US embassies in Egypt and Libya swarmed

What about the guy that just shot up a Sihk Temple? Is it better or worse to have no media trigger?

Farscry wrote:
Rexneron wrote:

There are groups in Islamic countries that are waiting to "be offended" & "respond with violence". They're not reacting, they're waiting for opportunity.

And your point is?

Muslims don't have a monopoly on religious extremism and violence, Mr. Confirmation Bias.

Yeah, that's not gonna fly. Name the last time the Army of God stormed a Consulate and brutally murdered people there because they saw (or got wind of) a film that portrayed Jesus doing sexy stuff? Fake anthrax and bombing abortion buildings are reprehensible acts, no doubt, but in the rule of degree, it's barely worth considering.

There is not modern Christian comparison to this attack of which I am aware. The Covenant, the Sword, and the Arm of the Lord, Defensive Action, Hutaree, and The Freemen Community, while all horrible groups, do not storm City Hall and kill people in protest of a film.

Edit: I need to point out that this comparison bullsh*t actually clouds the issue. A bunch of monsters killed innocents for a stupid, stupid reason. They were all North African. They were all Libyan (I think). They were all Muslim. We can state this accurately without also saying "but the KKK's bad, too!"

The fact that these Muslims also killed in the name of Allah is incidental, I would say. I don't care if Jews riot when they see Porky Pig, violence is violence, and the perpetrators should be held responsible.

fangblackbone wrote:

What about the guy that just shot up a Sihk Temple? Is it better or worse to have no media trigger?

It's different.

kazooka wrote:

There's a lot of weird stuff floating around about this Sam Bacile guy. The name appears to be a pseudonym.

http://www.theatlantic.com/internati...

Weirder yet is that the only real name associated with all of this is "Steve Klein".

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/lanow/2012/09/ambassador-killed-anti-muslim-film-steve-klein.html

Google that guy and go to town. He's founded anti-Mormon, anti-abortion and other Christian extremist groups. Not saying he's to blame. Free speech and all of that. But it's also up to members of a community, in this case the Christian community, to call BS on one of their own when they deliberately attempt to provoke violence.

This needs to happen a lot more. The extremists need to be marginalized. They need to have the contempt of the regular citizens. They need to be mocked and shown that the rest of the world - on any side - does not agree with them, and thinks they are reprehensible. Good on the people of Libya for realizing this. Reasonable people need to stand together in the face of terrorism, extremism, and violence.

I think it is ridiculous that people were getting all up in arms over what were two relatively isolated incidents, then broadly condemning people from the Middle East.

What's coming out is that it seems like the consulate was attacked not because of the film, but in what's possibly a retaliatory killing possibly spurred by Al Quaeda. Apparently, while the demonstration was going on, a few truckloads of heavily armed men showed up, surrounded the consulate and assaulted it. It does not seem to be a rampaging mob as originally reported, but was instead a planned attack, one of two that day in Benghazi against American sites.

[Updated at 2:48 p.m. ET] U.S. sources say they do not believe the attacks that killed Stevens and three other Americans in Benghazi, Libya, were in reaction to the online release of a film mocking Islam, CNN's Elise Labott reports.

"It was not an innocent mob," one senior official said. "The video or 9/11 made a handy excuse and could be fortuitous from their perspective, but this was a clearly planned military-type attack."

This meshes with information recorded earlier in this post, including that U.S. sources told CNN that the Benghazi attack was planned, and that perhaps a protest against the film was used as a diversion. Also, a London think tank with strong ties to Libya speculated Wednesday that Stevens was the victim of a targeted al Qaeda attack "to avenge the death of Abu Yaya al-Libi, al Qaeda's second in command killed a few months ago." (See 12:51 p.m. update.)

The Libya attacks came on the same day that protesters in Cairo, Egypt, scaled the walls of the U.S. Embassy in Cairo. Protesters there reportedly were upset about an online film considered offensive to Islam.

The U.S. sources also say that two U.S. properties were attacked in Benghazi: first, the main compound where Stevens was, and later, and attack on another U.S. compound in Benghazi.

Regarding the attack on the main compound, a U.S. source says three people – Stevens; Sean Smith, a U.S. Foreign Service information management officer; and a security officer – were in a safe room. The house was on fire (CNN has previously reported the building was on fire after a grenade attack), and the security officer got out. The officer then went back in for Stevens and Smith, and he found Smith's body and retrieved it. The officer could not find Stevens, the source said.

CNN previously reported that, according to a senior U.S. official familiar with the details of the attack, four Americans - including Stevens and Smith - died after succumbing to smoke inhalation.

More weirdness along the lines of the first link I posted:

http://www.theatlanticwire.com/globa...

As pointed out above, it should all be taken with a grain of salt.

Escalation.

http://www.abc15.com/dpp/news/nation...

WASHINGTON - The Pentagon dispatched a contingent of Marines to Libya, moved warships toward its coast, and planned to use drones in a stepped up search for those responsible for an attack on a U.S. consulate that killed the American ambassador and three others.
A senior military official told CNN that the Pentagon and other agencies would review a video of Tuesday's assault by heavily armed militants on the diplomatic compound in Benghazi that killed Ambassador Chris Stevens, another diplomat and two security personnel.
The official had not viewed the video and provided no details about its source.
American drones also were expected to join the hunt for potential targets. They would be part of "a stepped-up, more focused search" for a particular insurgent cell that may have been behind the attack, the official said.
Rallick wrote:

This needs to happen a lot more. The extremists need to be marginalized. They need to have the contempt of the regular citizens. They need to be mocked and shown that the rest of the world - on any side - does not agree with them, and thinks they are reprehensible. Good on the people of Libya for realizing this. Reasonable people need to stand together in the face of terrorism, extremism, and violence.

Thanks for sharing that - really humanized it for me.

Rexneron:

That sounds mighty scary. I'd start living in a bomb shelter if I were a Libyan. Let's hope the tolerance for "acceptable collateral damage" is closer to zero this time around.

It does not mean he is not an irresponsible loudmouth with blood on his hands.

It's not like they're f*cking animals, you know. They are human beings, able to make their own decisions. The only hands with blood on them are the killers'.

If those actors didn't know what was going on, then that's some serious sh*t.

Definitely 1dgaf. From what I heard on NPR, though... it was pretty obvious that the Prophet's name was (badly) dubbed into that footage.

I believe this filmmaker has no direct primary responsibilty for these deaths... in the same way a parent who abuses or neglects their child is not legally responsible for that resulting grown-up's actions. Choices are still each person's to make.

But I do believe he has some tertiary responibilty for increasing the passions and craziness of the fringe humans who caused this. But that is freedom of speech for you. Great thing if it weren't for those few who use that freedom against others in hatred and bigotry.

Plus... if this was a planned assault where the protest was a diversion or useful cover... doesn't that kind of make the video moot-ish?

I'm of the mind that outside of libel and things of that nature free speech is pretty much an absolute right. I'm not saying the filmmakers can't make their art. But I do believe rational people who don't want to kick a hornets nest can call them out for trying to do that. The consultant on this project has websites and groups for combating Mormons, abortions and everything else he deems immoral. Free speech doesn't mean no consequences.

DSGamer wrote:
kazooka wrote:

There's a lot of weird stuff floating around about this Sam Bacile guy. The name appears to be a pseudonym.

http://www.theatlantic.com/internati...

Weirder yet is that the only real name associated with all of this is "Steve Klein".

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/lanow/2012/09/ambassador-killed-anti-muslim-film-steve-klein.html

Google that guy and go to town. He's founded anti-Mormon, anti-abortion and other Christian extremist groups. Not saying he's to blame. Free speech and all of that. But it's also up to members of a community, in this case the Christian community, to call BS on one of their own when they deliberately attempt to provoke violence.

BS on Steve Klein. How's that? (although I wouldn't really consider him one of my own other than the very broad label of "Christian")

DSGamer wrote:

I'm of the mind that outside of libel and things of that nature free speech is pretty much an absolute right. I'm not saying the filmmakers can't make their art. But I do believe rational people who don't want to kick a hornets nest can call them out for trying to do that. The consultant on this project has websites and groups for combating Mormons, abortions and everything else he deems immoral. Free speech doesn't mean no consequences.

The goon is quite obviously a hate-monger who made a hate-mongering movie. I don't see why I should have to equivocate, and say I support his freedom of speech when saying so anymore than I should have to when I say that Michael Bay made one of the worst movies I've ever seen in Transformers 2. Alas, the Right has been working damn hard to minimize the threat hate groups pose, as they're easy to motivate as a base, so, here we are, where people have to justify being repulsed by this garbage.

He made a movie designed to provoke and anger, and it increasingly seems (based on Robear's article and others) that when people were provoked to anger, other hate-mongers were able to swoop in and exploit that opportunity. Al Qaeda or whoever are his best allies--in a perfect world, that would sicken him to the core of whatever soul he has left. But, we live in this one, so I wager all the gutless worms are pleased.

My views on the 1st amendment are both a given, and immaterial.

SpacePPoliceman wrote:
DSGamer wrote:

I'm of the mind that outside of libel and things of that nature free speech is pretty much an absolute right. I'm not saying the filmmakers can't make their art. But I do believe rational people who don't want to kick a hornets nest can call them out for trying to do that. The consultant on this project has websites and groups for combating Mormons, abortions and everything else he deems immoral. Free speech doesn't mean no consequences.

The goon is quite obviously a hate-monger who made a hate-mongering movie. I don't see why I should have to equivocate, and say I support his freedom of speech when saying so anymore than I should have to when I say that Michael Bay made one of the worst movies I've ever seen in Transformers 2. Alas, the Right has been working damn hard to minimize the threat hate groups pose, as they're easy to motivate as a base, so, here we are, where people have to justify being repulsed by this garbage.

He made a movie designed to provoke and anger, and it increasingly seems (based on Robear's article and others) that when people were provoked to anger, other hate-mongers were able to swoop in and exploit that opportunity. Al Qaeda or whoever are his best allies--in a perfect world, that would sicken him to the core of whatever soul he has left. But, we live in this one, so I wager all the gutless worms are pleased.

My views on the 1st amendment are both a given, and immaterial.

Maybe I missed something, but I don't think the 'defend the 1st ammendment' stuff that came up in here was a reaction to you and others saying he was douchebag and deserved shunning and other such social repercussions, but to the idea tossed out that he should be labeled as a terrorist/criminal and tossed into Gitmo/prison.

DanB wrote:

If you incite racial hatred I think that should be a crime, pretty sure it is a crime in most western nations because we accept that free speech doesn't give you the right to put other's lives or health in danger.

In Israel inciting racial hatred is illegal . from Israel's penal code 1977(PDF):

Publication of racist incitement is prohibited
144B.(a) If a person publishes anything in order to incite to racism, then he is liable to five years imprisonment.
(b) For the purposes of this section, it does not matter whether the publication did cause racism, and whether or not it is true.

It doesn't mean there is no free speech but there is a limit to how you can use it. So inciting violence,racism, or committing a crime can go to jail for. This law is rarely ever used by prosecutors and the punishment in Israel is fairly lax. Slander is still becoming a fairly popular crime which is sometimes combined with extortion. The media can still published lies if they didn't know they were false at the time.

-----

About the Riots In Libya I heard they are linking it to Al Qaeda. The Egyptians have been whacko for a while. Our ambassador was under siege at about the same date last year. The mob almost got to him and his guard but lucky the US urged the Egyptian Government to get in and save our diplomats. We have peace with Egypt but it's more of a "we don't shoot each other" kind of peace . There was once more tourism in Sinai but now it's a lot more dangerous to go there.

In Libya I heard there are a bunch of Al Qaeda members. The country was recently in anarchy so it's unsurprising a few extremists got in . There is actually a small Libyan community in Israel living in Ramla (if I remember correctly) .The came to Israel in the 1920s and the media interviewed them about Libya when the uprising was going on because they visited Libya in the past.

I haven't watched that movie and I'm not planning to watch it. It's still fairly irrelevant . Muslims in predominantly Islamic countries kill people all the time. They usually find all sort of excuses.

Yesterday I missed an episode of "Allah Islam" (I'll watch it online later) which is an Israeli documentary about Muslims in Europe. This is a much better quality movie and it's more interesting than some crazy christian claiming to be an Israeli Jew( I heard someone claimed it's a lie). Yesterday's episode was about the conflict between Sharia law and local Law. In the promo they showed a few parts about honor killings of women in Islamic society in Europe. I was more interested in playing LoL than watching part 2 .

In part 1 he went to France,England and Sweden and talked with the people, the police and Mayors. Each person told their story from their own view point. Tzvi Yehezkeli who did most of the interviews is fluent in Arabic and none really suspected him as a "Zionist Jew" ( his parents came from Iraq/Kurdistan) . He went to interview terrorists in his past job so talking with European Muslims is a walk in the park for him. I really hope it will get an English version (or subtitles ) it's a very good documentary. The Muslims are not evil or something like that they just have a different culture. All they are doing in Europe is getting it to a state which is more compatible with their culture and it's unsurprising the Europeans are starting to resist those changes.

RIP vile rat. I played internet spaceships (EVE online) with him many times during my years in Goonfleet. I even talked to him at length for a while about possibly joining the foreign service back when I was looking to get a job overseas. I remember all the sh*t he went through when he was in Baghdad and his stories about all the near misses. Finally caught up to him.

He was a good guy.

Sorry to hear that, Unknown. Sounds like a good guy.

Edit - A mention of Sean Smith on Slashdot, including a link to a memorial thread with info on contributing to a fund for his kids. And here's another link (possibly the one that Unknown tried to put into his post.)

Looks like The US embassy in Yemen got swarmed too . There is also a protest about the movie in Israel by the US embassy in Tel Aviv but Ynet said it's limited and non violent and there are only about 100 people protesting . The organizers claimed they intentionally limited their number of people who came.

I read the Iranian protest by the Swiss embassy which represent the US in Iran. If I'm not mistaken the Iranian overran the British embassy last year. I guess it's a new disturbing trend.

I don't usually post in this part of town, but this conflict sickens me and I fear that another war can be started over something as dumb an offensive crap youtube video. I'm sickened because we still live in a world where religion is used as an excuse for violence and I know this is going to get out of hand really fast. The fact that the violent protest are already spreading is bad news. The blood thirst of people in this world is a damn shame.

absurddoctor wrote:

Maybe I missed something, but I don't think the 'defend the 1st ammendment' stuff that came up in here was a reaction to you and others saying he was douchebag and deserved shunning and other such social repercussions, but to the idea tossed out that he should be labeled as a terrorist/criminal and tossed into Gitmo/prison.

It seemed like people were really jumping on Maq for saying it was a hateful video that shouldn't have been made, and as far as I saw he wasn't advocating any sort of prosecution.

Yonder wrote:
absurddoctor wrote:

Maybe I missed something, but I don't think the 'defend the 1st ammendment' stuff that came up in here was a reaction to you and others saying he was douchebag and deserved shunning and other such social repercussions, but to the idea tossed out that he should be labeled as a terrorist/criminal and tossed into Gitmo/prison.

It seemed like people were really jumping on Maq for saying it was a hateful video that shouldn't have been made, and as far as I saw he wasn't advocating any sort of prosecution.

I actually agree. Just because you can do something doesn't mean you should do something (just thinking in terms of basic human decency here).

Farscry wrote:
Yonder wrote:
absurddoctor wrote:

Maybe I missed something, but I don't think the 'defend the 1st ammendment' stuff that came up in here was a reaction to you and others saying he was douchebag and deserved shunning and other such social repercussions, but to the idea tossed out that he should be labeled as a terrorist/criminal and tossed into Gitmo/prison.

It seemed like people were really jumping on Maq for saying it was a hateful video that shouldn't have been made, and as far as I saw he wasn't advocating any sort of prosecution.

I actually agree. Just because you can do something doesn't mean you should do something (just thinking in terms of basic human decency here).

So you're advocating self censorship out of fear of violent consequences?

A report on CNN said that:

Initial reports indicate the four-hour assault began around 10 p.m. as gunmen opened fire on the main compound of the U.S. Consulate complex. Within 15 minutes, the gunmen entered the building.

How is it none of the news is asking how our embassy got overrun within 15 minutes? Even a light security perimeter should be able to hold off a mob for 15 minutes, let alone a trained Marine force. This is seriously bugging me.

Seth wrote:

So you're advocating self censorship out of fear of violent consequences?

Isnt this just called using common sense?

Quintin_Stone wrote:

Just WTF are you advocating here? A crowd of violent thugs blame their murder at the feet of Americans for something they said in America and you think the US government should, what? Arrest them? Censor them? Execute them? Deport them?

I'm advocating that national security interests trump the rights of two religious whack jobs to spew hate that is specifically designed to enrage a portion of the global population that we've expended two trillion dollars and several thousand American lives alternatively fighting and trying to make up with over the past decade. The last thing we need are these two assholes making things worse for the Americans we have deployed throughout the Muslim world.

What does that specifically mean? I'm not an expert on law so I don't know. If the Sedition Act hadn't been repealed, I'd have those two locked up for that. Since that law is no longer, I'm sure there's something buried in the Patriot Act that would at least stop these morons from making things worse for everyone else.

Personally, I'd like to see them hooded and dropped off in front of the families of the people who died so they could better understand the true cost of their freedom of speech and then take whatever was left of them and drop it off in downtown Cairo and Benghazi.

Quintin_Stone wrote:

Our foreign policy is not driven by these yokels any more than it is driven by the speech of America's endless sea of idiotic opinions. Our foreign policy's not even driven by Mitt Romney's claim that Jerusalem is the capital of Israel. Should we arrest everyone moron on Twitter that claimed the US gold medal victories over Japan were retaliation for Pearl Harbor?

These yokels certainly seem to have had quite an impact on our foreign policy, though. We're deploying more Marines to Libya as well as drones to help what...hunt for the crowd? The fledgling Libyan government essentially vowed to arrest and torture whoever they thought would have information about the attacks, something that doesn't exactly bode well for the future. And who knows how this is going to shake out in Egypt, where there's also a new government we need to make nice with, in Afghanistan, where we still have 100,000 troops and will for the next 12 months, and elsewhere throughout the world where Americans and American military are in pre-dominantly Muslim countries?

But, hey, keep on insisting that the overrunning of two American embassies and the death of an American ambassador won't have any impact on our foreign policy. Just look at Iran. We totes forgave them swarming the American embassy. Oh wait, we didn't. And we still don't have any official diplomatic contact with them 33 years later...

You haven't even thought about the words you're typing. It's embarrassing.

And you're allowed to say such things because of the 1st Amendment. But what you seem to be having an incredibly hard time comprehending is that the 1st Amendment only applies to Americans.

You can call my reasoning "embarrassing" and that's OK. As a fellow American I understand that you have the right to express yourself, just as I have the right to call you a giant poo-poo head in return. We can do this because we both are operating from the same cultural background, one where it's been well established that people have the right to say hateful, horrible things to one another.

What makes this circumstance different is that it isn't one American saying horrible things about another American. It's one American saying horrible things about a religion, one that consists almost entirely of non-Americans. There is no shared understanding about freedom of expression or that hateful speech should be tolerated between the parties.

That's because the two parties are from vastly different cultures. It is simply moronic to think that Western ideas of freedom of speech should be immediately accepted and tolerated by the populations of Libya and Egypt when we most definitely wouldn't do the same with some of their cultural norms, such as the treatment of women.

Nor should we get on our moral high horse and tsk-tsk the rioters as religious fanatics. Islam plays a much larger role in the lives of Muslims than Christianity does for Christians. Christians don't stop whatever they are doing six times a day to pray, for example. So it's simply cultural ignorance on our part to not understand how deeply offensive the film is, especially because it depicted Muhammad. Hell, we can't even remotely understand that one since a depiction of Jesus is front and center at just about every Christian church.

Nor are we so morally advanced. Just 150 or so years ago we Americans were busy with our own religiously-inspired riots, as Protestants clashed with Catholics in Philadelphia over the weighty issue of which Bible should be read from at school. A few years before that, Joesph Smith was being tarred and feathered and members of the Mormon faith outright slaughtered. And 150 years before that we were busy torturing burning women for being witches because god wanted it so...

So all that should be considered before we condemn all Muslims as bloodthirsty savages. As well, we should acknowledge that they aren't that far removed from tribal bonds that existed for millenia before the Europeans came and started to remake their countries in their image. This isn't meant as an excuse, just a simple acknowledgement of how extremely different our cultures really are.

Yonder wrote:
absurddoctor wrote:

Maybe I missed something, but I don't think the 'defend the 1st ammendment' stuff that came up in here was a reaction to you and others saying he was douchebag and deserved shunning and other such social repercussions, but to the idea tossed out that he should be labeled as a terrorist/criminal and tossed into Gitmo/prison.

It seemed like people were really jumping on Maq for saying it was a hateful video that shouldn't have been made, and as far as I saw he wasn't advocating any sort of prosecution.

This was the post that spurred a lot of discussion:

Maq wrote:

Here's an idea. If Sam Bacile and Pastor Terry Jones want to get their jollies poking a hornets nest of sociopathic fundamentalism, let's just throw them to the baying mob to be torn limb from limb so the rest of us can live in peace without having to die for anyone else's beliefs.

Are the people in Egypt, Yemen, and Libya under the impression that this is a movie that will be shown in theaters? It's just an embarrassingly pathetic mess that seems to only exist on YouTube, along with a billion other pathetic messes. Instead, people with an agenda are spreading misinformation about it and pretending it's important.