 Last night there were protests in front of the U.S. Embassy in Cairo and in the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya. These protests were sparked by not the release of but the media attention drawn to a trailer, a YouTube trailer of a feature film that was made depicting the Prophet Muhammad and the Islamic religion in a very negative light. And so when people somehow became aware of this film, it provoked this outpouring of anger and demonstrations in front of the embassies. In Cairo, the people were able to infiltrate the perimeter of the embassy despite the presence of Egyptian security personnel and they tore down the American flag and replaced it with a black banner saying there is no God but God. And in Libya, unfortunately, when they breached the perimeter, the protesters were also armed and there was an attack on the consulate and it resulted in the murder of four consulate staff persons including the U.S. Ambassador to Libya, Chris Stevens. So to give a little bit of history behind what happened in Libya yesterday, this is part of a broader pattern of Islamophobic comments, cartoons like we saw coming out of Denmark, actions sometimes accidental, sometimes intentional that have been perceived in the Muslim world as insulting to Islam. And many of these have been met with violent reactions. In 2004, for example, a Dutch film producer was murdered on his way to work because he had produced a 10-minute short film with a Somali writer that criticized the treatment of women in Islam. He was murdered by a Dutch Moroccan radical. And I'm sure a lot of people who follow Afghanistan remember in February of this year the United States accidentally, an investigation later found that U.S. soldiers accidentally burned copies of the Quran and there were massive protests across Afghanistan. I think over 30 Afghans ended up dying in the demonstrations, whether it was by their fellow demonstrators or by soldiers who were trying to protect NATO bases in themselves and six U.S. soldiers were killed by demonstrators or actually often by Afghan security force members. And as I mentioned, the Danish cartoons, which I'm sure most people remember, in 2005 a Danish newspaper published 12 cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad, the most insulting one which many people picked up on was an image of the Prophet wearing a turban-wrapped bomb on his head, sort of trying to show that Islamic radicals use religion as a cover for their violence. So in terms of the broader implications of these incidents, they come at a very fragile period of time when both Egypt and Libya are in the process of transitioning to democracy and are in need, Egypt in particular is in need of foreign assistance due to its economic crisis. There was just recently a delegation of U.S. business representatives to Egypt to talk about how to provide support, how U.S. companies can support Egyptian small businesses and what reforms may be going on within Egypt in order to produce a conducive business environment for growth. And so that delegation is arriving back to the U.S. against this backdrop. And so there is a lot of concern that this additional act of tension and confrontation and provocation could impact the ability of the U.S. to support these countries in transition. There are several lessons to be learned from what happened in Libya and from what has happened in Afghanistan and some of the other examples I mentioned. One of them is the growing threat of Islamophobia in the West that many people in the West, some government officials, many private citizens, feel that it is Islam that has created terrorism and that it is Islam that is a growing threat to the Western, to America in particular, but to sort of a Western way of life. And so they lash out. There was the pastor in Florida also who burned Quran. He wanted to show that he disagreed with Islam's values. So there needs to be something, the governments in the West need to make a concerted effort to battle this, to issue statements saying that it is not Islam from which terrorism arises. It is a radical fringe minority of the Muslim world from which radical Islamic terrorism comes. There's also a lesson to be learned, I think, particularly considering the Arab Spring for the new regimes, the new governments in the Arab world to crack down on these violent responses. The Libyan government should have been able to protect the consulate in Benghazi. It's unacceptable that Amab was able to launch rockets into a U.S. consulate and the security forces should have been able to prevent that. And in Egypt, Amab climbed over the wall of the embassy, managed to tear down the American flag and replace it with a black flag that's often associated with al-Qaeda. That should have been prevented. The Egyptian security forces should have been able to stop a radical fringe mob. And it's not only a physical presence that needs to be had and protecting the people that you have as guests on your soil, but it's also in statements. The Afghan President Hamid Karzai released a statement condemning the video, the original video, but not condemning what happened in Libya. It seems to me almost to be asking for something to happen in Afghanistan, which on top of that has a history of violent protests, as I mentioned with the Koran burnings and other incidents that have happened in Afghanistan and Iraq, videos that have come out of Marines, for example, urinating on Taliban, dead Taliban militants. And so as the president of that country, President Karzai should have been releasing a statement that condemned both the Islamophobic video and the violence in Libya and the breach of the embassy in Egypt, but he didn't. So I think that there is definitely a need on the part of Muslim leaders to show that this is also unacceptable, that while they too are insulted by these offenses to Islam, it is unacceptable to respond with violence. We have to also understand that the production of films of this nature harm relations, and I think it's appropriate for Obama to condemn both the act of provocation by the filmmakers and the violence that took place. And both the U.S. and the officials in Libya and Egypt need to work together to ensure proper security going forward. The Obama administration, after this event in Libya, I think needs to make it clear that it condemns the violence, but that it also does not support or is in any way connected to any of the vitriolic rhetoric that comes out of these Islamophobic corners of the United States, the pastor in Florida, and this, I guess, Israeli-American guy in California who made this recent video. The danger with that though, I think, is that by even talking about it, sometimes the government makes it more of a big deal than it is. So the statement does need to be carefully worded. It does need to show we condemn this, we don't agree with anything that was in this video, but we also uphold our democratic values and have freedom of speech laws, and we don't think that it was right, but we can't control and don't intend to try to control every piece of speech that comes out of our country. And I think that's all they can do at this point to make sure that the outside world knows that this is not the policy of the U.S. government, the opinion of the U.S. government, but also make sure that Americans know that this is, again, not the opinion of America as a whole, this is not how we want the world to see the United States.