Category: Embassy Attacks

Today, anti-film protesters attacked the US embassy in Yemen as well:

The protesters breached the usually tight security around the embassy and reached the compound grounds but did not enter the main building housing the offices. Once inside the compound, they brought down the US flag, burned it and replaced it with a black banner bearing Islam’s declaration of faith: “There is no God but Allah.” Before storming the grounds, demonstrators removed the embassy’s sign on the outer wall, set tires ablaze and pelted the compound with rocks.

Yemeni security forces who rushed to the scene fired in the air and used tear gas to disperse the demonstrators and were eventually able to drive them out of the compound. It was not immediately clear whether anyone was inside the embassy at the time of the attack.

Buzzfeed compiles “19 frightening photos”. Unlike his Egyptian counterpart, Yemen’s president apologizes to the US and calls for an investigation. For a full roundup of Dish coverage, go to the “Embassy Attacks In Libya and Egypt” thread page. (To jump to today’s coverage, click here.)

John Herman tracks down the latest on the apparent Keyser Soze of blasphemous film. There is reason to believe that "Sam Bacile" is an alias for one Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, a Coptic Christian:

In [Jimmy] Israel's telling, it was Sam Bacile — a man he met a number of times, and who insisted that was his real name — who turned the film into a piece of religious incitement. "Sam portrayed [Muhammed] as being a sex addict and killing people left and right and having henchmen kill people and so forth," he says, "I don't know about Muhammed at all." The reason for his initial participation was money: "It was really just for hire, I'm not a wealthy man."

In my discussion with Israel, which ended when his phone apparently died, he provided a bizarre sketch of Sam Bacile, who it seems very likely is, in fact, Nakoula Basseley Nakoula. (While Israel said he had never met anyone by that name, the name Bacile gave to Israel for the SAG registration was Abnob Nakoula Basseley, and Israel describes him as about the same age as that given in the AP report.)

The actors had no idea what they were filming. The whole thing is like a plot from a Mel Brooks movie. Many readers have made this point:

Say Sam Bacile out loud. From the first time I saw it I thought it sounds like "some imbecile." My guess is that it's a made-up name like Ben Dover, Amanda Huggenkiss, etc.

Another:

Not to go down the conspiracy rabbit hole, but it strikes me that the word "Islam" would be part of any anagram for Sam Bacile. Dropping the remaining letters into google translate from Latin, "Ceba
Islam" translates into "… said Islam." Could this be the author reinforcing his sour message about Islam?  Or perhaps the movie was secretly produced by Islamists to stir up protests and undercut the Arab Spring. I'm not sure, but maybe your readers can flesh out possible translations of the various combinations of the letters C B E A.

For a full roundup of Dish coverage, go to the "Embassy Attacks In Libya and Egypt" thread page. (To jump to today's coverage, click here.)

Ackerman has a useful rundown:

It was not a simple mob that attacked the U.S. consulate in Benghazi on Tuesday, killing four Americans. Benghazi was the scene of a pitched battle, one in which unknown Libyan assailants besieged American diplomats with small-arms fire for over four hours, repelling several attempts by U.S. personnel to regain control of it.

Nor was what happened in Benghazi a simple story of Americans assaulted by the Libyans they helped to liberate from Moammar Gadhafi last year, American officials say. Libyan security forces and a sympathetic local militia helped the Americans to suppress the attack and get the diplomats inside to safety.

That account is the first official telling of Tuesday’s events. It’s preliminary, as much of what has been initially reported in the media on Wednesday has proven incorrect. And it was provided to reporters late Wednesday afternoon by Obama administration officials who would not speak for the record.

Continued here. Another take on the same lines here:

This is Libya’s extreme right.

And, while much is still uncertain, Tuesday’s attack appears to have been their attempt to escalate a strategy they have employed ever since the Libyan revolution overthrew Colonel Qaddafi’s dictatorship. They see in these days, in which the new Libya and its young institutions are still fragile, an opportunity to grab power. They want to exploit the impatient resentments of young people in particular in order to disrupt progress and the development of democratic institutions.

A good rule when trying to absorb breaking news like this is to wait. That applies to bloggers as well as presidential candidates. J.D. Tuccille asks why Ambassador Stevens wasn't better protected:

By contrast to the Benghazi compound, the U.S. embassy in Cairo, which also came under attack with a better outcome, is described as a "fortress-like U.S. mission." Granted, the U.S. embassy to Libya is in Tripoli and the Benghazi consulate is a lesser facility, but Libya strikes me as the sort of place where any American presence should be "fortress-like."

Juan Cole adds:

Why in the world [Stevens] was in an insecure minor consulate in a provincial city on September 11 is a mystery to me.

(Photo: An armchair and parasol float in the swimming pool of the US consulate in Benghazi on September 13, 2012, following an attack on the building late on September 11 in which the US ambassador to Libya and three other US nationals were killed. By Gianluigi Guercia/AFP/Getty Images)

Sean Smith, one of the Americans murdered in Benghazi was a huge force in the online multiplayer game EVE Online. He was on Jabber when the attack happened. His last words there, one reader tells us, were "FUCK", "GUNFIRE". This is an obituary from his "alliance leader". A reader writes:

I am a player in EVE Online, part of the coalition where Sean (aka Vile Rat) was such an important player. Here’s an excerpt of the coalition’s jabber announcement channel (which on a normal day is mostly filled up by fleet operation announcements), after his death was made public:

(11:08:36 PM) directorbot@goonfleet.com/directorbot: My people, we have been dealt a grevious blow tonight, as people and as players. I, and all of us who knew Sean, are still reeling. And yet, to my horror, already Vile Rat's death has become a machination in Mitt Romney's presidential campaign. I do not speak of politics often because American politics do not matter in an international game of internet spaceships. But this sickens me, and Vile Rat would not have wanted to become a tool for the Romney campaign. Just this morning, he said this in Illum regarding the RNC:

(12:41:07 PM) kismeteer: vile_rat: Was there anyone in that group that you even partially respected?
(12:41:14 PM) vile_rat: on the republican side?
(12:41:17 PM) kismeteer: yeah
(12:41:20 PM) vile_rat: nope. not a one.

And now we see this: "I'm outraged by the attacks on American diplomatic missions in Libya and Egypt and by the death of an American consulate worker in Benghazi," Romney said in the statement. "It's disgraceful that the Obama Administration's first response was not to condemn attacks on our diplomatic missions, but to sympathize with those who waged the attacks."

My fury is boundless. Our friend should not be used in this way. We have only so many ways to make our voices heard, but if enough of us shout loudly enough we can – as we have seen – force the media to notice. Retweet this. ALL OF YOU. I will not have Sean's memory desecrated by American presidential politics.

Update from a reader:

It was a bit weird to load your blog this morning and see my friend's face on it. I've known Sean for close to 15 years now, and the fact that his death is international news doesn't make any less sad, but it does make it very strange. I don't have much of anything to add to what your other reader sent you, but there is an attempt to raise money for his family, and you can do so here.

For a full roundup of Dish coverage, go to the "Embassy Attacks In Libya and Egypt" thread page. (To jump to today's coverage, click here.) Above photos from Eve Online and Facebook, via Russell Jones.

Mohamed El Dashan dreams of a more reasonable response to anti-Islam speech from the West:

Is the film insulting? Yeah, sure. But the best reaction would have been to ignore it completely. There is no virtue in displaying lethal outrage (as in Benghazi) whenever anyone throws a feeble punch at Islam and Muslims. Doing so is only a display of weakness, a fear that our religion cannot withstand even the silliest of skits. This idea is insulting in itself. Bring on the insults, I say — bring on the hatred, the mockery, the piques, the spitballs. The amateur films, the Danish cartoons, the Geert Wilders, and the like. There is little harm than can befall Islam as a faith. It has withstood, over the past fourteen centuries, infinitely worse attacks, yet it has neither weakened nor vanished.

Dan Murphy acknowledges the cycle:

In some ways, [the aftermath of the Danish Muhammad cartoon] was the beginning of an era of manufactured outrage, with a group of fringe hate-mongers in the West developing a symbiotic relationship with radical clerics across the East. The Westerners deliberately cause offense by describing Islam as a fundamentally violent religion, and all too often mobs in Muslim-majority states oblige by engaging in violence.

Murphy reports that the protest and attacks in Egypt were sparked by a religious TV station there:

Jones and Mr. Bacile cannot be blamed for the violence and death of the ambassador. That blame goes to the perpetrators. Who whipped them up? Ground zero for bringing attention to the movie in Egypt appears to be Al-Nas TV, a religious channel owned by Saudi Arabian businessman Mansour bin Kadsa. A TV show presented by anti-Christian, anti-Semitic host Khaled Abdullah before the violence showed what he said were clips from the film, which he insisted was being produced by the United States and Coptic (Egyptian) Christians.

A reminder of the real victims in this whole saga:

(Bottom photo: Libyan civilians help an unconscious man, identified by eyewitnesses as US ambassador-to-Libya Chris Stevens, at the US consulate compound in Benghazi in the early hours of September 12, 2012, following an overnight attack on the building. Stevens and three of his colleagues were killed in an attack on the US consulate in the eastern Libyan city by Islamists outraged over an amateur American-made Internet video mocking Islam, less than six months after being appointed to his post. By STR/AFP/Getty Images.

Top photo: The outer wall of the United States Embassy in Egypt covered in graffiti, the morning after it was vandalised by protesters during a demonstration on Septmeber 12, 2012 in central Cairo, Egypt. By Ed Giles/Getty Images.)

:( Respect RT “@2011feb17: WE ARE SORRY!!! #AlgeriaSquare #Tripoli #Libya. twitter.com/2011feb17/stat…“

— Dalia Ezzat (@DaliaEzzat_) September 12, 2012

Daniel McCarthy explains how it makes events like those in Egypt and Libya possible:

[T]here is no such thing as worldwide free speech. It’s not simply that few countries other than the U.S. have constitutional speech protections as broad as those of our First Amendment. What’s more important is that few people in the developing world separate tolerated expressions of hatred from official endorsement of such views.

Indeed, while Americans think of free speech as something that protects everyone from censorious government, elsewhere peoples not infrequently demand that their governments limit speech. American diplomats must communicate with peoples and governments which not only recognize nothing like our First Amendment rights, but which see such rights as extreme and destabilizing — and with good reason. We in the U.S. may think that attitude barbaric and beyond the pale of civilized discourse, but diplomats addressing the public or officials of a foreign country have no choice but to deal with that reality, like it or not.

An Egyptian reader passes along the above Twitter pic of a sign that reads in Arabic, “We condemn insulting the Prophet, but not with terrorism”.

Rosie Gray created an (unembeddable) video highlighting the heavy dubbing of the trailer. She theorizes that the "anti-Muslim 'movie' that served as the spark or pretext for a wave of violent unrest Egypt and Libya may not be a movie at all":

[N]early all of the names in the movie's "trailer" are overdubbed. The video is a compilation of the most clumsily overdubbed moments from what is in reality an incoherent, haphazardly-edited set of scenes. Among the overdubbed words is "Mohammed," suggesting that the footage was taken from a film about something else entirely. The footage also suggests multiple video sources — there are obvious and jarring discrepancies among actors and locations.