The Obama Administration dispatched Ambassador to the U.N. Susan Rice to the talk shows Sunday to explain the outbreak of anti-American protests in the Arab world. Her message: It's all the fault of that 13-minute anti-Islamic video on YouTube. U.S. policies or foreign terrorists have little or nothing to do with it.

"What sparked the recent violence was the airing on the Internet of a very hateful, very offensive video that has offended many people around the world," said Ms. Rice, a leading candidate to be Secretary of State in a second Obama term, on "Fox News Sunday."

While there is no excuse for violence, she added, "as we've seen in the past with things like 'Satanic Verses,' with the cartoon of the Prophet Muhammad, there have been such things that have sparked outrage and anger, and this has been the proximate cause of what we've seen last week."

This followed White House spokesman Jay Carney's remarks last week that the violent protests were a "response not to United States policy, not to, obviously, the administration, not to the American people" but were "in response to a video, a film, that we have judged to be reprehensible and disgusting."

Mr. Carney all but asked Google to pull the video from its YouTube subsidiary website as inconsistent with its "terms of use," as if an anti-American attack should result in American self-censorship. Google appropriately refused.