Marc Ambinder beats me to the punch
I was trying to cogitate a post on the attacks in Cairo and Benghhazi yesterday inspired by this 13-minute piece of tripe that was consistent with what I’ve said before about stupid speech acts and the necessity of government tolerance of them. Fortunately, Marc Ambinder has already written something that is better than anything I ...
I was trying to cogitate a post on the attacks in Cairo and Benghhazi yesterday inspired by this 13-minute piece of tripe that was consistent with what I've said before about stupid speech acts and the necessity of government tolerance of them.
I was trying to cogitate a post on the attacks in Cairo and Benghhazi yesterday inspired by this 13-minute piece of tripe that was consistent with what I’ve said before about stupid speech acts and the necessity of government tolerance of them.
Fortunately, Marc Ambinder has already written something that is better than anything I can craft on the fly, so I’ll just outsource the argument to him. In particular:
We live in a world where American provocateurs can easily arouse the militancy of Muslim extremists who are more ubiquitous than even I would like to admit, or, at the very least, allow bad people to use extant anti-American sentiment to whip crowds into frenzies. In either case, innocent people, including Americans, die.
On Twitter, the first instinct of a lot of Americans was retributive justice. But the U.S. government’s sensitivity about the mood of the violent protesters is maddening but necessary. Being aggressive would cause more unnecessary dying.
Those who use the gift of institutionally and legally-protected free speech to exploit and prey upon the vulnerability of certain people to violence ought to be shamed.
At the same time, the people who killed people; protesters, thugs, militants, whomever, are ultimately responsible for their actions. If the U.S. government is going to discourage our own idiots from provoking people, then the governments of Egypt and Libya should act to corral those within their own nations who would storm an embassy on the pretext that a film offends. Well, barely, a film. A piece of anti-Muslim bigotry that was made to make the filmmakers feel good and others feel bad. If, as an American, I feel embarrassed that so many of my fellow Americans are bigots, I would, as an Egypt or a Libyan, be even more horrified that the majority in my country seemed unable to stop (and barely condemn) the even more deplorable violent religious extremism of a minority.
The Arab Spring is incredibly messy and it is hard to see how American values and sensibilities about religious speech will ever take hold in some countries there. That’s incredibly depressing, but I do know this: The barrels of our own guns won’t help anything either.
Daniel W. Drezner is a professor of international politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University and co-host of the Space the Nation podcast. Twitter: @dandrezner
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