World press on anti-American protests in the Middle East (September 14-17, 2012)

"Anti-American Protests Flare Beyond the Mideast" is an article
published by the New York Times on September 14. "Anti-American rage
that began this week over a video insult to Islam spread to nearly 20
countries across the Middle East and beyond on Friday, with violent
and sometimes deadly protests that convulsed the birthplaces of the
Arab Spring revolutions, breached two more United States Embassies and
targeted diplomatic properties of Germany and Britain," the beginning
of the article reads. "The anger stretched from North Africa to South
Asia and Indonesia and in some cases was surprisingly destructive. In
Tunis, an American-run school that was untouched during the revolution
nearly two years ago was completely ransacked. In eastern Afghanistan,
protesters burned an effigy of President Obama, who had made an
outreach to Muslims a thematic pillar of his first year in office. The
State Department confirmed that protesters had penetrated the
perimeters of the American Embassies in the Tunisian and Sudanese
capitals, and said that 65 embassies or consulates around the world
had issued emergency messages about threats of violence, and that
those facilities in Islamic countries were curtailing diplomatic
activity. The Pentagon said it sent Marines to protect embassies in
Yemen and Sudan," the article reports.
The same day the Washington Post published an article headlined
"Anti-U.S. protests spread through Muslim world." The author of the
article stated that the protesters' "violence appeared to overwhelm

whatever goodwill was built up during the Arab Spring, when the United
States tried to support many countries’ efforts toward democracy and
freedom. On Friday, it was the freedom to target American-linked
buildings that most defined the day, as many governments appeared to
be taken by surprise at the strength of the protests."
On September 17, the Washington Post published a new article entitled
"U.S. outposts still face threat in Muslim world." "After days of
anti-American turmoil in the Muslim world, governments on Sunday
looked ahead to a week of trying to make an uneasy accommodation
between the anger of their citizens and their desire to convince the
United States of their goodwill. But U.S. diplomatic outposts remained
under threat. In Pakistan, at least one protester was killed and 18
were injured on Sunday as hundreds of people broke through a barricade in

a march to the U.S. Consulate in Karachi, and thousands more rallied
in Lahore, where American flags were burned, the Associated Press
reported," the article reads. The author of the article believes that
"Tunisia’s 2011 protests set the rest of the Arab world afire — and
led, in the end, to newfound freedoms for many citizens to express
their distaste for their own governments and for the United States.
Leaders have struggled ever since to accommodate those anti-American
sentiments." The protests might change economic relations between the
countries of the region and the US, the author of the article
believes: "American support comes in many forms in the region, ranging
from diplomatic relations to aid to investment. Its future is being
newly evaluated."
On the same day the New York Times published an article "Cultural Clash
Fuels Muslims Raging at Film", which attempted to show a more weighted
opinion on what is happening in the Arab countries, as opposed to a

more informational article which the newspaper published on September
14. Echoing with the article published the same day in the Washington
Post, the text recognized that "the source of the rage was more than
just religious sensitivity, political demagogy or resentment of
Washington, protesters and their sympathizers here said. It was also a
demand that many of them described with the word “freedom,” although
in a context very different from the term’s use in the individualistic
West: the right of a community, whether Muslim, Christian or Jewish,
to be free from grave insult to its identity and values… Others said
that the outpouring of outrage against the video had built up over a
long period of perceived denigrations of Muslims and their faith by
the United States or its military, which are detailed extensively in
the Arab news media: the invasion of Iraq on a discredited pretext;
the images of abuse from the Abu Ghraib prison; the burning or
desecrations of the Koran by troops in Afghanistan and a pastor in
Florida; detentions without trial at Guantánamo Bay; the denials of
visas to prominent Muslim intellectuals; the deaths of Muslim
civilians as collateral damage in drone strikes; even political
campaigns against the specter of Islamic law inside the United
States."