September 18, 2012

U.S. embassies and military bases in majority Muslim countries around the Middle East and North Africa have been the site of violent protests over a racist film, produced in the U.S. and distributed in various forms on the Internet, that slanders Islam.

The U.S. media reaction to the demonstrations--which claimed the lives of four U.S. diplomats in the Libyan city of Benghazi and which led to bloody clashes with police in other cities and countries--has been to depict protesters as "anti-American" fanatics bent on bloodshed and destruction.

There has been little coverage of the fact that the racist film, called Innocence of Muslims, is the product of a shadowy right-wing network of U.S. Islamophobes who want to stoke more hate. And there has been almost no discussion of the context for these protests--decades of U.S. imperialist intervention in the Muslim region. In reality, the film has become a symbol of the contempt with which the U.S. government holds the people of the Middle East and North Africa.

Many of the protests have been supported and organized by Islamist forces in Libya, Egypt, Tunisia and elsewhere--including parties that are represented in various ways in the new governments that followed the fall of dictators during the uprisings of the Arab Spring. These Islamist forces are associated with the revolts for democracy over the past year and a half, but they have also taken very conservative positions in different national circumstances.

In this statement, the Revolutionary Socialists of Egypt look at the protests over the racist film--and what it will take to confront U.S. imperialism in the Middle East and North Africa.