Embassy protests - Middle East

[DubaiSis]

They do make me nervous. And while I'm itchy about all dogmatic religions, it bugs me when people completely misinterpret Islam. It is, on its face, very similar to pre-Vatican II Catholicism. So this kind of press starts bringing out the crazies who start blaming Muslims for everything that is wrong in the world.
A good explanation I like about Islam is this: it is 600 years younger than Christianity. Compare Islam now to the Christianity of 600 years ago, and they are further ahead in terms of women's rights, human rights and general nuttiness. Does that let them off the hook for the anti-feminist stuff they do now? Of course not. But through that filter at least it makes a certain amount of sense.

And you've never met a culture as fully absorbed in conspiracy theory as the Arabs. We know that this video, that was released only on the web as far as I can tell, has nothing to do with the American government or the vast majority of the American people. But a lot of people in Libya and Egypt could easily be talked into believing that's a likely story. Not understanding what freedom of the press really means, they wouldn't believe that the government didn't have any level of oversight.

What I would like people to do is just turn off the TV. You're getting very skewed information (the "huge" crowd of American supporters appeared to me to be about 20 people, and the "huge" crowd in Egypt was bigger than that, but by no means a Cairo-sized demonstration), and unless you have a direct reason to care, all you're going to get is frustrated from misleading information. And the next thing I'd like you to do is travel the world. It will change how you view all of these incidents and will give you a lot more sympathy for people who live differently from you.