WORLD
More than 100 years ago, Mark Twain said: 'A lie will go round the round the world while truth is pulling its boots on.'
More than 100 years ago, Mark Twain said: "A lie will go round the round the world while truth is pulling its boots on." The world received a chilling 21st-century update of that aphorism last week, as embassies were attacked and an American ambassador killed, sending shock waves ahead of a US presidential election just 51 days away.
At issue was an amateurish, 13-minute series of video clips on YouTube. They prompted protests at US embassies in Egypt and then Libya, where they were used as a pretext by al-Qaeda to launch rocket attacks that killed US ambassador Christopher Stevens and three others.
This foreign policy crisis has drawn attention away from Republican presidential contender Mitt Romney's trump card of the economy and towards one of President Barack Obama's strengths. Polls show voters trust the man who ended the Iraq war and presided over the killing of Osama bin Laden more than the former governor of Massachusetts when it comes to foreign affairs.
But the presidential-level political escalation was comparative child's play. To date, 11 US embassies have been attacked and British, German and Swiss embassies also targeted. American Marines and warships have been dispatched to the region.
It is easy to look at all this and conclude that the Arab Spring was a sham, a moment of hope manipulated by Islamist radicals. But in truth this is a cautionary tale about the power of obscure fanatics to spur violence half a world away.
Initially, it was widely reported that the offending film, Innocence of Muslims was the "$5?million" production of one Sam Bacile, an "Israeli Jew" with some "100 Jewish donors". But it now seems Sam Bacile is a California-based, Egyptian-born, Coptic-Christian con-man named Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, who had previously been convicted on bank-fraud charges and charged with intent to produce methamphetamine.
A non-profit company, Media for Christ, based in Duarte, California, took out the permits to produce the film. Its owner is Joseph Nassralla Abdelmasih, who I saw speak at a rally against the so-called "Ground Zero mosque". The Koran-burning Florida pastor, Terry Jones, was enlisted to promote the film. The actors were apparently unaware of its ideological intent.
And so we are left to wrestle with the question of how to put this genie back in the bottle. When CNN's Ben Wedeman spoke to protesters in Cairo, cameras caught this dispiriting exchange: "It's not possible that President Obama, with all his intelligence agencies, didn't know about this and stop it from coming out in the open," shouted a student named Ashraq. "It's clear, Obama is guilty. Obama is guilty! Obama is guilty!"
Ashraq's screams were consistent with what he saw of life under the Mubarak regime - omnipresent intelligence agencies must have known of the film and approved it. He has no experience of free speech.
Perhaps still more concerning is how extremists can echo one other across our global village. We face the prospect of rabid anti-Islamist activists posting intentionally offensive clips on sites that are then "trolled" by radical Islamists looking to incite violence.
The real geo-political fault line of our times is not Left versus Right, but freedom versus fundamentalism. Those who believe all Muslims are bad or all Muslims are good reflect the same sickness - and the challenge for the rest of us is to present an example of fearless pluralism that makes the haters look definitively on the wrong side of history.
? John Avlon is a senior columnist on Newsweek and The Daily Beast
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