Robin Wright says Chris Stevens “was less an advocate of U.S influence than of U.S. enabling” and “would almost certainly have urged his bosses to hold off on extraterritorial intervention” in Libya:<\/p>\n
The cause of the death of the US Ambassador to Libya, Chris Stevens, remains controversial. While the US and the UN now claim it was the result of \u00c2\u00a0a spontaneous attack, Libya’s parliament chief\u00c2\u00a0blamed the attack on “a few foreign extremists who he said entered Libya from Mali and Algeria and pre-planned it with local affiliates and sympathizers”:<\/p>\n
Even in safer areas where schools were open, classrooms sat empty and teachers signed into work solely as a formality:<\/p>\n
A Human Rights Watch researcher fears that the backlash against the Islamophobic American film “The Innocence of Muslims” “could bolster a preexisting effort to insert a clause banning religious insults into Egypt\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s new constitution”:<\/p>\n
Appeals such as Youssef al-Qaradawi’s\u00c2\u00a0call that the “manner of protesting should reflect sense and reason …\u00c2\u00a0while frequent from many Islamic leaders and scholars in the past week \u00e2\u20ac\u201d have competed against opposing calls” from “[p]olitical factions and hardline clerics” seeking “to capitalize as after other perceived offenses against the faith”:<\/p>\n
“Surely if the sentence of the Imam (Khomeini) [against Salman Rushdie] had been carried out, the later insults in the form of caricatures, articles and the making of movies would not have occurred,” is the dubious claims from a representative Khamenei: that overlooks the damage the rescinded threat has done to the Muslim world:<\/p>\n
“American Muslims are a wasted asset. Probably more than most they understand and appreciate the value of free speech and the [F]irst [A]mendment and could play a crucial role in acting like a bridge between America and … the Islamic world provided that they feel genuinely included in the political discourse and be treated with respect”:<\/p>\n