International schools are beautiful on a superficial level. A teacher profoundly described mine in Switzerland as a “highly privileged facet of humanity”. One of our ‘sister’ schools was in Tunisia; a nation unlike others in and around the Arabian Peninsula in that it actually held democratic elections while emerging from the dust cloud of the Arab Spring. Yet there was very little beauty here.
In September 2012, extremist Islamic rioters led an attack on the US embassy opposite the school and on the school itself, filling the former with bullet-holes and burning the latter to the ground. The widely reported cause of the attack was the release of a film: Innocence of Muslims.
The release of the film in 2012 brought death threats upon the cast and crew, and was deemed to have incited yet more ultraconservative Muslim rioting. Cue the broken record of stereotype: ‘impulsive, dogmatic, religious’. What we seem to forget is that (unexercised) death threats are thrown around in frustration all the time by the most hapless of keyboard warriors, no matter their religious persuasion. The echo chamber that is today’s media landscape associates those particular threats with the violence that follows, thus making the film appear responsible. Replace ‘film’ with ‘cartoon’ in the previous sentence and you’re left with the same process of rationalisation that was assigned to the 2015 Charlie Hebdo shooting – not much has changed.
The hardest but most vital question in journalism is ‘why’. Rationale provides readers with closure; it leaves them full. Yet sometimes as readers all we really get is fast food – food with no desirable nutrition, not real information. The question of ‘why’ is answered by ascribing to it a particular scapegoat; something that echoes what the reader already thinks. It faces no cognitive opposition, so they gobble it up. Like a greasy six-pack of chicken nuggets.
I won’t deny the potential power of cinema. But political protest will never erupt simply from the release of a film. An entire historical narrative of social and political upheaval, intermingled with the frustrations faced by fundamentalist Islam cannot instead be expressed as ‘they got angry about a film’. On this day in 2014, the actors starring in the film brought YouTube to court and asked them to remove it. The fi lm is not only a culturally misrepresentative 14-minute piece of Islamophobic propaganda, but an awfully produced piece of ‘cinema’. Yet it did not start a riot; it was a drop in the ocean. We must give even those who burn down a school more credit.
