Friday, September 14, 2012

The emergency scapegoat


Many people have read over the last couple of days about the making of the "Innocence of Muslims" and the alleged role of 100 Jewish donors in putting up the US$5 million to finance it. So today we were thinking ... hadn't the first news stories we read about this referred to 100 Jewish doctors? That's what Google thinks too, as above. So was it just a mis-spelling of "donors" or was the initial claim of the supposed Sam Bacile that it really was Jewish doctors financing the film? If it was the latter, the cartoonish yet historically laden claim of a Jewish doctors plot to cause unrest would be a further indictment of the motives of this film. Which would be consistent with the notion of the blogger in Los Angeles who first became aware of the film that there was anti-Semitic motivation behind it.

At this stage, it seems safe to say that the conservatives who have adopted the cause of whoever was behind the film are in bed with some fairly strange people, what appears to be an expatriate provocateur element among Egyptian Coptic Christians. They're not doing any favours to their brethren who actually have to live in Egypt.

UPDATE: Interesting account from PBS Media Shift blog of how the entire early accounts of Sam Bacile were dodgy.