It's not "the film", stupid! It's just anti-Americanism, is all

With her usual unerring aim, Margaret Wente hits the nail squarely on the head in "It's too easy to lay all the blame on a crude video", in today's Globe and Mail. She exposes the Democratic party line, as expressed on Sunday by Susan Rice (US ambassador to the Disunited Nations) that "what sparked the recent violence was the airing on the Internet of a very hateful, very offensive video that has offended many people around the world".

Ms Rice's characterization of the video is quite correct, but, as anyone who's seen even a snippet of it realizes, "Innocence of Muslims" is no big deal. It looks and sounds like a Grade 8 school play, and in no way deserves to be taken as seriously as would appear from the ferocity of the demonstrations against it.

But -- and this is Ms Wente's point -- the near-riots in the streets of cities throughout the Muslim world are not against the film so much as against America itself. She writes, "The line...that the protests were directed against the video, not the U.S. ...might come as a surprise to the folks who were burning American flags and chanting, 'Obama, Obama, we love Osama.'"

The Muslims hate America. That has been the case for decades, long before American soldiers burnt copies of the Qu'ran, long before they pissed on dead Afghan prisoners and long before this stupid little film appeared on YouTube. "Innocence of Muslims" is just this week's catalyst for a deep and longlasting hatred of America's culture, America's religion [Wozzat? Ed.] and America's version of democracy.

Ms Wente reminds us that Al O'Bama -- a Muslim sympathizer if not a Muslim himself -- was supposed to fix all that.

Back in 2009, President Barack Obama went to Cairo and promised to reset the U.S. relationship with the Arab world. Unlike his predecessor, he sympathized with Muslim aspirations. Muslims were anti-American because of bad American policies, and he would fix that. Things didn’t quite work out as planned. Back then, 70 per cent of Egyptians had an unfavourable opinion of the U.S. Today, 79 per cent do.

What conclusion are we to draw? Too many liberal intellectuals – and now, unbelievably, the U.S. administration – seem to think it’s partly our fault when Western insults to Islam lead to riots in the streets. But maybe there’s a bigger cause. Although it’s deeply unfashionable to say so, maybe what we have here is a clash of civilizations. Indeed.