Perusing CNN’s story on the attack on the US embassy in Cairo, on the anniversary of the 9-11 attacks on the United States, turns up this gem.
Mohammed al-Zawahiri — the brother of al Qaeda’s leader Ayman al-Zawahiri — added that “we called for the peaceful protest joined by different Islamic factions including the Islamic Jihad, Hazem Abu Ismael movement.”
“We were surprised to see the big numbers show up including the soccer Ultra fans,” he said. “I just want to say, how would the Americans feel if films insulting leading Christian figures like the pope or historical figures like Abraham Lincoln were produced?”
Um, has Mo ever seen South Park? Or The Simpsons? Or read anything written by militant atheists? Or seen Piss Christ or that painting of Mary that was made with elephant dung or watched The Borgias? The Last Temptation of Christ wasn’t exactly orthodox in its theology.
I’m an evangelical Christian living in a nominally Christian country in which we’re perfectly free to blaspheme without running afoul of the law, and someone somewhere is doing his or her best to be obnoxious every single day.
And I wouldn’t have it any other way.
What Mo reveals is that the ascendant strain in Islamic culture is not ready to nurture a truly pluralistic democracy. Even where we imposed democracy, in Iraq, Islam wormed its way into the country’s new constitution and the freedoms there are fragile and as likely as not to succumb to sharia. Where we have no say, such as in the “new” Egypt, things are far less likely to evolve in a way that does anything but threaten pluralism. Ray Ibrahim writes here all the time about the threats that the Coptics face in the “new” Egypt. Watching the “new” Egypt today is a whole lot like watching the path Iran took starting in 1979. Pakistan and Turkey are both on that track, and once Assad falls in Syria it’s likely to go Islamist too.
Based on the response of the US embassy to the attack on itself in Cairo, we’re going Islamist too, a whole lot faster than some of us feared.
Bonus: Zawahiri is the brother of the leader of al Qaeda. I’ve been predicting that Zawahiri’s ascendance will end up making the relationship between the “new” Egypt and al Qaeda friendlier.
Insulting leading religious and historical figures is big business here, Moe. Get hep.
I laugh whenever Muslims and liberals say stuff like that. Christianity (as well as other non-Islamic religions like Mormonism and Judaism) are mocked and insulted almost every day. There aren’t constant riots like this.
I remember a year or two after 9/11, a video surfaced of Bin Laden sitting with some Al Qaeda people (or whoever they were) and they were watching a video of the 9/11 attacks and Bin Laden laughingly says something like, “They thought a coup was happening!” refering to the Americans. That always struck me- he had no clue how Americans thought. I don’t think ANYONE thought it was a coup. Same thing here- this guy thinks “Well of course Christians would go berserk if someone insulted Christianity” Uhhhh no we wouldn’t. Don’t project your insanity on us. Along the same lines, Al Jazeera (and their lefty apologists) LOVE to find stories of American violence and racism so they can be like, “see they’re just like us.” To me it seems that their need to do this shows that deep down they know that really, we’re not like them.
Let’s see, we give them a BILLION dollars and the next week they burn our flag. Wonder what they figure they’ll get when they burn the embassy down (probablt a couple of TRILLION). Odumbo just LOVES his jihadi brothers SO MUCH!
It’s 1979 deja vu all over again.
Hope the election turns out the way 1980 did.
Then, if they still have our embassy, we can send a B2 in there to level the place and tell them we’re not interested in re opening it. If they don’t still have it, we can pull our people out, level the place and tell them we’re not interested in reopening it.
They have so many factions in that part of the world. There will never be a Caliphate unless it is imposed in the same manner as the first Chinese Empire.
I wonder who will win? The Shia, the Sunni, the Alawites, the Druze or maybe the Caliph will come from the Ultra Soccer faction.
Who cares which gang of inbred homicidal maniacs misrules all the other herds of inbred homicidal maniacs? So long as they keep killing each other.
Don’t forget too that not only ARE those types of “blasphemous” films/TV shows and “art” exhibits present and celebrated by many in the US, but the response of Christians doesn’t seem to include violence and killing to punish the infidels…They truly are barbaric.
And our embassy’s response treats them as barbarians in the sense that it refuses to blame them for their violent actions and instead lays the blame on those exerting their free speech rights (meaning that it assumes that it is a natural response of these Muslims to destroy, burn and kill because their sensibilities were offended. They simply can’t help themselves because they are barbarians. That’s the implicit assumption, though they won’t admit it.)
– of war and Obama bowed in surrender.
Dude, two of your co-religionists unworthily presented themselves for Communion and proceeded to spit It out onto the floor. An analogous sacrilege in Islam simply does not exist. This wasn’t some picture, this was our God, in the Flesh and Blood, that they were chewing up and spitting out. Even so, they were permitted to leave the church uninjured. If we were anything like you, they’d have been dead before they could make it back to their pew.