In an article, "Rampaging Islamists," I listed Libya as one of the over thirty countries where the Innocence of Muslims video had prompted demonstrations, rioting, or violence in September 2012; it seemed obvious at that time that the attack on the U.S. mission in Benghazi fit into the much larger context of agitation and hostility sweeping so many Muslim communities.
But then, after Barack Obama nominated Susan Rice as his national security adviser, her having repeatedly stated that the attack had been a "spontaneous" response to Innocence, a demonstration that "spun out of control," prompted a backlash against this account of what happened on Sep.11, 2012. The conservative interpretation focused entirely on Al-Qaeda and rejected any role for Innocence.
Despite this consensus, I stood by the contention that Innocence played a part in the events that night. Now, the journalist John Rosenthal confirms this connection at "New Evidence Links Benghazi Attack to Anti-Muslim Movie," where he argues that Innocence served as a "catalyst" for the attack on the US mission. His proof?
Examination of contemporaneous chatter on Libyan websites shows that locals really were in an uproar about the video in both the run-up to and immediate aftermath of the Benghazi attack. This finding is all the more significant inasmuch as the chatter in question comes from precisely the same extremist milieu as the presumed assailants. In the hours immediately preceding the attack, local Islamists were calling on their brethren to "do something" in response to the video. From both the source and tenor of these appeals, it is clear that they meant something more emphatic than just a peaceful demonstration.
Rosenthal uses the Facebook page of the Libyan Ansar Minbar, which "provides an important window into the agitation embroiling the local Islamist scene around the time of the attack."
Timeline entries on the page show that in the early evening of Sep. 11, 2012, Ansar Minbar was closely following developments in Cairo, where a crowd of thousands had converged upon the US Embassy, ostensibly to protest a US-made film that insulted the Prophet Muhammad.
Examples (see Rosenthal's article for the accompanying graphics):
At 6:04 p.m., the page administrator posted a photo of an al-Qaeda flag being attached to a flagpole at the embassy in Cairo. The accompanying text read: "Egypt urgent. Demonstrators take down the American flag and raise in its place the 'There is no God but God' flag. And us, what are we doing in Libya???"
Six minutes later, the administrator posted another photo, this one showing the al-Qaeda flag now flying in front of the embassy. The new, more insistent, message enjoins, "God is great, o brothers! The 'There is no God but God' flag rises above the American Embassy in Cairo. And what, brothers, men of Libya, are you doing??!! Expel them from our land, we do not want one infidel of them …" It continues, "The measuring cup has overflowed and the flood has reached the place above the flood line, long live Jihad, long live Jihad!"
Just three hours later, at 9:11 p.m., a newsflash on libya-s.net, an Ansar Minbar online forum, announced that the US mission was being attacked. Note that this puts the start of the attack around a half hour earlier than the official US account. The post identifies members of Ansar al-Sharia as the assailants.
At 1:20 a.m. on Sep. 12, a new photograph appeared on the Ansar Minbar Facebook page under the heading "Photographs [sic] of the Benghazi demonstrations." But rather than any demonstration, the picture shows just a single masked "protester" burning an American flag.
Rosenthal's conclusion about Susan Rice's mistakes in blaming the attack in Benghazi solely on a demonstration against the video: "She was not right about the demonstration. There appears not to have been any. Moreover, even if there were some unarmed hangers-on who converged upon the compound, it is beyond doubt that the armed assailants went there with the sole purpose of attacking it."
But, he goes on, "what brought the militia members out of their homes or barracks at that particular time on that particular night appears to have been none other than the 'anti-Islam video'."
Comments: (1) It's not either the video or a terrorist attack; it can be a bit of both. (2) That the video has some connection to the attack does not reduce the Obama administration's incompetence and its culpability for the what followed that night. (July 8, 2013)
Dec. 28, 2013 update: A major New York Times investigative report, "A Deadly Mix in Benghazi" by David D. Kirkpatrick, finds that the attack on the American mission on Sept. 11, 2012, was "fueled in large part by anger at an American-made video denigrating Islam."
Jan. 12, 2014 update: John Rosenthal responds to the Kirkpatrick report at "Benghazi: both video and al-Qaeda-inspired jihadists behind attack," where he notes that Kirkpatrick's evidence in support of the quote above
consists exclusively of hearsay reports from unidentified persons who were allegedly on the scene on the night of the attack. Kirkpatrick does say that by Sept. 9 "a popular eastern Libyan Facebook page had denounced the film." But, regrettably, he does not identify the page in question. The claim thus remains unverifiable.
Referencing his own work from (quoted above), Rosenthal notes that
there is in fact hard evidence that the local Islamist scene in Benghazi was in uproar about the "anti-Islam video" in the run-up to the attack, and that this outrage figured prominently among the motivations of the assailants. This evidence is drawn precisely from social media.
