The wave of anger in North Africa and the Middle East over the anti-Islam video "Innocence of Muslims" underscores several troubling similarities between anti-Americanism in Russia and the Muslim world. Injured pride is at the top of the list.
Prominent journalist Maxim Shevchenko has suggested that the administration of U.S. President Barack Obama may have stood behind the production of "Innocence of Muslims." Shevchenko, who made his remarks on Sept. 13 on Ekho Moskvy radio, isn't alone in embracing this conspiracy theory, which has been circulated in the Russian blogosphere. The motive behind provoking the Muslim world with the video, Shevchenko reasoned, was to boost Obama's popularity two months away from the U.S. presidential election by creating a major crisis, much like the 9/11 attacks initially consolidated Americans around President George W. Bush and increased his ratings. This, Shevchenko said, may explain why there was so little security protecting the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya, and why the ambassador and three other Americans ended up dead.
Russians' fondness for conspiracy theories is exceeded perhaps only by Muslims'. In Egypt, for example, 75 percent of Muslims believe U.S. authorities carried out the 9/11 attacks, according to a 2011 Pew poll. In Russia, the figure is 16 percent, according to a 2008 Levada poll, with 20 percent having difficulty answering.
Al-Nas, a Salafist pan-Arab television station based in Cairo, translated the video several days before the 9/11 anniversary and distributed it in Egypt and other Muslim countries. The Arabic version then went viral in days, with 10 million Muslims watching it, which led to violent protests at U.S. embassies and consulates in more than a dozen cities around the globe.
The political goal of the Salafist fundamentalists — presumably with a silent nod, or even the active participation, of Egypt's ruling Muslim Brotherhood — was clear: to mobilize angry, poor Muslims against a time-honored foreign enemy, the United States, to deflect attention from the region's domestic problems.
The Muslim world's steady 300-year decline has arguably played an important role in shaping its worldview and, specifically, anti-Americanism. Of course, Russia's decline from its superpower status is more recent and less severe but hardly less painful.
Still, Russia should take a lesson from Britain on how to recover gracefully from lost-superpower status. Much of Russia is, indeed, stuck in the nostalgia of the past — in an overglorified version of Soviet power and influence.
The past is a bad place to be. There is no future in it.
Read more: Islamic Fundamentalists in the Kremlin | Opinion | The Moscow Times
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