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September 16th, 2012 
FAKE NEWS for the Zionist agenda
The condemnations came even from the Right side of the aisle. President Barack
Obama responded by saying that Governor Romney had “a tendency to shoot
first and aim later”.
This foreign policy crisis has drawn attention away from Romney’s trump card
of the economy and towards one of the president’s core strengths. Polls show
that voters trust the man who ended the Iraq war and presided over the
killing of bin Laden more than the former governor of Massachusetts when it
comes to foreign affairs, especially because Romney has failed to lay out a
differing vision from George W Bush.
This is not the ground on which Team Romney wanted or expected to fight –
their candidate infamously declined to mention the continuing war in
Afghanistan in his nomination address. But this unwelcome September surprise
reflects the realities of the office – foreign policy is the primary
responsibility of the president.
And even though President Obama has been given the opportunity and the
obligation to express decisive presidential leadership, this is a volatile
moment, rife with risks.
But the presidential-level political escalation was comparative child’s play.
To date, 11 US embassies have been attacked and British, German and Swiss
embassies also targeted as proxies. American Marines and warships have been
dispatched to the region.
It is easy to look at all this and conclude that the Arab Spring was sham, a
moment of hope manipulated by Islamist radicals. No one must be happier than
Bashir al-Assad, because international attention has moved away from his
slaughter while concerns about just who might take his place now seem more
rational.
But in truth we are still learning to navigate the complicated tributaries of
globalisation, and this is a cautionary tale about the power of otherwise
obscure fanatics to spur violence half a world away, encouraged by their
opposites.
Initially, it was widely reported that the offending film, Innocence of
Muslims was the “$5 million” production of one “Sam Bacile”
an “Israeli Jew” with some “100 Jewish donors”. Cursory
investigation proved that it was the media and the Arab street that were
being taken for imbeciles.
It now seems that “Sam Bacile” is a California-based, Egyptian-born,
Coptic-Christian con-man named Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, who had previously
been convicted on bank-fraud charges and charged with intent to manufacture
methamphetamine.
A non-profit company, Media for Christ, based in Duarte, California, took out
the permits to produce the film. Its owner is Joseph Nassralla Abdelmasih,
who I saw speak at a rally against the so-called Ground Zero mosque. His
film used notoriously anti-Islamist activists like Steve Klein as
consultants and the Koran-burning Florida pastor, Terry Jones, was enlisted
to promote it.
The actors in the film were apparently unaware of it’s ideological intent, and
the amateurish overdubs add credibility to their claims.
The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg summed up the whole affair this way: “A
group of Christians, smearing Muslims, libels Jews.” It was murderously
effective.
And so we are left to wrestle with the question of how to put this genie back
in the bottle. It seems almost too late for the truth to have resonance.
When CNN’s Ben Wedeman spoke to protesters in Cairo, cameras caught this
dispiriting exchange: “It’s not possible that President Obama, with all
his intelligence agencies, didn’t know about this and stop it from coming
out in the open,” shouted a student named Ashraq. “It’s clear,
Obama is guilty! Obama is guilty! Obama is guilty!”
What we have here is failure to communicate. Civil society cannot be created
without civic structures, and Ashraq’s screams were consistent with his
understanding of life under the Mubarak regime – omnipresent intelligence
agencies must have known of the film and approved its contents.
He has no experience of the concept of freedom of speech.
Perhaps even more concerning is the way extremists have learned to echo one
other across our global village. We face the prospect of rabid anti-Islamist
activists posting intentionally offensive clips on internet sites that are
then trolled by radical Islamists looking to incite their followers to
violence.
It is a sick, symbiotic relationship: tribal identities caught in a defensive
crouch, lashing out at the 21st Century world that promises their extinction.
The real geo-political fault line of our times is not Left versus Right or
even West versus East, but freedom versus fundamentalism. Those who believe
that all Muslims are bad or all Muslims are good reflect the same sickness –
and the challenge for the rest of us is to present an example of fearless
pluralism that makes the haters in this world look small, weak, and
definitively on the wrong side of history.
John Avlon is senior columnist for Newsweek and The Daily Beast
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