Saturday, September 15, 2012

Methinks Thou Doth Protest Too Much: Protests and Pretexts and Cynicism

As we learn more about the intentional and unintentional distribution of the hate movie made by the far right wing extremist Christian felon and friends, the details offer some surprising parallels.

It is now emerging that in Egypt, the military commander of the forces that should have been protecting our embassy on the first day of outrage (both real and faux) was an old government adherent who took his sweet time in performing his duty to our embassy, apparently to cause embarrassment and pressure on the newly formed Morsi government, you know - like right wing partisan political players do.

And the distribution of the film appears to have been made by a far right party - farther right than Morsi and the Islamic Brotherhood - was the work of another faction, the Salafi faction, who discovered the film somehow (those details are still a bit foggy, if it was on their own or if they were 'helped' to find it) and put clips of it on television with the intent of ginning up opposition and pressure on .....you guessed it, the Morsi government.  Another instance of factionalism, and again apparently by the Egyptian far right wing.

I couldn't help but be struck by how willing far right wingers are, in both governments, to try to harm their own country, to put people at risk (both theirs and ours), to contrive a divisive incident for their own cynical partisan political game playing.

Blair sporting a 'continental'
poodle cut
Romney and Ryan are exactly like the old guard military, trying to use an incident from the even further right to make some sort of political hay for their personal and partisan advantage. I am struck by the mewling and whinging on of the right, the further right the more frequent the moans and protests, that the Obama administration exploits crises for their advantage.  This would appear to be another example of that projection that Pen so properly pointed out.  Because the right has done this frequently, the most egregious case being the using the events of 9/11 as a pretext to invade Iraq, which they had planned to do anyway WITHOUT 9/11.  The tragedy of the attack on our citizens simply inconvenienced their timetable, and necessitated a different web of lies than the ones they had originally planned. Those plans to invade Iraq were not only admitted by some of the old Bushies, they have been acknowledged by Tony Blair, Bush's poodle, er, 'partner in crime'.

So, clearly, we should be watching events unfolding, and looking at this not with the superficial understanding that these protests are all the same, country by country, but rather at who is behind them, what different factions are EACH using the film that was first circulated by a faction of far right wing conservative Muslims playing dangerous partisan politics for their own purposes.  This is NOT an example of a pan-Muslim response. That is too simplistic an understanding. This is an example of separate factions taking their cue from the example of the earlier ones staging demonstrations.

One of the hints that this is in fact a correct viewing of the separate protests is that while they are intense certainly, in some cases, they have been consistently very small.  They are highly partisan, just as the origins of the film in this country by an apparently ex-pat Egyptian had a very very tiny partisan group who knew exactly how to intrude his little hate opus into Egypt, which now increasingly appears to have been his target for chaos.

It will take a while to uncover all the players, with multiple countries involved, time to verify the players, time to be sure that one faction doesn't try as occurred with 'Bacile' telling the Israelis he was American and telling U.S. reporters he was Jewish or Israeli, when it appears he was neither.

It is a time for patience.  It is also a time for unity, for coming together to support or diplomatic corps on the front lines of controversy, even if it is a contrived conflict and a manufactured pretext.  We should recognize the posturing of Romney, particularly in making the statement he did that was so disloyal to this country even as our consulate was under attack in Libya.  His statement shows a disregard for responding to factual information, which simply displays that Romney and Ryan were playing personal and partisan politics at the expense of the country, like the original old-guard military commander in Egypt who did not act to nip that earlier protest in the bud when he could, in order to take a jab at an opposition leader.  Both our American cynical right wingers and the right wingers in Egypt should be equally condemned for putting people in harms way, theirs and ours, for gain.  It shows a very contemptuous attitude to the respective citizens, and it shows how easily the far right wing factions in both countries fall in line like little sheep, baaa baaa baaaa, to be easily manipulated.

The early condemnation of Romney was correct, regardless of partisan politics. It continues to be correct, and the right continues to line up the sheep.  In the case of the right wing surrogates now belatedly coming out in support of Romney, facts be damned, it is lining up the goats. The Judas goats who are attempting to further manipulate the little lambs of the far right partisans instead of doing what Republicans used to do when they had morals, uniting in support of the country against our enemies, radicals and extremists world wide, INCLUDING HERE.

No comments:

Post a Comment