I HAVE been troubled by suggestions that, as a result of the Innocence of Muslims movie, eight South Africans in Kabul, Afghanistan, have lost their lives; it is more correct to say that they died when a 20-year-old suicide bomber known only as Fatima drove a truck full of explosives into their van as they were being driven to the airport and they were blown to smithereens.
True, in claiming responsibility for the attack, an insurgent group, Hezb-i-Islami, said it was carried out to avenge this stupid film. "The bombing was in retaliation for the insult to our Prophet," a spokesman told a news agency.
But I suspect that, movie or not, Fatima was not long for this world, and was going to go out with a violent bang anyway. Hezb-i-Islami is reportedly the second largest insurgent bunch in Afghanistan after the Taliban and has been fighting the US-led troops and the government there for a decade or so.
The bombing was the second such suicide attack in ten days, and once again raised doubts about stability in the region as NATO accelerated a troop withdrawal plan ahead of a handover to Afghan authorities by the end of 2014. In other setbacks, more than 50 Western troops have been shot dead by their Afghan colleagues this year already. It is, accordingly, a dangerous place, and any foreigner working there is presumably aware of the risks in doing so.
Commentators have pointed out that it is extremely rare for women to carry out such attacks in Afghanistan. In fact, it's quite unusual to see women drivers in Kabul.
That, presumably, is another reason Fatima had to go; given the designated role of women in these fundamentalist societies, the notion of a female suicide bomber seems perversely progressive, and surely a blow to the morale of any self-respecting male jihadist. What next, one wonders; they'll be allowing girls to go to school?
One also wonders what Fatima had been promised as her reward for her act of martyrdom. Surely not that schtick about the virgins?
But now we are straying into crass caricature and the crude territory of Innocence of Muslims. I've only seen the 13-minute trailer for Innocence -- presumably it is the same YouTube clip that that has sparked the wave of anti-American riots across the Muslim world -- and it is not an experience I'd wish to repeat anytime soon.
The film was produced by one Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, who was reportedly involved in the production The Young Lady Chatterley. But whatever Nakoula's involvement with this B-grade, allegedly erotic bilge was, it certainly wasn't anything meaningful behind the cameras. It's worth noting that Nakoula used the pseudonym Sam Bacile in making the film. Im Becile may well have been more appropriate.
Those actors who appeared in the film have claimed that they were duped into doing so, and that their lines were altered during post-production -- if that's what they call this clumsy propagandist tinkering.
It is a valid claim. In the trailer you can clearly hear this; a sentence from a character, for example, changes dramatically in tone and accent as offensive phrases are dropped in over previously recorded dialogue and it's all wildly out of sync -- lips going one way, overdubbed blasphemies another.
One actress, Cindy Lee Garcia, who launched an unsuccessful court action to have the clip removed from YouTube, claimed that there was no mention of "Mohammed", or references to religion or sex during filming or on the set when she was around.
That may be the case, but there certainly is a great deal of sex in the trailer in scenes where Garcia is not present. "Mohammed" is cast as a lecherous fool, albeit a lecherous fool who looks suspiciously like the blue-eyed Jesus we remember from the Jehovah's Witness literature of the 1970s.
In one scene he is pelted with slippers by two of his angry wives after being caught in bed with a servant; in another he goes into a weird trance after peering between woman's legs and then starts talking to a donkey. Who knows what it means?
"The film is clearly a malevolent piece of garbage," the novelist Salman Rushdie told the Guardian. "The civilised response would be to say of the director: ‘F*** him. Let's get on with our day.' What's not civilised is to hold America responsible for everything that happens in its borders. That's crap. Even if that were true, to respond with physical attacks and believe it's okay to attack people because you're upset at this thing, that's an improper reaction. The Muslim world needs to get out of that mindset."
The same would apply to the world of mad, busybody Christians.
This article first appeared in the Weekend Argus
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