General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: What ABOUT that anti-Muslim video that supposedly triggered the murders in Benghazi? [View all]Igel
(35,337 posts)There was a protest that day. Hours later, late evening, a group that knew where a safehouse was, what staffing levels were, and had planned and organized this attack. Coincidentally, on 9/11.
The planning almost certainly didn't take a day or two. It took a bit more, if only because of the information that was needed. It's connected to the video protests only because it occurred shortly after the protests. "Post hoc" reasoning, in other words.
Nobody in the CIA/FBI claims that the (R) dismissing of the video as the cause of the attack is false. They also say they're causally unrelated.
The low-budget video was funded by Copts and intended to dissuade Muslims in the US from being Muslims. Months after it flopped in the US somebody finally got around to dubbing it into Arabic so that it could be imported to majority-Muslim countries. It was posted on Youtube and got scant traffic. So a few days later the makers tried to bring it to the attention of a Coptic newspaper in Egypt to get some free press. It was ignored for a day or two, then the Coptic newspaper, contacted and pressured by the makers of the film, printed a small article about it. After all, there's probably not just a great deal of Copt-oriented news emanating from the US. But that little article got no press at first.
This is pretty much parallel to the Danish cartoon mess in some respects. The Danish cartoons had been printed in an Egyptian newspaper months before they became a BFD. Nobody cared. It took a group of imams making sure that Islamists were properly offended to organize the grass-roots protests against portraying Islam and its prophet/adherents as violent by rioting and maiming. Irony is not apparently a Middle-Eastern literary device.
A few days after the Coptic newspaper printed their little blurb about the movie an Islamist-oriented newspaper that monitors the Coptic press made a bigger deal out of it. From there it spread through Islamist sources until everybody who wants to be pissed at uppity Xians was pissed and spontaneous grassroots protests were organized by imams and other groups, complete with the distribution of spontaneous preprinted posters and banners translated into English for the Western press. The delicate sensibilities of the Muslims and hurt their feelings were again offended and their devotion to peace, or at least pacification, again had to be affirmed.
Note that this film was truly low-budget and anything but slick. There are far slicker student productions at 2nd-tier film schools by students after general ed credits. They often hire actors as well. This was cheap because there were few actors, not union scale, and only for a day or two. The sets were in the maker's house or basement. These days you shoot digitally and edit on a home computer.