The Guilt of the Warmongers

First of all, Christopher Stevens sounds like a decent guy, a real mensch.  May his loved ones, those of everyone killed at the US embassy in Benghazi and everyone who died in protests this weekend be comforted.

Second of all, this story is so full of weird wrinkles, it will be a while before we understand it all.  A “> Christian supremacist who wants to alter the religious protection in our Constitution is brought in as a consultant.  The bottom feeder dupes hungry actors into creating such a craptastic mélange of dreadful—really it is extraordinary that the direction and editing and acting are on the level of bad 1970s TV and that the script is a compendium of every smutty taunt that your average middle-schooler might bring into a bathroom slapfest and that all that stupid is directed at the founder of one of the world’s great faiths.    One would expect that if this steaming pile went anywhere, it might achieve a small cultish buzz for its sheer volume of stunning suck.

But this deservedly inconsequential “film” was dubbed into Arabic and people throughout the Middle East responded in fury.  Peaceful demonstrations against the film were pushed to the side by people who wanted to attack embassies.  The strikingly naïve idea that the US government even knew about and should have used force to prevent this pathetic, evil and legal exercise of free speech is now promulgated as a talking point.  All this over a movie?  No, it was as much catalyst as cause.

At least two things seem to be clear:  there was a well of anger and grievance with the USA among sectors within Muslim and Arab countries that is deep enough to be tapped by this clumsy provocation; and there is also a complex diversity of thought which, thanks to the Arab Spring is bursting into the public square.  Witness the demonstrations in Libya against the embassy killings.  Witness the differences between those who wanted to demonstrate peacefully against the stupid film and those who responded with violence.  Witness the differences, even among the violent, between armed deliberation and the spontaneous rage.  The entire “Arab and Muslim world” does not hate us and is in a state of generative flux.  Is it possible, however, that our decades of military intervention and support for those brutal strongmen deposed in the Arab Spring is coming back to haunt?

Third, the intricacies of this story will play out for a long time, and an attitude of curious skepticism—and grief for the departed—might serve us well now.  What we in the US, and in the Jewish community in particular can do, is resist any rhetoric or pressure that nudges us toward conflicts of choice—or toward election-year distractions.

The Innocence of Muslims is the latest version of what has become an election season ritual—the introduction of anti-Muslim propaganda into the mix.  During the 2008 presidential election campaign, millions of unsolicited DVDs of the film“>here.) The film addressed itself to likely voters, framing the election, not as a choice between two starkly different approaches to economic issues, but as a choice between potential commanders in chief during a state of global war.  In 2010, Newt Gingrich produced a