Jew World Order

Also taking a battering are hopes that the democratic processes unleashed by
the Arab Spring might mean that violent, anti-Western feeling was becoming a
thing of the past.

“I don’t have a bad conscience about it, I did not call for violence,”
Mr Abdullah told The Sunday Telegraph yesterday in an interview at
his home in a middle-class Cairo suburb. “It’s not like I made this
film. I only transmitted the news. It is funny that people in the West
imagine that showing only two and a half minutes of the film on my channel
was responsible for this whole crisis.”

Mr Abdullah, 47, whose “New Egypt” talk show started last year,
exemplifies the way the Arab Spring movement of the past 18 months has
unleashed two vocal and diametrically opposed forces within the Muslim
world.

One is that of the “Facebook Generation” who initially led the
protests in the likes of Tahrir Square, who are generally liberal, educated
and secular.

The other is that of conservative, voraciously anti-Western Islamists who were
likewise viciously suppressed by dictators like Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak, and
who are also now exercising their freedom of speech.

Despite Salafis officially advocating an Amish-like disdain for the trappings
of modern life, they are as well-versed in the power of digital media as any
other Arab Spring protesters. And just like the Facebookers, they are adept
at getting their supporters onto the streets – as the mayhem of the past
week has shown.

Yesterday protests over the film continued, with clashes outside US diplomatic
presences not just in the Middle East but right round the globe. In the
Australian city of Sydney, police were pelted with rocks and bottles by
several hundred protesters carrying placards saying: “Behead all those
who insult the Prophet,”.

In Pakistan, crowds burned US flags in the street, and in some 50 countries
worldwide, US embassies were on high alert.

In Cairo, police arrested some 220 people in an overnight crackdown on
protesters outside the US embassy, many of whom had vowed to remain until
President Mohamed Mursi, an Islamist and Egypt’s first freely elected
leader, took a fimer line against the Americans.

“The clashes will continue until President Mursi takes a strong position,”
said protester Ahmed Abdel Gawad, 31. “They aren’t for something
specific, we are trying to be at the embassy to tell the whole world we are
here.”

Yesterday Pope Benedict XVI, on a three-day visit to Lebanon, pleaded for
Muslims and Christians to live in harmony. Meanwhile, President Barack Obama
tried to soothe US anger at the killing of US ambassador Chris Stevens by
saying that the Libyan mob who stormed the Benghazi consulate on Tuesday
were not the same as the crowds who gratefully cheered the West for helping
oust Colonel Gaddafi.

“I know the images on our televisions are disturbing,” Mr Obama said
in his weekly radio and Internet address. “But let us never forget that
for every angry mob, there are millions who yearn for the freedom, and
dignity, and hope that our flag represents.”

As President Obama broadcast his address, residents of Benghazi reported
hearing US drones flying over the skies of the city, raising expectations
that Washington may launch military strikes against camps run by Ansar
al-Sharia, the Salafi militia widely blamed for the embassy attack.

The Libyan authorities arrested a further 12 suspects yesterday, on top of
four taken into custody the day before, but the ability of its fledgling
post-Gaddafi government to deal with such threats has already been cast into
doubt by the incident itself.

Not only did Libyan security forces fail to protect the embassy staff during
the assault on Tuesday, they are also under criticism for not disarming
Ansar al-Sharia in the first place, despite it being suspected of other
attacks on foreign embassy staff and the desecration of holy shrines and
British war cemeteries.

Like many other Libyan militias that sprung up during last year’s anti-Gaddafi
revolution, it still operates openly in Benghazi, driving around in convoys
of trucks mounted with machine guns.

“The new Libyan govt has not tried to take their weapons off them because
if you do that with one brigade, then all the other brigades fear they will
do the same thing,” said Shamsiddin Ben Ali, a former member of Libya’s
transitional national council who knew Mr Stevens personally.

“It is a shame because the Salafists have only minimal support here in
Libya, and they could easily be disarmed by any well-trained brigade. They
are completely misguided, with an ideology that is completely alien to
Libyans – they want to stop women driving or wearing make up, and for men
and women to be educated separately.

Benghazi has been improving greatly in the past year, with very little trouble
other than from these kind of extremists. The sooner they are arrested the
better.”

Mr Obama thinks likewise. In a Rose Garden statement the morning after the
attack, he vowed that those responsible would be brought to justice, despite
the difficulty of identifying specific perpetrators in what was a night-time
mob assault.

No American president can allow a US ambassor to die in such circumstances
without being seen to respond in tough fashion – especially just two months
before an election.

But that also plays into the militants’ hands. The US warships now off Libya’s
coast, the drones in the sky above, and the despatching of a team of 50 US
marines on the ground can all be used to create the impression of US
military interference in Muslim lands once more.

That is something the White House had hoped would soon be almost finished with
the wind-down of troops from Afghanistan.

Last night, grim further details emerged of Mr Stevens final hours, during
which he appears to have got separated from his bodyguards and taken refuge
in a secure room in the diplomatic compound, protected by a locked iron gate
and wooden door.

What should have been a protective citidel then became a death-trap, with Mr
Stevens apparently unable to escape the smoke that then engulfed the room.
He was found later, asphyxiated, by a group – possibly looters – who broke
into the room through a window, the New York Times reported.

US officials are also said to be investigating reports that on the day of the
embassy assault, militants from Ansar al-Sharia were in discussions with
members of al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, the Saharan franchise of the
global terror movement.

Until now, it has not really made its presence known in Libya. “The way
AQIM has been discussing this strongly suggests they were involved in the
plotting,” one former US official told the Wall Street Journal.

Mr Abdullah, the Egyptian broadcaster, lays the blame for the violence on
Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, the California-based Egyptian Coptic Christian who
apparently made the film, and who is now under US police protection at his
suburban home in Los Angeles for fear of reprisals.

A convicted bank fraudster, Mr Nakoula was driven to a nearby sheriff’s
station yesterday on suspicion of violating the terms of his parole, wearing
a scarf, hat and sunglasses to hide his identity.

Whether he will ever be able to show his face in public again is another
matter, as is the question of whether further attacks may take place.
Yesterday, the Yemen-based al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula and the
Somali-based al-Shabaab movement both urged Muslims to carry out attacks on
both foreign embassies and on targets in the West.

“The unprovoked attacks against Prophet Mohammed are not initiated by
media houses and movie makers, but are clear instructions by Western
governments,” said a Shabaab spokesman in the Somali capital,
Mogadishu.

Rather more conciliatory was Abdullahi Sheikh Osman, a respected spiritual
leader in the city, who came to talk at a demonstration against the film. “”The
man who made the nasty film is the al-Qaeda of Christians,” he said. “If
Muslims make havoc, then they are rewarding the crazy man.”

Additional reporting by Richard Spencer in Cairo and Ruth Sherlock in Beirut