US embassies in the Muslim world were on high alert Friday following days of violent protests against an anti-Islam film. Germany, too, closed several embassies in fear of attacks. Some German commentators argue that the violence shows that Obama’s Middle East policies have failed.
David Gordon Smith
With reporting by Hasnain Kazim
Spiegel
9/14/2012
…On Friday, German commentators analyze the violence and its implications for US foreign policy…
The center-right Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitungwrites:
“The murder of an ambassador in Libya and the attacks on US diplomatic missions in other Arab countries is sure to strengthen the skepticism that more than a few Americans feel toward Muslims and the political changes brought by the Arab revolutions. The deeply held American belief that all you have to do is liberate people from serfdom and dictatorship, and then democracy and a market economy will develop more or less on their own, burned to ash in the trial by fire of Iraq. A fact that academics and historically informed diplomats have always known can now be observed throughout the Arab world: Deeply ingrained cultural attitudes do not change simply because one political regime replaces another. In the long process of building a democratic society, it is not possible to simply skip stages.”…
…The conservative Die Welt writes:
“US President Barack Obama’s Middle East policy is in ruins. Like no president before him, he tried to win over the Arab world. After some initial hesitation, he came out clearly on the side of the democratic revolutions. … In this context, he must accept the fact that he has snubbed old close allies such as Israel, Saudi Arabia and the Egyptian military. And now parts of the freed societies are turning against the country which helped bring them into being. Anti-Americanism in the Arab world has even increased to levels greater than in the Bush era. It’s a bitter outcome for Obama.”
“Obama was naive to believe that one only needed to adopt a new tone and show more respect in order to dispel deep-seated reservations about the free world. In practice, the policies of the Obama administration in the region were not as naive as they may have seemed at times, and the Americans have always been much more involved in the Middle East than the passive Europeans. But Washington has provided the image of a distracted superpower in the process of decline to the societies there. This image of weakness is being exploited by Salafists and al-Qaida, who are active in North Africa from Somalia to Mali.”
“One thing is clear: If jihadists believe they can attack American installations and kill an ambassador on the anniversary of Sept. 11, then America’s deterrent power has declined considerably. For a superpower, it is not enough just to want to be loved. You have to scare the bad guys to keep them in check.”…
Read the entire article at Spiegel Online.
Related: At Breitbart’s Big Peace a Google map to help readers remain informed…and offers a stunning visual of the spread of protests.
They say a picture is worth a thousand words. If that’s the case, then the picture painted by the continuously updated Google Map assembled by Atlantic Wire speaks volumes more than the Obama Administration would like voters to hear…
Update: Jay Carney on Unrest in Middle East: ‘This Is Not a Case of Protests Directed at the United States’
White House Press Secretary Jay Carney on Friday insisted that the protests in the Middle East are not “directed at the United States” but are instead the direct result of an anti-Muslim YouTube clip.
“This is a fairly volatile situation, and it is in response not to United States policy, obviously not to the administration, not to the American people. It is in response to a video, a film, that we have judged to be reprehensible and disgusting — that in no way justifies any violent reaction to it.”
Carney went on to repeat this point at least two more times during his daily press briefing with reporters.
“But this is not a case of protests directed at the United States writ large or at U.S. policy, but it is in response to video that is offensive to Muslims,” said Carney…
Right. Because if you keep repeating a lie, eventually it becomes truth, evidently…
