OK, we know Romney is an idiot. I support the way Hillary and Obama expressed their feelings today. Instead of adding another redundant diary, I just made my views known by posting comments.
But here is something I feel is good discussion from a progressive point of view. What is the kind of response we should have towards Libya and Egypt?
There are new protests in Cairo outside the US Embassy. We have seen reports of people holding signs of sympathy for the killed people in Libya. It is not easy to figure out what the breakdown of Libyan and Egyptian people numbers by opinion held on the attacks.
How strong should the US seek out justice for these incidents?
For starters, the Libyan government seems to have a stake in not pissing us off. THey seemed to have had the right reaction of sympathy to our dead and anger at what happened in their house. As they should. The US is sending some small amount of military help over there. Hillary Clinton has made it clear no amount of hate speech is a valid reason for those attacks. A good start.
The reaction from Egypt is still not clear. Their head of state lived in the US and one would hope that guy's family members, some of who are Americans, will shame him into showing more anger to what happened on their soil. THey are the hosts of our embassy. Egypt should do whatever it takes. Instead their leader Mohamed Morsy says this:
"The presidency condemns in the strongest terms the attempt of a group to insult the place of the Messenger, the Prophet Mohammed (PBUH) and condemns the people who have produced this radical work," the president said in a statement posted on his Facebook page. "The Egyptian people, both Muslims and Christians, refuse such insults on sanctities."
The statement noted that "the Egyptian government is responsible to protect private and public properties and diplomatic missions in addition to embassy headquarters of various countries" and that "it respects and protects the right of expression and the right to protest peacefully under the law and will firmly oppose any irresponsible attempt to veer off the law."
Seriously? This guy lived in and prospered from American free speech during his stay in America. Now , he doesn't use any of those values back in Egypt.
When Van Gogh was murdered, sadly, the reaction to his murder did not generate enough outrage in the muslim community, even if admittedly, most of them wouldn't dream of doing something so heinous. Are Egyptians more concerned about the fallout due to this because of economic reasons, or do they actually care that people can get hurt because of these kind of attacks? When are they going to understand that people have free speech to insult and the best way to counter it is to use your own free speech to expose the guy and if there are any deliberate falsehoods in facts then, they can sue for slander or whatever. There have been anti semitic videos made in the middle east. How would these people feel if we supported Israel in attacking arabic embassies just because some muslim lunatic independently made a despicable video without the permission of his government the same way Bacile made this video ridiculing Prophet Muhammed.
Luckily no lives were taken in Egypt. Otherwise, it would have been a hairy situation in making sure Egypt doesn't drop the ball in taking this seriously.
In another gem, this idiot's concern seems to be about suing the nutball filmmaker instead of trying his best to assure the security of foreign embassies on his soil.
Egyptian President Mohamed Mursi asked the Egyptian embassy in Washington to take legal action in the United States against makers of a film attacking the Muslim Prophet Mohammad, the official state news agency said on Wednesday.
Weigh in. I don't have any answers. Just wanted to start a discussion. I am tired of these lunatics getting so riled up over some lunatic's book or movie defaming Islam to the point of attacking innocent americans when they have muslims who do the same thing in their media. We are not going to start burning the Iranian embassy or egyptian embassy because some idiot made a bigoted movie in one of those countries.