Islam

When the story about this wretched film Innocence of Muslims first broke, I wondered how anyone had managed to get together enough people who were nuts enough to participate in making such dreck and yet sane enough to run cameras, learn lines of dialogue, build sets, refrain from drooling, and all the other things that go into even the lowest-budget Grade Z film. I played leading roles in the no-budget amateur films Mega Rat and Dick's Last Shoot, so I know firsthand that making even the worst film takes at least enough brain cells that I would expect someone to be immune to such crude bigotry.

Thanks to Neil Gaiman relaying the story of actress Anna Gurji, we now know what happened: the cast and crew made a different movie, which was then dubbed. It's quite a story.

The best take I've seen so far on the murder of Chris Stevens,
US Ambassador to Libya, and three other Americans (believed to be Marines on consulate duty, but details are still hazy), is from The Christian Science Monitor. The title says it all: US Ambassador murdered as extremists on all sides win, again (The Christian Science Monitor)

The ginned-up controversy over the film, which was propelled to violence by a rabble-rousing Egyptian television channel that presented the film as the work of the US government, recalls the protests over cartoons depicting Muhammad published in Denmark's Jyllands-Posten newspaper in 2005.

Then, there were violent protests across the Middle East over the exercise of free speech in a Western nation. In some ways, it was the beginning of an era of manufactured outrage, with a group of fringe hate-mongers in the West developing a symbiotic relationship with radical clerics across the East. The Westerners deliberately cause offense by describing Islam as a fundamentally violent religion, and all too often mobs in Muslim-majority states oblige by engaging in violence.