Credit: Asia Times:
By Victor Kotsev
The recent attacks on American and European embassies and the riots throughout the Muslim world are bringing home what the summit of the Non-Aligned Movement in Tehran failed to get across: that much of the world strongly resents Western hegemony. Amid chants of “Listen, listen, oh Obama! The entire nation is Osama!” and placards stating “Our dead are in paradise. Your dead are in hell” even Americans are waking up – with a start – to this uncomfortable reality.
The reasons for these sentiments are complex, and some of the hype is overblown. There are plenty of legitimate complaints and resentments that people in the developing world harbor against the West; there is also a fair amount of scapegoating involved. As Foreign Policy analyst James Traub put it, “Blaming the West, and above all the United States, allows leaders to distract attention from their own failings, ordinary citizens to live with their sense of humiliation, and Islamist and anti-Western parties and factions to burnish their ‘resistance’ credentials.” [1]
The absurd nature of the cause for the riots – a movie allegedly made by an Egyptian-American serial fraudster who hired a 1970s soft-core porn director and tricked the entire cast with a fake plot – adds emphasis to the latter point. So does the observation of the US-based intelligence analysis organization Stratfor that “Egyptians were unaware that the video even existed until a talk show host named Sheikh Khalid Abdullah devoted his two-hour program to the film Sept. 8 . … As a Salafist, whose beliefs run counter to those of the ruling Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, Abdullah may have screened the film to incite chaos and complicate Egypt’s newly elected president’s attempts to consolidate power.
Categories: Americas