There have now been hundreds of demonstrations in the Middle East and North Africa against the United States, triggered by the movie “Innocence of Muslims.” The wave of protests has now moved beyond the Middle East and into other predominantly Muslim countries, such as Indonesia and Pakistan.
Concerned by the wave of protests and the unleashing of anti-imperialist sentiments, the United States has reacted by putting some of its embassies on lock down; bringing in additional Marines to protect embassies and consulates, as in the case of Yemen; moving more warships to the region; and frantically calling on its client states to do all they can to protect U.S. diplomatic facilities.
In one of the early protests, on Sept. 11, the U.S. ambassador to Libya, Christopher Stevens, was killed when armed demonstrators overran the U.S. Consulate’s security in Benghazi and set its buildings on fire.
The role of the U.S. embassy
The U.S. government and media depict Stevens as a hero who, in the words of U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, had a “passion for service, for diplomacy and for the Libyan people … (who) risked his own life to lend the Libyan people a helping hand to build the foundation for a new, free nation.” But the fact is that Stevens was no friend of the Libyan people. His active role in helping overthrow the nationalist Libyan state, led by Moammar Gaddafi, and replace it with the imperialist-allied rebels, was a service to the imperialists, not to the Libyan people.
Libya today is less independent and less free than it was before the overthrow of Libya’s nationalist state. But, of course, the oil giants consider Libya to be a free country today, now that they are free to extract maximum super-profits without having to deal with a government afflicted with “economic nationalism.”
The U.S. emphasizes that U.S. embassies and consulates are protected diplomatic sanctuaries and that attacking them is a violation of international law. This assertion lays bare the hypocrisy of imperialist arrogance.
In the seven-month-long NATO bombing of Libya, which eventually brought down the Libyan state, the U.S. and its allies respected no boundaries. No location in the sovereign country of Libya was considered off limits to the United States and its NATO allies. Gaddafi’s presidential palace was bombed repeatedly with the specific intent of assassinating him. NATO succeeded in killing Gaddafi’s 29-year-old son and three of his grandchildren.
The “no fly zone” was purportedly put in place to protect civilians licensed assassinations. Why should any segment of the Libyan population be obligated to respect the sanctity of the diplomatic compound of a country that rained down so many bombs on them?
Libya is not the only target of recent U.S. intervention. The United States and its imperialist allies subjected Iraq to 12 years of genocidal sanctions, from 1991 to 2003, causing the deaths of over a million Iraqis. The invasion and occupation of Iraq killed upwards of another million people. The U.S. has now occupied Afghanistan for 11 years, killing untold numbers of people in another bloody campaign to bring about “democracy.”
In a mockery of international law and the territorial integrity of sovereign nations, U.S. drones bomb and kill targets within Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen as they please. The targets are not military bases or military training grounds but, quite often, residences in villages allegedly housing “militants.” Israel, the U.S.-backed garrison state in the Middle East, mercilessly bombed the civilian population of Gaza in 2008-2009, with no targets spared—schools, hospitals, ambulances and houses. The United States armed Israel not just before and after but even while the massacre was ongoing.
It’s not just about a movie
The imperialist establishment falsely portrays the conflict as an issue of freedom of expression guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution—a notion that, as the racist narrative goes, the protesters do not quite grasp, so they resort to violence against innocent diplomats and workers at U.S. embassies.
“Innocence of Muslims” is no work of art, not an intellectual musing nor a philosophical exploration. Scenes from the movie indicate nothing but an explicit intent to insult Muslims. The circumstances around the production of the movie are quite suspicious.
The filmmaker is reportedly an Egyptian, a Coptic Christian, who was convicted of, and served time for, bank fraud. His history reportedly includes delving into manufacturing methamphetamines in the 1990s. Would a person with such a history spend $50,000 to $60,000 out of his pocket, or from his wife’s family savings, to make a movie that would be unlikely to ever make money? Was it just the moviemaker’s commitment to art? Was it simply his hatred of Muslims?
Whatever is behind the making of the movie, the depiction of the recent protests as simply being angry mobs upset over an amateur movie that Clinton described as “inflammatory and despicable” is to obfuscate the essence of the conflict.
Religion and imperialism
Colonization since its inception has had a strong ideological component. The conquistadors, who massacred the Indigenous peoples of South America, were accompanied by priests who provided divine justification for colonization. It was not enough to defeat the Indigenous peoples in the battlefield; their cultures, their ways of life had to be denied. In North America, when not massacring them outright, the European colonizers denied and ridiculed the customs and traditions of the Native peoples, bringing them “civilization” by preaching the virtues of their “superior” culture.
Similarly today, imperialism justifies its wars, occupations and plunder of oppressed countries, particularly in the Middle East, by demonizing the religious beliefs of the peoples, states and movements that are fighting imperialist dominance. Israel is portrayed as a modern, secular state, despite the fact that it is based on a fundamentally racist conception of establishing a colonial Jewish exclusionary state on occupied land. National liberation movements led by religious forces, such as Hamas in Palestine and Hezbollah in Lebanon, or independent states such as the Islamic Republic of Iran, are portrayed as backward religious fanatics needing to be taught the lessons of secularism and democracy.
The demonization of Islam promoted in the imperialist propaganda should not be viewed in the abstract, as a conflict between secularism and religious sectarianism, but in the context of class struggle, particularly the struggle between imperialism and oppressed peoples. It is an attempt by the colonizers to deny the beliefs of the colonized and to humiliate them, a means of weakening their struggle for independence.
Socialists, who struggle for the liberation of humanity from imperialism, condemn all colonizers’ propaganda campaigns that try to dismiss the views, rituals and traditions of colonized peoples. We uphold and defend the rights of peoples, especially oppressed peoples, to exercise their religious beliefs.
The United States has waged a decades-long campaign to suppress the left in the Middle East, aided by the reactionary client states it has propped up. While this campaign has been largely successful in weakening the left in the Middle East, it has not, and could not have, resulted in the disappearance of pro-independence sentiments. Resistance to colonization and oppression may have different manifestations and be led by different class forces than they were several decades ago. What is a constant, however, is that oppressed people will resist, no matter what form that resistance may take.
