The maelstrom of anti-western violence in the Arab world has little to do with an anti-Islam propaganda film released on YouTube.

It has more to do with decades of perceived western imperialism – and the organisational skills of the Salafis, known for their no-compromise, literal interpretation of the faith.

Such rightwing Islamists were wrongfooted by the Arab spring. For years, the jihadis and Salafis thought they had a monopoly on revolution and were the only viable opposition to the Arab dictators.

When the regimes were threatened by popular uprisings, the Salafis took weeks and months to respond. In Libya they initially called for the demonstrators to support the ruler of the land, Muammar Gaddafi. As it became clear that the revolutions would not instantly deliver the brighter future people had marched for, the Salafis began to use that discontent to their advantage.

They are brilliant at agitating on the streets – working on the unemployed, the frustrated, people who feel life should be better. In Tunis, the Salafi agitation began months before the propaganda film – the Innocence of Muslims – surfaced. They attacked cinemas, secularists and artists. In Bahrain and Syria they worked along sectarian lines, and in Egypt they launched vicious confrontations with the Coptic Christians.

In Libya, the Salafis have been systematically burning Sufi shrines and trashing Christian cemeteries, while the government has felt too weak to confront them. Some of the demonstrations – in Damascus, Khartoum and Tehran – will have been backed by the state.

Anti-western sentiment is rife in the Arab world. Germans, British, Danish – all are deemed guilty for the colonial crimes of the past and present. The US, of course, is perceived as the most arrogant of all, with 50 or more years of perceived bigotry, support for Israel at the expense of the Palestinians, sanctions on Iran and occupation of Iraq.

Barack Obama's Arab honeymoon was squandered by drone attacks on Pakistan and Yemen and his impotence over Israel. As Salman Rushdie wrote recently in the New Yorker about the people who led the fatwa against him: "As for the British Muslim 'leaders', whom, exactly, did they lead? They were leaders without followers, mountebanks trying to make careers out of her brother's misfortune. For a generation, the politics of ethnic minorities in Britain had been secular and socialist. This was the mosques' way of getting religion into the driver's seat."

So it is with the Salafis. Very few of the people setting fire to the German embassy in Khartoum, attacking the American school in Tunis or torching a KFC in Beirut will have even seen the Innocence of Muslims. If the prophet had really been insulted, you would see 100 million in the streets. Instead we only see a few thousand.