The following is an excerpt from OpinionJournal.com’s “Best of the Web” written by the editor, James Taranto.
A River in Egypt
Those mobs storming U.S. embassies in Cairo and elsewhere? The official White House line is that they’re just overexcited movie critics.
Here’s spokesman Jay Carney at a noontime press briefing, quoted by Mediaite.com: “This is a fairly volatile situation, and it is in response not to U.S. policy, not to, obviously, the administration, not to the American people. It is in response to a video–a film–that we have judged to be reprehensive and disgusting. That in no way justifies any violent reaction to it. But this is not a case of protests directed at the United States, writ large, or at U.S. policy. This is in response to a video that is offensive and–to Muslims.”
The New York Times had a piece on Friday claiming that President Obama made a “blunt phone call” to his Egyptian counterpart, Mohamed Morsi and got results: “Egyptian leaders scrambled Thursday to try to repair the country’s alliance with Washington, tacitly acknowledging that they erred in their response to the attack on the United States Embassy by seeking to first appease anti-American domestic opinion without offering a robust condemnation of the violence.”
Wait a minute, “anti-American domestic opinion”? We thought they just didn’t like the movie. The riots are in Egypt, but Jay Carney seems to be in denial.
Reuters reports that Morsi’s account of the conversation with Obama is quite different from the White House’s, as reported by the Times: “On Thursday, [Morsi] said he asked U.S. President Barack Obama to act against those seeking to harm relations. His cabinet said Washington was not to blame for the film but urged the United States to take legal action against those insulting religion.”
Egypt is demanding that Obama violate the American Constitution by prosecuting speech that is protected under the First Amendment. That fact is left out of the Times puff piece, which mentions only that Morsi “brought up” the film and Obama “said he understood the ire felt by Muslims.” If Obama had said “no” to Morsi’s outrageous demand, surely that would have made it into a Times account designed to convey his firm leadership.
“Scholars say the furor [in Cairo] reflects different traditions when it comes to religious rights and freedoms,” the Times piece asserts. “Where Americans prize individual choice, Egyptians put a greater emphasis on the rights of communities, families and religious groups.”
That’s a laughably anodyne way of describing the distinction between freedom and Islamic supremacism, but one begins to suspect that the administration shares the Times’s mindset: We have our values, they have theirs, and surely everyone can find common ground in deploring this awful video.
But even accepting that formulation, Americans are entitled to ask why our government has failed to take a clear stand on behalf of our values and our basic law. Perhaps the thinking is that a meliorative tone will have a meliorative effect. That certainly seems to have been the impulse behind the U.S. Embassy’s initial statement, now down the memory hole but quoted here Wednesday, sympathizing with the mob that later stormed the grounds. Although the administration has disavowed that particular statement, every public pronouncement from the White House and State Department, including Carney’s today, has been in the same spirit.
To our ear, it sounds pusillanimous rather than prudent. The “Arab street” seems to be hearing it the same way. Reuters reports that in Cairo, “hundreds of protesters gathered in streets near the mission, pelting police with stones and petrol bombs as they were pushed back from the embassy perimeter. . . . Thousands of people joined peaceful protests after Friday prayers in Tahrir and outside mosques in Cairo and other cities, responding to a call by the Muslim Brotherhood, the group that propelled President Mohamed Mursi [same guy, different transliteration] to power.” That was the day after Obama supposedly dressed Morsi down.
The Times website reports that “the violently anti-American rallies”–no, no, no, no, no, they’re only about the movie!–“expanded on Friday to more than a dozen countries, with demonstrators storming the American Embassy in Tunisia in a deadly clash and protesters in Sudan’s capital broadening the targets to include Germany and Britain.” In Yemen, they broke into the U.S. Embassy on Thursday; in Lebanon they torched a KFC. Apparently there are no Chick-fil-As in that part of the world.
The Weekly Standard picks up the news from a CNN reporter’s Twitter feed that “a mob has gathered and burned the American flag” at the U.S. Embassy in London. They also burned an Israeli flag. All because they don’t like a movie, to hear Jay Carney tell it. It’s Islam’s answer to Siskel and Ebert: instead of two thumbs down, two flags charred.
Our colleague Anne Jolis phoned Anjem Choudary, who organized the London protest, and he makes quite clear that Carney has it wrong: “In Islam, you could ban it,” he tells her, referring to the film. “How come Americans can’t? They still proclaim ‘freedom of expression’–but if Americans can believe in freedom of expression, which involves harming other people, insulting their prophets, then what’s wrong with Muslims having freedom of action, doing what they did in Libya and Egypt?”
The Obama administration’s response to the crisis has been not only fatuous but confused. The other day, as ABC News reports, a Telemundo reporter asked the president if he considers Egypt an ally. His reply: “You know, I don’t think that we would consider them an ally but we don’t consider them an enemy.” In fact, since 1989 Egypt (along with Australia, Israel, Japan and South Korea, and later other countries) has been formally classified as a “major non-NATO ally.”
The Times describes this as the president’s having “signaled his displeasure” with the Egyptian government’s lack of support. It sounds to us more like the careless musing of someone who is not a seasoned foreign-policy hand.
Indeed, it reminds us of this statement:
You want a fight, President Bush? Let’s fight to make sure our so-called allies in the Middle East, the Saudis and the Egyptians, stop oppressing their own people, and suppressing dissent, and tolerating corruption and inequality, and mismanaging their economies so that their youth grow up without education, without prospects, without hope, the ready recruits of terrorist cells.
That was Barack Obama in October 2002. …..
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