Why was GOP candidate so slow to condemn "Innocence of Muslims"?
by Wayne Barrett
…The Romney campaign’s foreign policy team of advisers is flooded with neocons from the Bush era, including Robert Joseph, the National Security Council official who, as Ari Berman reported in The Nation, inserted the famous “sixteen words” in Bush’s State of the Union address in 2003 claiming that Iraq tried to buy enriched uranium from Niger.
Romney’s top national security adviser since 2007 is Cofer Black, the former Blackwater executive and CIA official who ran the “extraordinary rendition” torture program. Sheldon Adelson, the billionaire Super PAC donor for Romney, says “all the terrorists are Islamists,” Gingrich’s declaration that the Palestinians are “an invented people.” This is the context surrounding Romney’s most recent expedition into Middle East policy.
A Washington Post editorial echoed by MSNBC’s Chris Matthews pointedly raised the question of why Romney failed to condemn the fourteen-minute trailer, “Innocence of Muslims,” during his Wednesday press conference, though it ostensibly triggered the embassy attacks in Egypt and elsewhere.
His campaign later issued a muted criticism of “the reported message of the movie.” Finally, this morning, he said the “whole film is a terrible idea,” and that “making it, promoting it, showing it, is disrespectful to people of other faiths,” a statement it took him four days after the furor began to make.
The fact is that the film emerged from the same Islamophobic circles that celebrate Bolton and Boykin, and are now backing Romney….
Mitt Romney's Muslim-baiting backers
About Wayne Barrett
Wayne Barrett was a fixture at the Village Voice for almost four decades, doing his first investigative feature in 1973 and writing more than 2000 stories between then and 2011, when he left the paper. He has also written five books, including two on Rudy Giuliani, a biography of Donald Trump and City for Sale, a chronicle of the Koch scandals of the late 80s.
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