Daily Times

The sheer predictability of both the crass provocation of the 14-minute video, Innocence of Muslims, as well as the violent response to it has prompted many an analyst to scrutinise the minutiae involving the principal actors of this drama. Their analyses pertain to answering three interlinked questions. What were the motives of those who produced and circulated the film, and of those who spearheaded violent protests against it? Does the freedom of speech recognise no curbs in the US? If yes, has this principle been applied uniformly, cutting across the divides of class, race, and religion? Revealed to us is the numbing hypocrisy of myriad provocateurs who have worked in unison to manufacture the controversy over Innocence of Muslims.

In an article on the fire raging in West Asia, the Egyptian journalist Hani Shukrallah, who is the founding editor of Ahram Online, believes the controversy is the outcome of a conspiracy involving the Christian Right and Islamic Right. It is not a conspiracy in the conventional sense of provocateurs entering into a secret compact to challenge and destabilise societies. It is more akin to what security establishments refer to as gaming — a process through which an actor tries to guess the probable reaction of his rival to a contemplated measure. The rival’s possible response then determines the combatant’s next manoeuvre. So continues the mapping of action-reaction until it is possible to predict the outcome.

Shukrallah says the agenda behind the producers of the film was, no doubt, to depict the Muslims as “irrational, violent, intolerant and barbaric, all of which are attributes profoundly inscribed into the racist anti-Muslim discourse in the West.” This perception of Muslims indeed informs the worldview of the Christian Right. Yet this stereotypical image stood challenged, even reversed, as Muslims in several West Asian countries poured out on the streets over the last two years, protesting against dictators, demanding democracy and freedom, including that of speech, through mostly non-violent methods.

It was to reverse the emerging image of the Muslim, says Shukrallah, that the film was circulated widely in cyberspace. The timing was propitious, for in many Arab countries the revolutionary upsurge had floundered, breeding both disappointment as well as violence, and opening the passage to power for the Islamists, however moderate. Might not the film stoke the rage simmering in the region and elicit a violent response? Shukrallah writes, “…the provocateurs had counted on an irrational and violent reaction, and they got it, possibly beyond their most optimistic expectations. The result is the same: the image of Arabs and Muslims as produced by the Arab Spring is painted over with the old racist/Orientalist brush of the clash of civilisations.”

The attempt to reignite the clash of civilisations is also linked to the impending election in the US and the fervent hope of the Christian Right to dislodge President Barack Obama from the White House. It is he who has, in many ways, blunted the rhetoric arising from the bogus theory of Samuel Huntington. In roiling West Asia, the Christian Right, writes Shukrallah, hopes to show that Obama’s decision to bank on the “Arab Spring was a major blunder; Muslim Arabs will be Muslim Arabs, and the Islamist governments in post-revolution Arab states are as much enemies of America as bin Laden and Ayman Zawahari.” Indeed, the attempt of the Republican campaign to exploit the controversy has been stark, what with its Presidential hopeful, Mitt Romney, blaming the Obama administration’s condemnation of the film for the death of the American diplomat in Libya.

Yet the Christian Right’s hidden agenda would not have fructified without the assistance of Muslim extremists (Salafis, Jihadis, et al) who live in a veritable time warp and wish to see the world map swathed in the Islamic green. Not for them the values of democracy and free speech. Their very rationale of existence is predicated on the perpetual conflict between Muslims and infidels. It is why they and the police have been targetting Christians in Egypt. The film was an opportunity for them to undermine the revolutionary values they abhor as “aesthetic Western imports” and for gaining, yet again, access to the region’s political stage. This has also been the motivation underlying the violent protests in South Asia.

Can these Muslim leaders not fathom the inefficacy of venting their rage, unlikely as it is, to persuade the US to ban the film? Imposition of a ban on films and books does not constitute the US’s reflex reaction to a crisis. The first amendment to its Constitution militates against the circumscribing of free speech, bolstered further by judicial verdicts. In the celebrated Brandenberg vs Ohio case of the 1960s, the court ruled, “The constitutional guarantees of free speech and free press do not permit a State to forbid or proscribe the advocacy of the use of force.” The logical extension of the Brandenberg verdict is that the fear of a book or film provoking violence can scarcely become a compelling reason to proscribe it. The onus for getting provoked and resorting to violence rests on the perpetrator, not the person whose work could have inspired him.

This is precisely why the White House could not order but only request Google to take the film off YouTube. Google turned down the request, unwilling to compromise its policy of supporting free speech. Yet there have been several occasions Google has promptly acceded to such requests. Writing in Counterpunch, a web magazine, Essam Al-Amin quoted The Jewish Press report of August 1 that said Google removed 1,710 videos because “a substantial number of those videos concerned Holocaust denial and defence of Holocaust deniers.” Nor has the principle of free speech deterred the US from trying to gag WikiLeaks and Julian Assange, with more than a little help from entities such as Visa and MasterCard.

Ironically, as well as hypocritically, “the advocacy of the use of force”, or even of circulating publicly available material espousing violence, has led to the conviction of Muslims in America. The Guardian’s Glenn Greenwald, a noted writer on civil rights, cites the example of a 24-year-old Pakistani, Jubair Ahmad, who was arrested and indicted, among other things, for loading to YouTube “photographs of US abuses in Abu Ghraib, a video of armoured trucks exploding after being hit by IEDs, and prayer messages about ‘jihad’…” Two Muslim satellite operators were charged for broadcasting to their customers Al Manar, a satellite channel of the Hezbollah. Similarly, Egyptian-American Tarek Mehanna was convicted for subscribing to the view that advocated armed resistance to American soldiers deployed in Muslim countries. Mehanna was accused of assisting al Qaeda and packed off to jail for 17 years.

Responding to Greenwald’s piece on the issue of freedom of speech arising from the film, the veteran journalist Robert Fisk wrote of his discussion with a New Zealand editor who proudly proclaimed his newspaper too had republished the controversial Danish cartoons. “But when I asked him if he planned to publish a cartoon of a Rabbi with a bomb on his head next time Israel invaded Lebanon, he hastily agreed with me that this would be anti-Semitic,” Fisk noted. Truly, the film has brought out the hypocrisy, global in its sweep, of both the Christian and Islamic Right.

The writer is a Delhi-based writer and can be reached at ashrafajaz3@gmail.com