This week's madness continues undiminished. The United States is withdrawing most of the staff from its embassies in Sudan and Tunisia. It's like a Facebook party gone wrong or, more to the point, a carefully choreographed flash mob. Sheep drunk on aggravation and the energy of the crowd throw their anger at anything in their way. Fire, stones and sticks are hurled to give meaning to apoplectic shouts of honor dignity.
The German embassy in Khartoum was one of the targets yesterday. There wasn't at first any concrete reason for that. Neither the ethnic Egyptian that's responsible for the movie nor youtube, where extracts were posted, nor any of the Arabic TV stations that fanned the flames by showing snippets is German. This wouldn't do, a minor German party with xenophobic inclinations thought and promptly announced that it would show the film in full, in public, in Berlin – and in retrospective vindication of the violence.
From the extract on the web it is hard to see how anyone could possibly want to attend besides – in an endless ping-pong of action and reaction – mortally offended protesters. And this is the crux of it. What plays out on global TV, what keeps analysts and pundits up all night and newspaper circulation high is a tightly orchestrated tug-of-war between clearly defined groups of conflicting interests.
At first I was tempted to see in what's going on the rape of free speech because it came along in a red miniskirt of provocation. But the filmmakers didn't go for an innocent stroll in the park with their idea. They developed and executed it to bring about maximal damage. They didn't want to provoke (an acceptable thing in my rulebook) but incite violence.
It's not that the streets are filled with demonstrators voicing ire and indignation at an acute insult. No, anger and dissatisfaction that have long accumulated are now being stoked and exploited for political gain by outside forces. On both sides are fanatic fringes that would like to enter the political mainstream, either by presenting themselves as immutable defenders of the faith against the onslaught of infidels or as antipoles to senseless violence and rage, precursors to international terrorism no doubt.
The few voices of reason that persist drown in screams of fury and deafening explosions. But that doesn't matter. Like the riots in London last August (where trigger and causes were similarly unrelated), the current violence will peter out soon enough, independent of any external actions once the built-up tension has been worked off. Calm will return – until the next trigger finds the tinderbox of public resentment recharged.
(with apologies for the metaphor overkill)
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