Think Locally, Act Globally

Here's something challenging I have been thinking about, vis-a-vis "the movie."

After tracking down information about the Egyptian TV broadcast that first widely disseminated the movie I was surprised to find that it focused more on the makers being Coptic Christians then on it being made in America.

The initial makers of the movie (as opposed to Terry Jones or Media for Christ) are speaking from the perspective of a persecuted minority—Egyptian Coptic Christians—lashing out at the Muslim majority. (The last time some Coptics had a protest march the Egyptian government shot 28 of them.) That perspective is then co-opted by both American Christian extremists and Muslim extremists throughout the Arabic speaking world.

(Ex-pats are always getting into shit because their narrow intrests are often useful to bigger forces, and visa versa. The enemy of my enemy...)

From our perspective the minority Copt expats are read, somewhat implausibly, as imperialists because they have Christianity and bitter feelings toward Islam in common with radical American (majoritarian) Christians that are our adversaries, and that is our lens.

I was expecting, "Look what powerful America is doing to our prophet." But the broadcaster, Egyptian Salafi TV Host Sheik Khaled Abdallah is an influential paranoid who's focus is what's wrong with Egypt, which he sees as beset by infiltration, and whose reputation is as a chief anti-Coptic media figure. (He's anti-everyone, of course, but Copts are a favorite target.) So his primary lens on the movie is resentment of an Egyptian religious minority (smaller in % than African-Americans in the USA) as a malignant and undermining force within Egypt. Here is what all those Coptics think. Here is how Coptics undermine our Egyptian values.

As with much anti-minority scapegoating, the persecuted minority is seen as more powerful than the majority. (Like Jews in Germany who were said to be controlling all of German culture.) The broadcaster here (a Salafi Muslim) says things like that the head of the Coptics in Egypt can get anyone out of prison with a phone call to the prime minister. The delusional belief that Egyptian Christians secretly wield great power in Egypt is reminiscent of Bachman's belief that Muslim will impose Sharia law in the USA. It seems delusional to attribute such power to a persecuted minority, but it is historically typical.

After being broadcast on an Egyptian network that reaches Arabic speakers far beyond Egypt, the movie was then picked up by radicals throughout the Arab world whose primary focus is the USA vs. Islam in broad terms..

The initial Embassy protest in Cairo was a smorgasbord of differing narrow interests. While one guy scaled the face of the building to scrawl "Ben Laden" across the embassy sing, another guy had a home-made sign demanding that all Coptics be deported from Egypt... and odd demand to make at a US embassy protest, when you think it through.

Everyone imposes their assumptions. To us, the film is really about Terry Jones, not about Egyptian expat Coptics. Terry Jones is our enemy. To al-Qaida the film is about religious imperialism because that is their lens. To the Egyptian who started the publicity the film is about why "we" are right to oppress an internal minority group.

I don't have a huge theory here... I just got interested in the development of the whole thing and have been taking in a lot of information from the perspectives of the various players.

Here's a large batch of stray information about all these angles, offered primarily because having dug through a bunch of stuff I figured I might as well share. http://www.democraticunderground.com/10021354473