Blasphemy as a Tactic
By Thierry Meyssan
September 15, 2012 "Information
Clearing House"
- - The circulation on the Internet of the trailer for
a film, The
Innocence of Muslims, sparked demonstrations across the
world and resulted in the killing in Benghazi of the U.S.
Ambassador to Libya and members of his entourage.
At first glance, these events can be located in the long
line leading from Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses to the
burnings of the Koran by Pastor Terry Jones. Nevertheless,
this new attack differs from other incidents in that the
film was not directed at a Western audience but instead was
uniquely conceived as an instrument of provocation directed
at Muslims.
In political terms, the affair can be analyzed from two
angles: from the tactical perspective as an anti-U.S.
manipulation; or from a strategic one, as an anti-Muslim
psychological attack.
The film was produced by a Zionist group composed of Jews of
double Israeli-American nationality and by an Egyptian Copt.
It was completed several months ago but was released at a
calculated moment to provoke riots targeting the United
States. Israeli agents were deployed in several large cities
with a mission to channel the rage of the crowd against
American or Coptic targets (though not Israeli ones). Not
suprisingly, their maximum effect was attained in Benghazi,
the capital of Libya’s Cyrenaica region.
The population of Benghazi is known to harbor particularly
reactionary and racist groups. It is useful to recall that
at the time the cartoons of Mohammed appeared in September,
2005, Salafists attacked the Danish Consulate. In keeping
with the Vienna Convention on diplomacy, the Libyan
government of Muammar al-Gaddafi deployed troops to protect
the diplomatic service then under attack. The repression of
the riot resulted in numerous deaths. Subsequently, the
West, seeking to overthrow the Libyan regime, financed
Salafist publications which accused Gaddafi of protecting
the Danish Consulate because he had allegedly been behind
the cartoon operation.
On February 15, 2011, Salafists organized in Benghazi a
demonstration commemorating the massacre during which
shooting erupted, an incident that marked the beginning of
the Benghazi insurrection that opened the way to the NATO
intervention. The Libyan police arrested three members of
the Italian Special Forces who confessed to having fired
from the rooftops on both demonstrators and the police to
sew chaos and confusion. Held prisoner throughout the war
that followed, they were released when NATO seized the
capital and smuggled them out of the country to Malta in a
small fishing boat on which I was also a passenger.
This time, the manipulation of the Benghazi crowd by Israeli
agents had as its goal the assassination of the U.S.
Ambassador, an act of war not seen since the Israeli
bombardment of the USS Liberty by the Israeli Air Force and
Navy in 1967. This constitutes the first assassination of an
ambassador in the line of duty since 1979. The act is all
the more grevious considering that in a country where the
current central government is a purely legal fiction, the
U.S. Ambassador was not merely a diplomat but was
functioning as Governor, as the de facto head of state.
It should be emphasized that in the past few weeks, the
highest-ranking U.S. military officers have entered into
open conflict with the Israeli government. They have issued
declarations signifying their intention to halt the cycle of
wars begun after September 11 (Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and
Syria) and which, in light of the informal agreements of
2001, will expand further (Sudan, Somalia and Iran). The
first warning shot occurred in Afghanistan, in August 2012,
when two missiles were fired at the parked plane of General
Martin Dempsey, head of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff. This
second warning turned out to be even more brutal.
If, on the other hand, we examine this affair from the
viewpoint of social psychology, the release of the film and
its aftermath appear to be a frontal attack on the beliefs
of Muslims. In this regard, it is similar in nature to the
Pussy Riot episode trampling on the freedom of religious
practice inside the Orthodox Cathedral of Christ the Saviour
in Moscow and the mulitple performances of conceptual
pornography the group engaged in afterwards. These are
operations geared to violate societies that resist the
project of global domination.
In democratic and multicultural societies, the sacred is
seen as belonging to and being expressed within the private
sphere. But a new collective space of the sacred has been in
the process of elaboration. Western European states have
passed "historical memory" laws which have transformed a
historical event—the Nazi destruction of European Jews—into
a religious occurrence: the "Shoa" in Jewish terminology, or
the "Holocaust" as expressed in Christian evangelical
parlance. Nazi crimes are thereby elevated to the level of a
unique event at the expense of the victims of other
massacres, including other victims of the Nazis. Questioning
the dogma, i.e. this religious interpretation of historical
facts, subjects one to criminal penalties, just as blasphemy
was punished in the past. Similarly, in 2001, the U.S., the
European Union member states and a number of their allies
imposed by decree that entire national populations must
observe a minute of silence in memory of the victims of the
September 11 attacks. This ruling was underpinned by an
ideological interpretation of the causes of the massacre. In
both cases, having been killed because one was Jewish or
because one was American confers a particular status on
these victims before whom the rest of humanity must
genuflect.
During the Olympic Games in London, both the Israeli and the
American delegations attempted to enlarge their sacred space
still further by imposing a minute of silence during the
opening ceremony of the most-watched televised event in the
world, this time on behalf of the hostages seized during the
Munich Games of 1972. In the end, the proposal was rejected,
with the Olympic Committee holding instead a separate
ceremony. This is just a further indication of the effort to
create a collective liturgy legitimating the global empire.
The Innocence
of Muslims serves
both as a device to bring Washington back into line at a
moment when it may be stepping back from the Zionist agenda
and as a means to further advance it by attacking the
religious beliefs of still others who may resist it.
Translated from French by Michele Stoddard
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