There was a tragedy yesterday.

[akitrom]

Paragraph 1: A while ago, somebody made a short film called "The Innocence of Muslims". By all accounts, it doesn't portray the prophet Mohammed in a flattering light. The producer is supposed to be an Israeli Jew living in California, but that identity appears to be a hoax. I don't know who made the film. According to some news reports, it had

Comments

[angry_scotsman]

One cannot expect tolerance from ignorant zealots. That being said, it was not the collective whole of people of Egypt or Libya that attacked the consulates, it was a small subset of petty, ignorant zealots and the opportunists who manipulate them.

[dwer]

This. In addition, there was only one purpose for that film, and it was to get this reaction. That doesn't excuse anyone of anything, but people do have reasons for stuff they do, even if they're bad reasons.

[mairegirl]

While I agree with the position of not rioting because of a movie, It is not a grown-up thing it is western 21st century thing. There was a comment on the World radio commentary about how many people in Egypt and Libya can't understand that a movie could be made with our government's approval.

[cassielsander]

Yeah that; people in a lot of countries believe in government conspiracies behind everything because that is the situation in which they have always lived.

That aside, I have no problem with our government expressing disapproval of a film (or for that matter behavior such as burning the American flag) as long as they make it clear that at the same time these things are expressions of free speech and that in a free society you have to put up with people saying things you disagree with.

And no country or people has learned the lesson of tolerating minority opinion without a struggle. We had to learn that it through trial by error in the 1790s (even though we'd theoretically already secured it in the 1st Amendment), while France was learning approximately the same thing far more bloodily.

(Good discussion, akitrom, thanks for the post.)

[cassielsander]

None of this is to say they don't need to grow up, just that it doesn't pay to be superior about it or to expect it to happen all at once.

(Which I've noticed as an increasing problem in the literal grow-up situation; maybe it's just getting older but it seems like I run into more and more people who talk about how teenagers today are horrible because they don't know stuff, have bad grammar, follow fads, are impractical and otherwise are acting like teenagers.)

[walrusjester]

As an ex-reporter, I'd have done two stories. Both paragraph 4 and paragraph 5 are newsworthy. You'd lead with the para4 story, since it's the most important and most tragic. But you'd also bring up para5, since it's a major party's presidential candidate lying.

The wife and I were kicking the question of culpability around last night. If someone does a Bad Thing (like murder an ambassador), we agreed that it's the *fault* of the thing-doer; it gets tricky when you try to determine *responsibility* for that thing. Was the movie-maker responsible for any of this? I'm not sure, although it feels like it.

Was he a jackass? Certainly.