Source: The National Post: ………………………..Questions are being asked whether the anti-American unrest is really about the video. Is it rather a convenient way of channeling the aggression of jobless youth and those frustrated by the failure of the Arab Spring to deliver real change? Certainly, the timing of the first violence to coincide with the 11th anniversary of 9/11 terrorist attacks indicates malice aforethought.
The New York Times editorialist Ross Douthat believes politics, rather than religious zeal, is the underlying cause.
There is certainly unreason at work in the streets of Cairo and Benghazi, but something much more calculated is happening as well. The mobs don’t exist because of an offensive movie, and a U.S. ambassador isn’t dead because what appears to be a group of Coptic Christians in California decided to use their meager talents to disparage the Prophet Muhammad.
What we are witnessing, instead, is mostly an exercise in old-fashioned power politics, with a stone-dumb video as a pretext for violence that would have been unleashed on some other excuse …
What we’re watching unfold in the post-Arab Spring Mideast is the kind of struggle for power that frequently takes place in a revolution’s wake: between secular and fundamentalist forces in Benghazi, between the Muslim Brotherhood and its more-Islamist-than-thou rivals in Cairo.
In a piece in The Guardian, Mona Eltahawy, an Egyptian commentator, challenges her fellow citizens to examine their motives.
[President Hosni] Mubarak is gone, and Egypt’s president is from the Muslim Brotherhood movement – long vilified as the “lunatics with beards.” It is at this point that I tell fellow Egyptians it’s about them, and not about America.
That YouTube film – not made or distributed by the U.S. government – was posted at least two months before ultra-conservative Salafists called for protests at the U.S. embassy. Why? Understanding that the president, Mohamed Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood, must now occupy that same middle ground as Mubarak did, the Salafists are all too happy to flex rightwing political muscle. Why else did they call their protest in Cairo on the anniversary of the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001?
Writing for the panArab television channel Al Arabiya, Osama Al Sharif believes American foreign policy has much to answer for.
It is fair to say that the unfavourable view of America in the Arab and Muslim worlds has to do with Washington’s foreign policy, especially in relation to Israel, and is driven by its unpopular wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, its indiscriminate killing of Muslims by unmanned drones and others. But this is only part of it. In reality Muslims have for long been divided in their perception of the U.S.
A Pew opinion poll, conducted in June, found that Tunisians are generally divided in their views of the US. Overall, they are split evenly between those with a favourable view and those with an unfavourable view (45% each). But the picture is different in Pakistan, where 74% consider the U.S. an enemy, and in Yemen, recipient of more American humanitarian assistance than any other country, where anti-Americanism is rife.