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Protests Over Anti-Islam Film Taper Off, but Effects Linger

September 17, 2012, 2:45 pm
By CHRISTINE HAUSER

ITN television footage of the aftermath of protests in Afghanistan.

Protests against an anti-Islam film spilled into a second week on Monday, although they appeared to be tapering off in size and taking place in fewer countries compared with last week.

As my colleagues Matthew Rosenberg and Sangar Rahimi reported, hundreds of Afghans burned tires and threw rocks at the police during the unrest, which took place along the Jalalabad road that leads out of the capital, Kabul. At one point the protesters came close to scaling the walls of a major military base.

There were demonstrations and violence in more than 20 countries starting from l ast Tuesday, when the American ambassador in Libya, J. Christopher Stevens, was killed in an attack on the diplomatic mission in Benghazi. But even as the protests taper off, some say the backlash could take other forms.

Blake Hounshell, the managing editor of Foreign Policy magazine, noted there could be more of what are known as insider, or green-on-blue, attacks in Afghanistan, for example - green being American military parlance for indigenous forces, blue for its own.

In Indonesia, the police fired tear gas and water cannons against hundreds of demonstrators outside of the American Embassy in Jakarta. In Pakistan, protests flared near the consulates in Karachi and Lahore, while in Islamabad, the American Embassy said it had halted public services. The embassy also noted that protests in Pakistan were often spontaneous and issued travel restrictions.

But some bloggers and writers suggested a growing weariness with the impetus generated by the anti-Islam film, while elsewhere people were being killed in drone strikes, in the war in Syria and in a factory fire in Pakistan. One Pakistani writer, Shiraz Hassan, noted that amid the protests over the film last week, hundreds of workers were killed in those fires last week.

The issue of censorship has also come up as governments, including that of the United States, tried to block the film's widespread dissemination. A Web site news editor, Jahanzaib Haque, wrote on his blog about how the unrest was fomented on social medi a but he, like others, condemned efforts to block YouTube.

Ali Dayan of Human Rights Watch wrote:

But the video was still providing grist in what my colleague David Kirkpatrick described over the weekend as having the potential to inspire local dynamics to fan the flames.

As word spread on social media about the protest activities, on Monday the largest outpouring of protest appeared to be the one organized by Hezbollah in Lebanon. Still, a journalist there, Lucy Kafanov, reported on her Twitter feed th at there was little violence.

An activist and writer, Mhamad Kleit, wrote that it was not just a Shiite protest, but that Sunni clerics, Christians and Druze were among the large turnout.