Tthe Republic Party’s base, which Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan courted so ardently and now represent, is deeply implicated in the sponsorship, funding, production, and initial distribution of “Innocence of Muslims,” and has direct responsibility for the consequent Muslim protests now raging around the world over this short film. Yet, so far as I know, nowhere in the media coverage of all this has anyone addressed these connections. […]
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The propaganda film “Innocence of Muslims” was entirely sponsored and produced by elements of the wingnut anti-Islamist evangelical Christian right in the U.S. By dint of their close association with their base, Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan bear a considerable degree of responsibility for the conflagrations touched off by the film, including the one that took the life of Ambassador Christopher J. Stevens. Time to put them on the hook for that and watch them try to wriggle off. […] Eastwood’s star turn at the RNC conjured up the image of an “imaginary Massa,” an arrogant patrician Southern plantation owner, doddering yet white and gun-wielding, thus empowered to humiliate a grown black man who can’t talk back, in front of a laughing, jeering, cheering crowd of white people who roared with approval when Eastwood announced “We own this country” and “Politicians are employees of ours” before closing with an ominous “Make my day” chanted by the assembly. […] |
 SPJ Research Award 2014 |
Election 2012: Image World (7)
With this mediocre production Mark Basseley Youssef has demonstrated the radical right’s eagerness to provoke Muslim outrage with deliberate sacrilege while simultaneously making visible the criminally irresponsible face of fundamentalist Islam. At the same time, he’s seeded a minefield for Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan, who can’t denounce this hypothetical movie (or its all-too-real trailer) in any but the vaguest terms without alienating the Reblican base from which it sprang. […]