asking for input

[pastwatcher]

Fuck Sept. 11. Should have listened to the "ignore the news" plan, and should now be ignoring the entire conversation following the news. But here we go: is this right?

Trying to find good news sources. Once again Al-Jazeera seems to have reasonable coverage of the facts all around.

What I get out of this and others is that an amazing amount of religious tension internationally has been created by Terry Jones, the "burn a Qur'an on Sept. 11 2010" pastor guy, since he thought Sept. 11 2012 was a GREAT time to spread talk about this strongly anti-Islamic film (possibly created by an Israeli-American guy with 100 donors). And two things happened.

1. There was a protest in Egypt, about the film, which affected mainly a flag, but is being called an "attack" by most US sources, because
2. There was an actual attack on the US consulate in Libya, killing 14 people of whom 4 are Americans (one the ambassador), and the US is digging for terrorist connections.

And so far the responses to this are mostly useless, except for responses like Romney's which are worse than useless.

About right? Analysis? :(

ETA: Here's some analysis that looks to be useful, and here's some Egyptian and Libyan netizens denouncing the violence.

Comments

[lord-codfish.livejournal.com]

I'm... not really in the mood to analyze the attacks right now, particularly not in a public forum, or to express any opinion besides the fact that I thought Secretary Clinton's statement summed it up very well.

I might be able to discuss it by e-mail, if you like.

[novalis.livejournal.com]

What I think US officials should have said is, "When someone makes a video you don't like, make your own video instead of killing people. If you're anywhere in the world and you can't get your video online, deliver it to any US embassy or consulate and we'll put it on Youtube for you."

[http://users.livejournal.com/little_e_/]

I saw part of the video. It was an absolute piece of shit. I don't mean that morally; I mean that if you handed me a camera and some costumes, I could make something better. It was totally incoherent and terribly done. I *think* it was supposed to be funny--like one of those fake movie trailers for the Oregon Trail movie. I've seen better movies made by nine yr olds about their toy trains.

Basically, four people died over someone's terrible homemade Youtube video. Most successful troll ever?

I think that because the media is so closely controlled in many of these other countries, people there tend to assume the same about our media. So they see something like this, and they don't realize that we have movies like Religulous and folks like the Phelpses and Marilyn Manson and that in general, you can be just about as offensive as you wannabee, and there's very little folks can actually do about it.
(Not to mention that people don't necessarily have good access to the internet or speak a lot of English, so then we're talking about second or third-hand reactions spread by TV or word of mouth and small clips, etc.)