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Obscure Film Mocking Muslim Prophet Sparks Anti-U.S. Protests in Egypt and Libya

September 11, 2012, 7:25 pm
By ROBERT MACKEY and LIAM STACK

Video of Egyptian protesters on the walls of the U.S. Embassy in Cairo ripping the American flag apart.

Angered by reports in the Egyptian media that members of the Coptic Christian diaspora in the United States had produced a crude film mocking the Muslim prophet, protesters climbed the walls of the U.S. Embassy in Cairo on Tuesday and tore down the American flag. Later, a Libyan security official told Reuters that armed militiamen had attacked the U.S. consulate in Benghazi to express their rage at a 14-minute trailer for the English-language film which was posted on YouTube in July.

The trailer attracted little att ention until last week, when a version dubbed into Arabic was posted on the same YouTube channel and then copied and viewed tens of thousands of times.

While it remains unclear who produced the film, an Egyptian-American Copt known for his broadsides against Muslims drew attention to it last week in an e-mail newsletter publicizing the latest publicity stunt of the Florida pastor Terry Jones, reviled in the Muslim world for burning copies of the Koran. Reached by telephone in Florida, a representative of Mr. Jones seemed unaware of the film, but hours later the pastor sent The Lede a statement by e-mail in which he complained of the attack on the embassy in Cairo and announced plans to screen the trailer for the film on Tuesday night, saying that it “reveals in a satirical fashion the life of Muhammad.”

The Coptic activist, Morris Sadek, did not respond to a request for an interview, but he is an ally of Mr. Jones and his blog f eatures photographs of the two men at a tiny, anti-Islam protest outside the White House in June. Later, he told The Associated Press that he planned screenings of the film.

Although Mr. Sadek did not claim in his e-mail promoting Mr. Jones to have produced the movie - which dramatizes the life of Muhammad, incorporating scenes based on slurs about him that are often repeated by Islamophobes - three days after he passed around a link to the film's trailer, a Cairo newspaper reported that the leader of an Egyptian political party had “denounced the production of the film with the participation of vengeful Copts, accompanied by the extremist priest Terry Jones.”

The same day, a scene from the film - in which an actor playing a buffoonish caricature of the prophet Muhammad calls a donkey “the first Muslim animal” - was broadcast on the Egyptian television channel Al-Nas by the host Sheikh Khaled Abdalla.

Video of a scene from a film mocking the Muslim prophet as shown on Egyptian television on Sunday.

Last year, the Egyptian-British journalist and blogger Sarah Carr wrote, “Sheikh Khaled Abdalla is part of a school of particularly shrill religious demagogues who turn every possible event into an attack on Islam.” She added that Sheikh Khaled regularly attacked Egypt's Coptic Christian community.

The Egyptian media reports appear to have drawn much more attention to the obscure film trailer, which was posted on YouTube by someone using the name Sam Bacile who failed to respond to a request for comment on Tuesday.

As Menna Alaa reported for The Egypt Independent, photographs and video posted online showed the protesters at the embassy in Cairo on Tuesday ripping the American flag apart and raising a black, jihadist flag with the words, “There is no god but Allah and Muhammad is his messenger.”

The Cairene blogger who writes as Zeinobia repo rted there were “also pro-Al Qaeda chants unfortunately,” which was particularly striking on the 11th anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks in the United States.

Mostafa Hussein, a psychiatrist and blogger, pointed to a photograph that showed that the protesters had also scrawled the name Osama bin Laden on a sign outside the embassy.

In response to the protests, diplomats from the besieged compound said in a statement: “The Embassy of the United States in Cairo condemns the continuing efforts by misguided individuals to hurt the religious feelings of Muslims â€" as we condemn efforts to offend believers of all religions.” Later, the embassy's official Twitter feed condemned both the provocative film and the attack on the compound.

Zeinobia also reported that confusion about the origins of the film was so general that one group of fundamentalist Muslims was “calling for another huge protest at the embassy of Netherlands demanding its closure because the Dutch government is producing an insult film against Islam.” Dutch diplomats responded with a statement denying these claims, she noted.

The Egyptian blogger who writes as The Big Pharaoh noted that one sign wielded by a protester outside the American embassy in Cairo called for “the expulsion of Coptic Diaspora from Egypt.”



After Militant Is Killed, Car Bomb Targets Yemen Minister

September 11, 2012, 4:00 pm
By CHRISTINE HAUSER

Video showing the aftermath of a car bomb attack in Sanaa, Yemen

At least 12 people were killed in a car bombing in the capital of Yemen on Tuesday, in what appeared to be an attack targeting the country's defense minister. The bombing came after a top Al Qaeda leader in Yemen, and six people traveling with him, were killed in what Yemeni officials said was an airstrike by an American drone.

As my colleagues Nasser Arrabyee and Alan Cowell reported, the car bomb exploded alongside a convoy of vehicles used by the minister, Maj. Gen. Mohammed Nasser Ahmed, on a street between the cabinet office and the state radio building in downtown Sana, th e capital. At least seven of the dead were bodyguards and five were civilians. The minister remained unharmed, government and hospital officials said.

In Twitter messages, journalists based in Yemen who quickly arrived at the site of the blast described the carnage.

Adam M. Baron, a freelance reporter in Yemen, wrote about a chaotic scene of casualties, with damaged storefronts and vehicles.

Joe Sheffer, a cameraman and journalist, wrote that clean-up crews scooped human remains into bags, and security forces tried to clear the area of onlookers by firing into the air.

While Yemeni authorities were quoted as saying there had been no immediate claim of responsibility for the car bomb on Tuesday, the killing of Saeed Ali al-Shihri, the second in command for Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, places the timing and target of the blast into context.

Witnesses in the region said Mr. Shihri escaped an initial drone attack and made off into the desert on Monday, but the remotely piloted aircraft tracked him down, Mr. Arrabyee and Mr. Cowell reported.

Two senior American officials confirmed Mr. Shihri's death, The Associated Press reported, but not any involvement in it. Reuters reported there were conflicting versions of his death: that he was killed W ednesday in a drone strike or on Monday in a Yemeni Army operation.

Mr. Shihri spent six years at the American military prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, before being released to Saudi Arabia in 2007 and later making his way to Yemen. As my colleague Robert F. Worth wrote in a story about the complications of his release, American officials suspected his involvement in the 2008 car bombings outside the American Embassy in Sana that killed 16 people, including six attackers.

Reporters raised the possibility that Tuesday's bomb attack was in retaliation for Mr. Shihri's killing and assessed the significance of the two events for Yemen and for Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.

Still, Yemen has not escaped the turmoil behind the protest movements sweeping other Arab countries. The country's president, Abdu Rabbu Mansour Hadi, assumed power in February after its former president, Ali Abdullah Saleh, agreed to step down last November following a year of antigovernment demonstrations calling for his removal.

Katherine Zimmerman, an analyst for the American Enterprise Institute, wrote on her blog that Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula still had room to maneuver in Yemen after Mr. Shihri's death.

The group took advantage of the unrest in Yemen during the Arab Spring to expand its network, and despite territorial advances against AQAP's insurgent arm in the south, its operational network is largely intact.



Qaeda Leader Confirms Death of His Deputy

September 11, 2012, 12:33 pm
By ROBERT MACKEY

Ayman al-Zawahri, Al Qaeda's leader, confirmed the death of his deputy, Abu Yahya al-Libi, in a video message posted on jihadist Internet forums late Monday, The Associated Press reports.

Al Qaeda's leader, Ayman al-Zawahri, confirming the death of his deputy, Abu Yahya al-Libi, in a video message posted online this week.

As my colleagues Declan Walsh and Eric Schmitt reported, American officials said in June that the senior militant had been killed by a Central Intelligence Agency drone strike in Pakistan's tribal belt, along the Afghan border.

Mr. Libi, a charismatic, Libyan Islamist who escaped from an American military prison in Afgh anistan in 2005, was considered a particularly important figure because of his use of video messages to spread Al Qaeda's ideology. In a Foreign Policy article on Mr. Libi's importance in 2009, Jarret Brachman, the former director of research at West Point's Combating Terrorism Center, explained that Mr. Libi had formed his impressions of Americans firsthand. At Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan, Mr. Brachman reported, Mr. Libi “passed time by intimately studying his American captors as they aimlessly surfed the Internet or complained to him about their dysfunctional childhoods.”

The Qaeda leader statement on “the martyrdom of the lion of Libya,” came in a 42-minute video, according to SITE Intelligence Group, a private organization in Washington that tracks militant Web sites. (SITE, or the Search for International Terrorist Entities, was founded by Rita Katz, an Arabic-speaking Israeli researcher who was born in Iraq and now lives in Washington.)

The video was apparently recorded during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, which ended in August, Reuters reports. In the message, Mr. Zawahri calls President Obama a “liar” who “is trying to fool Americans into believing that he will defeat Al Qaeda by killing this person or that person.”

As Agence France-Presse reports, Mr. Zawahri “also mentions Warren Weinstein, an elderly U.S. aid worker kidnapped in Pakistan by Al Qaeda just over a year ago, vowing to keep him in captivity until U.S.-led forces release Qaeda followers held in Afghanistan.”

In an interview with CNN in Cairo broadcast on Tuesday, the Qaeda leader's brother, Mohamed, suggested that he could broker a truce between the Islamist militants and the West. Mohamed al-Zawahri, who was released from prison after the Egyptian revolution in 2011, also suggested that Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, the blind Egyptian cleric convicted of conspiring to blow up New York City landma rks in 1995, should be freed by the United States as part of the truce agreement.



Image of the Day: September 11

September 11, 2012, 11:17 am
By THE NEW YORK TIMES

Happy First Birthday, India Ink

September 11, 2012, 9:02 am
By HEATHER TIMMONS

A year ago, we launched India Ink, The New York Times's first country-specific blog/news journal, with a promise to provide “more in-depth, on-the-ground coverage of the world's biggest democracy - and of a people who know that no matter how far they roam, their hearts will always be Indian.”

Since then we've reported from India's major metropolises and minor villages, from Jaipur, Kashmir, Tamil Nadu, London, Mumbai, Israel, New York and numerous other locations. We've covered Tibetan protests, expensive wedding planners, living at (or below) the poverty line in India, “meaningless cricket,” the difficulties of “flying while Khan,” Indian women who suffer after divorce, Bangalore's “Maybe Virgin” generation and hundreds of other topics.

Along the way we've gained millions of readers, inspired thousands of comments and, hopefully, prompted some serious and not-so-serious discussions.

A year on, things seem a bit darker in India. Economic growth forecasts have been sharply downgraded, from over 7 percent in 2011 to as low as 5 percent today. The energy and optimism that surrounded the Anna Hazare-led anti-corruption movement have morphed into a still-potent disdain for the current governing parties but one that is accompanied by more pessimism. What seemed like a one-time request by the government, asking social media companies in India to censor and screen content, now could be read as a more sinister plan to curb criticism and dissent.

Looking back at the top essays and articles we wrote in the past 12 months, you could say that one running theme is conflict â€" not physical conflict, but a conflict between the way things are, and how our readers and the subjects of these articles want them to be. Our writers, and readers, seem frustrated and thrilled with India and the position of Indians around the world in equal measure, and they despair of the shortcomings they see, while working to fix them.

Here are our top posts from the past 12 months, by number of readers:

1. Why I Left India (Again): The I.T. professional Sumedh Mungee's heartfelt essay on hating the man he became when he returned to India, which we published in October 2011, is still getting responses. An excerpt from the essay:

Perhaps three thousand years of history have made us Indians a little too familiar with one another for our own good. We've perfected Malcolm Gladwell's “blink” - the reflexive, addictive and tragically accurate placement of other Indians into bullock carts, scooters, airplanes and who knows what else. These issues exist in all countries, but in India, I could see the bigotry in high fidelity and hear the stereotypes in surround-sound - partly because it is worse in India, mostly because I am Indian.

2. An Open Letter to India's Graduating Classes: Mohit Chandra, a partner with an international consulting company based in India, innocently submitted this to India Ink after interviewing job candidates. He (and we) didn't anticipate the hornet's nest it would stir up when it was published in May. An excerpt:

Today, we regret to inform you that you are spoiled. You are spoiled by the “India growth story”; by an illusion that the Indian education system is capable of producing the talent that we, your companies, most crave; by the imbalance of demand and supply for real talent; by the deceleration of economic growth in the mature West; and by the law of large numbers in India, which creates pockets of highly skilled people who are justly feted but ultimately make up less than 10 percent of all of you.

3. India Asks Google, Facebook to Screen User Content: Our report on the private meetings that the acting telecommunications minister Kapil Sibal held with top executives from social networking sites in India showed both the government's discomfort with Internet criticism and its misunderstanding of how technology works. An excerpt:

At the meeting, Mr. Sibal showed attendees a Facebook page that maligned the Congress Party's president, Sonia Gandhi. “This is unacceptable,” he told attendees, the executive said, and he asked them to find a way to monitor what is posted on their sites.

In the second meeting with the same executives in late November, Mr. Sibal told them that he expected them to use human beings to screen content, not technology, the executive said. The three executives said Mr. Sibal has told these companies that he expects them to set up a proactive pre-screening system, with staffers looking for objectionable content and deleting it before it is posted.

4. Meet Aparna, Mumbai's Teenage Sex Educator: Neha Thirani's article on Aparna, the 16-year-old daughter of a prostitute, who candidly and cheerfully conducts sexual education classes for underprivileged girls, inspired a flood of offers for help to further Aparna's education. An excerpt from the article:

When sex workers like Aparna's mother would become pregnant, the “doctors would treat them so badly,” Aparna recalls. “They would yell at them, and even slap them sometimes. They would say things like ‘You go and pick up anyone's child and come to me with your stomach swollen. When you were doing it, you enjoyed yourself and now what happened?' ”

These encounters made Aparna want to become a gynecologist. Even when she was younger, she would share with her friends and peers whatever sexual health-related information she could find.

5. Being Sikh in America: Amardeep Singh's essay, penned after the shootings at a Wisconsin gurdwara in August, detailed the sometimes perilous position in which Sikhs find themselves in America, where they are often mistaken for Muslim, or just singled out for being different. An excerpt:

In light of the Wisconsin shooting, many Sikhs are now suggesting that we renew our educational efforts about Sikhs and Sikhism. These are well-meaning and valuable efforts, but here's the thing: I am not sure that the shooter would have acted any differently even if he had known the difference.

As I have experienced it, the Sikh turban reflects a form of difference that can provoke some Americans to react quite viscerally. Yes, ignorance plays a part and probably amplifies that reaction. But it may also be that visible marks of religious difference like the Sikh turban are lightning rods for this hostility in ways that don't depend on accurate recognition.

This top five list is just the tip of the iceberg, of course. We've had Sonia Faleiro's keenly observed and often heartrending reporting on communities outside the Indian mainstream (like this one on Durga, a girl who lives on a pavement in Mumbai); Samanth Subramanian's Long View column, looking at current events through the lens of history, Naresh Fernandes on music and Mumbai, the longtime New York Times reporter Hari Kumar on politics and corruption, and dozens of other excellent writers.

To our India Ink audience: Thank you, thank you. If there's something you've loved or something you've hated, or something you just want to get off your chest, send us an e-mail at IndiaInk@nytimes.com or leave a message in the comments below.



Is it Time for Tendulkar to Hang Up His Bat?

September 11, 2012, 3:38 am
By HARESH PANDYA

Until recently, it was considered sacrilegious to speak a word against Sachin Tendulkar, the world's most famous cricketer, who enjoys a God-like status in India, where cricket is practically a religion.

Not anymore.

His glaring failure in the recent series against lowly New Zealand, when he was out for paltry 19 runs in the first Test in Hyderabad and 17 and 27 in the second in Bangalore, and, worse still, clean-bowled on each occasion, has turned many of his staunch supporters against him. Even former cricketers are beginning to question his decision to continue playing, if not his place in the Indian team.

While all his old teammates â€" Anil Kumble, Sourav Ga nguly, Rahul Dravid, V.V.S. Laxman â€" have retired, the 39-year-old Tendulkar has decided to continue despite his poor form.

Tendulkar, who has played more Tests (190), scored more runs (15,533 at an average of 55.08 per innings) and hit more centuries (51) than any other cricketer in history (in addition to being the only batsman with 18,426 runs and 49 centuries in 463 One-Day Internationals), has now gone 25 innings without a hundred in the five-day game since making 146 against South Africa in Cape Town in January 2011.

Sunil Gavaskar, former India captain and the first cricketer to score 10,000 Test runs and 30 centuries, feels that Tendulkar's reflexes are sliding and his footwork is no longer what it used to be.

“With age, the feet don't come to the pitch of the ball, the eyes don't pick up the ball early,” he said during the second Test in Bangalore, reacting to Tendulkar's dismissal in the first innings.

Gavaskar and fellow commentator Sanjay Manjrekar, a former Test batsman who has played with Tendulkar both for Mumbai and the Indian national team, were clearly unhappy with the way Tendulkar was dismissed after struggling for 50 balls. “The dismissal that was most disturbing was that of the ‘master' when he was bowled through the gate,” the Gavaskar later wrote in a column in the Times of India.

Echoing Gavaskar's words, Mohammad Azharuddin, who was captain of India for most of the 1990s, said on Sept. 7 during an India Today event “I have found that he has become a little slow. Reflexes go slow with age and pressure.”

Another former India captain, requesting anonymity, said in an interview that Tendulkar has become “more of a liability than an asset” to the Indian team since it won the World Cup more than a year ago. “Tendulkar has achieved everything,” he said. “He has nothing more to prove to anybody. I've the utmost respect for him and his genius.”

But recently, the former captain said, Tendulkar has become a “shadow” of the player he was. “I don't understand why he wants to tarnish his own image by just hanging on,” he said. “He should make room for some younger player.”

Tendulkar is in no mood to call it a day.

“The day I don't enjoy wielding bat in my hands, I'll think otherwise,” he said after receiving the ‘Test Cricketer of 2011' award on Aug. 30. “But that moment hasn't come as yet,” he said. (The following day was the disastrous second Test against New Zealand.)

And there are still plenty of players, including several of his former teammates, who say Tendulkar should ignore the critics, and keep playing.

Ganguly, who played alongside Tendulkar for 15 years and led India in 49 Tests, says speculation over the master batsman's future in the game is uncalled-for. Ganguly is convinced that Tendulkar is still good enough to play at the highest international level, ahead of visits by England and Australia later in the season.

“It's not the first time he has been bowled,” Ganguly said on Sept. 7, after delivering the fourth Dilip Sardesai memorial lecture at the Bombay Gymkhana in Mumbai. “It has happened when he was at his peak. He had then found a way and he is going to do it again.”

The India team's current captain, Mahendra Singh Dhoni, is even more optimistic about Tendulkar. “Whenever people talk about his form, he comes up with a brilliant performance,” Dhoni said in Bangalore on Sept. 3, during a post-match news conference.

The next test of Tendulkar's mettle will be the much-awaited series of four Tests against England, which begin in India in mid-November.



Verghese Kurien, Leader of India\'s Milk Cooperatives, Dies at 90

September 11, 2012, 3:05 am
By THE NEW YORK TIMES

“Verghese Kurien, an engineer who led India's so-called White Revolution,” died on Sunday in Nadiad, in Gujarat, at 90 years, William Yardley wrote in The New York Times. Mr. Kurien “helped thousands of dairy farmers create cooperatives to produce and market milk, reducing hunger and poverty and eventually transforming India into the world's largest milk producer,” Mr. Yardley wrote.

Shortly after India gained independence, “Mr. Kurien returned from doing graduate work in mechanical engineering in the United States and began working at a government research creamery in Anand, a village in Gujarat,” Mr. Yardley wrote. “It was a way for him to repay the government for helping to finance his studies.” Read more '



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