From what I heard on the radio yesterday and today, there IS some suggestion that these attacks were planned in advance for the anniversary of 9/11 and the video was a coincidence.
That said, what the interviewer talking to people on the street suggested was that most of the locals believed it was retaliation for the video (and indeed didn't understand why the US government wouldn't take the video down).
One way or another, yeah, I think we can all agree that the video may be an excuse but it's not the real cause.
The NPR correspondent in Benghazi was suggesting that Stevens was a really popular guy there and the public as a whole is pretty outraged. I'm still worried the killers could get away without being identified, but if that's true then they're going to have a much harder time keeping their heads down.
EDIT: MEANWHILE: McCain is blaming it on Obama for pulling out of Iraq.
Really.EDIT 2: The New Yorker has a good piece called
What Was Really Behind the Benghazi Attack?, which persuasively argues that this is a relevant question even as people are jumping all over the "it was a YouTube video" explanation. It bolsters the "it was an excuse" point:
And these far right groups that feign religious and moral outrage are being very deliberate in their progress. They have turned a blind eye to what can be argued are conservative Libyans’ more traditional concerns. They have said nothing, for example, about the widespread consumption of drugs and alcohol among Libya’s youth, about the young men who fill Tripoli’s costal cafes late into the night, descending into hopeless states of intoxication before every weekend. This is not an oversight but intentional. Infringing on the freedoms and fun of young people would provoke too much anger and, more crucially, lose the extreme right the support of their main target audience: young men. Like Benito Mussolini’s Milan fascio in nineteen-twenties Italy, Libya’s far right also knows that it cannot rule through violence and fear if it does not have the young and strong on its side.
So instead they have focussed on easy targets: architecture, women, and, now, America, or, more abstractly, the West. They demolished landmarks, claiming them to be unreligious; demanded that women be banned from cafés; and now, because of a film almost no one has seen, they have attacked symbols of the American state. But perhaps this latest assault is their most cunning. Not only because it involved the loss of four innocent lives, but also because it is trying cynically to capitalize on legitimate grievances.
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Topic: Don't you know there's a war on? (Read 68788 times)