Americans are messed up with privilege. There is no other way to begin this. This is the initial thought I conjured as I rattle through my pop culture-bred membrane as we discover detail after detail of the production of “Innocence of Muslims,” a film that has incited riots and a U.S. embassy attack which left an ambassador dead and three others wounded.
Our privilege is hemorrhaging, and we effectively Kanye shrug in the other direction while people die in the name of “free” speech. (The quotations are present because it is obvious that premiums are paid upon “freedom.”)
As the details unravel themselves, the classic case of religious duality rises from the ashes of the phoenix for many of us. As far as I am concerned, I tend to find issue in the hypocrisy of those who practice religion for personal or political gain, but never the principles of religion itself. In your case, this overdubbed, underdeveloped façade is the exact breed of hateful excrement that makes me embarrassed to my core. True enough, one thing America can never take from you (for more than one reason) is that beautiful, paradoxical free speech. God forbid we refuse to allow your low-budget blasphemy to serve no real purpose or critique to any debate in anything. God forbid that Google swipes the link and every copycat following. God forbid you deface someone else’s God.
Actually, yes. Forbid the last part.
I honestly wonder how close to God’s cheat code you thought you were. How “revolutionary” or “avant garde” you felt in doing this bidding. Having the prophet Mohammed, played by a white guy, gettin’ some head in the desert must have some sort of artistic merit. It’s not like extremists aren’t scouring for reasons to proliferate hatred or anything. I’m sure you have heard several hundred variations of rhetorical questions by the time this hits press, so I shall spare you the ounces of creativity.
But then it hit me like a meme on my timeline… Does America ever react so vehemently over art? Better yet, does that even matter here?
This film, in the sense of American release, would receive harsh condemnation from the Muslim community as well as a large majority of other groups that are, dare I say, conscious of politically correct representations. There will be armchair activism and passive-aggressive tweets, but would much come of it? No. I don’t see murderous riots or burning effigies in this scenery. We shrug it off as piss-poor satire by an artistic failure, but the discussion would become archaic within the next 24-hour news cycle.
But with this film serving as a minimal catalyst in the grand scheme of these recent attacks rooted in anti-American sentiment, I then began to ponder whether or not I was justified in said assumption. If you get Americans angry enough about something, bloodshed is a possibility. The Onion proved me correct: in response to this, they published a drawing on Sept. 13 with the caption “No One Murdered Because Of This Image.” Do you know what it was? It was, to quote directly, “the Hebrew prophet Moses high-fiving Jesus Christ as both are having their erect penises vigorously masturbated by Ganesha, all while the Hindu deity anally penetrates Buddha with his fist.”
And, like expected, no one did a thing. Yet. (Right?)
I tweeted it around 2 a.m. One of my friends called it ridiculous and then presumably went to sleep. I showed multiple people around me the image, they shrugged with slight giggles and continued onward with the rest of the day. It has been “liked” over 155,000 times on Facebook. And not a single shot was fired in the name of animated blasphemy. Are we simply accustomed to let issues like this glide across our conscience because we’ve heard a million and one Jesus satires and Family Guy jokes? Not caring comes easy to us.
The same cannot be assumed for the rest of the world. The way you manipulated scripting, cast, crew and funding to accomplish this glistening disgrace justifies the non-negotiable hatred sent our way on a normal basis. This is pure Islamophobic hate speech under the rouge of Hollywood that accomplishes nothing. Better yet, the way our media shucks and jives past these realities as if it isn’t our problem and does absolutely nothing to absolve the problem, in a sense, proves their hatred unjustified.
Don’t take this the wrong way. No one deserved to die over this. This does not justify any injustice here or abroad. Yet the perpetual wheel on the playground spins where people with horrible senses of morality utilize their religious beliefs in a political advancement to provoke a response, any response, from “the enemy.” Whoever “the enemy” may be in this instance. An intolerant filmmaker, that’s what I don’t like.
It’s saddening how this is playing out. The world will forget by next week. An ambassador is still dead. And you will probably fraud another bank in that amount of time. I just hope you one day come to grips with the monster you’ve breastfed through your ignorance.
Tweet @dailycardinal.
