of the political shadow to his right and will not move against even the most psychopathic actors, especially at election time.

So the most likely scenario is that, just as in 2001, our leaders will do nothing to address our own behavioral and policy shortcomings. Thus, the dangerous likelihood of more provocations igniting the deep anti-American anger in the Muslim lands will go on and on.

Lawrence Davidson is a history professor at West Chester University in Pennsylvania. He is the author of Foreign Policy Inc.: Privatizing America’s National Interest; America’s Palestine: Popular and Official Perceptions from Balfour to Israeli Statehood; and Islamic Fundamentalism.

(Originally published on ConsortiumNews.com)

The Daily Banter Headline Grab. From the Reuters:

DUBAI (Reuters) – Western embassies across the Muslim world remained on high alert on Sunday and the United States urged vigilance after days of anti-American violence provoked by a video mocking the Prophet Mohammad.

The head of Libya’s national assembly said an attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi that killed Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other Americans last Tuesday looked like a planned assault by a “group with an agenda” rather than a spontaneous reaction to the video posted online.

With protests against the film continuing from London to Lahore on Sunday, Western diplomatic missions were on edge. Germany followed the U.S. lead and withdrew some staff from its embassy in Sudan, which was stormed on Friday.

Washington ordered non-essential staff and family members to leave its embassy on Saturday after the Khartoum government turned down a U.S. request to send Marines to bolster security.

Non-essential U.S. personnel have also been withdrawn from Tunisia, and Washington urged U.S. citizens to leave the capital Tunis after the embassy there was targeted on Friday.

The protests peaked on Friday and abated over the weekend. Around 350 people chanted slogans at a rally outside the U.S. embassy in London on Sunday. A small group of protesters burned a U.S. flag outside the embassy in the Turkish capital, and in Pakistan there were protests in more than a dozen cities.

By Chez Pazienza: If you’re one of those people who’s always dreamed of going back in time, I’ve got some terrific travel advice for you today: plan your next vacation to the Middle East; it’s still the second century over there in some areas, or at least 1979.

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before, but yesterday it was reported that separate angry mobs had descended upon U.S. embassies in Libya and Egypt, burning one to the ground and killing an American diplomat stationed there and scaling the walls of the other and hoisting a black flag emblazoned with the Muslim declaration of faith in place of the American flag. The reason for the attacks is as familiar as it is infuriating: Apparently a real estate developer and would-be independent film producer here in the states has put together a movie for an Egyptian Christian, an anti-Muslim extremist — promoted in part by Koran-burning asshole Pastor Terry Jones of Florida — that denigrates the prophet Muhammad. And we all know how calmly and rationally many Muslims, particularly in Middle Eastern countries, have traditionally responded to their prophet being depicted in any fashion, let alone an insulting one.

But that was really just the beginning of the bloodshed over a perceived religious slight, because last night, as you no doubt know by now, it was confirmed that the American ambassador to Libya and at least two others were killed in a rocket attack — a criminal act that President Obama is calling “outrageous” and the first time a U.S. ambassador has been murdered since the glory days of Middle Eastern political turmoil back in the 70s.

And again, all over decades and centuries of religious resentment and sparked by somebody saying something mean about a guy who lived around 1,900 years ago. It’s insanity — indefensible insanity — pure and simple. And if we weren’t inexplicably forced to take Islam seriously and defer to it and its followers, our outrage wouldn’t have to be tempered with delicately worded admissions that intolerance and a lack of understanding may have played a role in this madness.

Now before the PC police come banging on my door, know that I’m not going all “Islam Is Evil” here. It’s crazy and misguided, mind you, and its fundamentalist adherents are especially dangerous — argue with that and you’re simply trying to deny reality or keep your liberal moral relativist card from being pulled — but it’s no more evil than any other faith-based religion. It just happens to be the biggest threat to the civilized world at the moment when it’s practiced by those who have perfect faith.

The Middle East/Northern Africa is one of the most bustling and thriving regions of the world — and it also happens to be one of the most culturally stunted, thanks in large part to a nearly absolute devotion to ancient superstition that’s been allowed to dictate, typically with a governmental mandate, every facet of the lives of those who live there. In many Middle Eastern countries, Islam is a meal that’s force-fed — and it’s a fact that’s held an otherwise vibrant point on the globe stuck in time while putting those outside its purview in the unenviable position of having to walk on eggshells and gush ridiculous platitudes in an effort to make sure the often barbaric beliefs that rule the lives of its people are never shown anything less than the utmost respect. Because if they aren’t, well, you get what we’re witnessing right now in Libya.

But to claim that Islam is a faith that’s somehow more insane than all the others is almost laughably absurd. It’s one thing to approach a civil criticism of devout Muslims from the understanding that all faith-based religions are equally dubious, but it’s quite another to say, as fundamentalist Christians here in the United States often do, that one unproven and unprovable belief system is superior to another. It’s certainly true that, these days at least, Christians often don’t, en masse, rise up and execute infidels in the street if they feel that somebody has insulted Jesus, but it hasn’t always been that way; the difference between modern-day Christians living abroad and modern-day Muslims living in concentrated areas like the Middle East is that Christians have, for the most part, been forced to bend to changing times, to adapt to a civilization that no longer allows them to behave like primitives in thrall to myth and magic and to react violently when challenged.

Yes, there are still plenty of heinous acts committed in the name of Jesus and plenty of backward-ass thinking deferred to and permitted to influence the lives of believers and non-believers alike, here in the U.S. especially. But despite the designs of what some have cleverly and ironically referred to as the “American Taliban,” the Bible-thumping would-be theocrats who believe the United States is the Christian god’s administration on this planet, in large part the Middle East doesn’t have a vital and assertive secular society to intrude upon its reliance on the spiritual, fanciful and antiquated.

So this is what you get: living, breathing men and women killed in 2012 because the Koran says they have to die for the crime of apostasy, for insulting the great prophet of Islam. Thousands of men and women dead in a suicidal plot involving commercial jets and some of our most iconic buildings in the year 2001 all because of religious resentment, manifesting itself in a frustrated culture, and the lunatic belief that Muslims are being subjugated by our presence on holy land. And then, on the flip side of the same coin, equally devoted Christians claiming that their invisible god can beat up the invisible god of Islam. If there weren’t sanity in numbers — if we didn’t, for reasons I’ll never understand, simply accept that an utterly irrational belief should be respected simply because enough people believe it — we would call it what it is: insanity. Absolute insanity. Just another case of the implementation of an unwavering faith in magic and superstition, handed down from a time when people literally knew nothing about anything, doing far more harm than good.

At some point it has to stop. But I can’t imagine that point will come anytime soon. And that means the bodies will continue to pile up, chaos will reign and the madness at its core will continue to be treated with unnecessary reverence.

Update: The U.S. government is now saying that it suspects the Libyan attack was planned in advance and may have used the anti-movie protest as a diversion.

It is amazingly idiotic for the French government to ban people wearing veils. It won’t happen, but we should condemn them from both a presidential and secretary of state level. A law like this would – you would hope – violate the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights. This is another sign that our bill of rights was a visionary document. We take for granted the right of free expression, yet even amongst our first word allies this isn’t always the case.

Fox News, MSNBC, and CNN Cut Away From Ranking Democrat During “Radicalization” Hearings

ALSO: Rep. Ellison Breaks Into Tears Explaining Story Of Muslim First Responder Who Died To Save Americans On 9/11

This entire exercise by the GOP is sick. This is a sad day for America.