Democracy burning – what if they threw a revolution and it was a lie? Rage On my Brothers, Rage On my Sisters

Protesters in Karachi, Pakistan, tried to storm the U.S. Consulate on Sunday and Hizbullah’s leader called for more demonstrations, but much of the unrest over an Islam-bashing film seems to have ebbed. Now come the questions, Mike Giglio reports.

Arab Spring Countries Take Stock After Violent Anti-American Protests
by Mike Giglio – 17 September, 2012 – The DailyBeast

Farah Hached, a prominent lawyer in Tunisia, thought the authorities would be ready if the anti-American unrest came her country’s way. It had started last Tuesday, when protesters at the U.S. Embassy in Cairo stormed the 12-foot concrete walls and replaced the American flag with an Islamic one, while armed men in the Libyan city of Benghazi took advantage of a similar protest to attack the consulate there and kill the U.S. ambassador. The demonstrations spread as far as Yemen, Iran, and Iraq over the next two days. “The government had three days to prepare. They should have been ready,” says Hached, who runs Laboratoire Démocratique, a human-rights NGO in Tunis.

Instead, protesters breached the U.S. Embassy in Tunis on Friday, lighting fires and tearing down the flag. A venerable American school was also attacked, its students sent home early before the building was ransacked. Yet another cornerstone of the Arab Spring—the country that lit its fuse, in fact—had become engulfed in the furor over an anti-Islam film that gripped some of the same streets across the region last week that were claimed by pro-democracy protesters last year. “People are shocked,” Hached says.

Over the weekend, the United States pulled its nonessential diplomatic staff out of Tunisia, citing security concerns, and urged all Americans in the country to leave. It did the same in Sudan, where 5,000 people reportedly rallied at the U.S. Embassy on Friday. Marines have been sent to protect diplomatic sites in Libya and Yemen, while protesters attempted to storm the U.S. Consulate in Karachi, Pakistan’s largest city, on Sunday. And the leader of Hizbullah, the militant group based in Lebanon, called for the U.S. government to be “held accountable,” encouraging protests next week.

But the unrest that swept across the Muslim world last week—sparked by a low-budget, Islam-bashing film made by provocateurs in America, excerpted on YouTube, and recently dubbed into Arabic—largely seemed to have calmed. As the violence ebbed, some turned their attention to what had happened and why, questions that seemed especially pressing for residents of the Arab Spring countries that are still working to find their footing after decades of authoritarian rule. …more