I assume that we all know how it goes at this point: someone in the West in some way blasphemes against the Prophet Muhammad, news of this comes to fundamentalists in the Islamic countries, and we all wind-up watching paroxysms of violent anger on the news.
Unfortunately, it has become such a well-known two-step that it now seems like people are deliberately trying to provoke the ire of the Fundamentalist Muslims. This “Sam Bacile*” fellow seems to have gone out of his way to push all of the right buttons–not just in terms of blasphemy, but also in claiming to be an Israeli national with the financial backing of “a hundred Jews”–the whole thing sounds like very calculated attempt to set off a religious conflict.
There’s little doubt in my mind, based upon what I’ve read, that “Bacile” (like Terry Jones before him) is an absolute pile of Human shit, and given his deeply unsympathetic behaviour, it is so tempting to blame him for the entire thing.
Unfortunately, it doesn’t wash. The men who decided to destroy that embassy in Libya are not hornets; they are not mindless drones. They are Human Beings, presumably fully in charge of their own faculties, who have decided of their own free will to value their religious ideals above the lives of a bunch of people who had absolutely nothing to do with the offense given (other than coming from the same country as the offender). There is no way to excuse such conduct, no matter how much of an asshole the person who gave the original offense was–and frankly, any attempt to excuse their behaviour invariably comes across as infantilizing of people in other cultures.
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