Hate means you can't seem to say 'I was wrong'
I'm fond of people who have regrets. I know that's an unpopular predilection in this era of intractable certitude, but I admire people who can look across their wreckage-strewn lives and say, "Whoops."
Regretting a blunder — whether a moral lapse or the color of the den carpet — speaks to a pliancy of temperament, a recognition of one's own fallibility.
All of which brings me to Nakoula Basseley Nakoula.
You remember the California native with the queer name? He's the shady character behind the much-maligned film "Innocence of Muslims." That's the YouTube video the Obama administration impetuously blamed for the Sept. 11 attack on the American diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Libya, that killed four Americans, including the U.S. ambassador. It now appears that something far more slippery was afoot in Benghazi, but the video undeniably led to protests in Yemen, Morocco, Iran, Tunisia, Sudan, Lebanon, Indonesia and Malaysia.
It was crudely produced, deliberately inflammatory, fanatical and hateful, "a bigoted piece of poison calculated to inflame the Muslim world," in the words of the Guardian's Peter Bradshaw.
The mayhem that it provoked might lead a more reflective man to lament his decision to broadcast his beliefs that the Prophet Muhammad was a brutish, bloodthirsty sex-fiend.
In an interview with The New York Times published Monday, Nakoula not only said he would not back down from the video, but that his invectives against Islam hadn't gone far enough.
"I thought, before I wrote this script that I should burn myself in a public square to let the American people and the people of the world know this message that I believe in."
Well, there was a missed opportunity.
Nakoula has spent two months in prison for violating his supervised release on a fraud conviction, one of a number of freakishly inventive crimes that have sent this Egyptian-born sham artist to the slammer. On Wednesday, a Cairo court sentenced Nakoula and six others to death for "insulting the Islamic religion," a measure of how seriously the Islamic world takes slurs of its faith.
Outside of his abortive film career, Nakoula also has a knack for drug-dealing, name-changing and claiming membership on the 1984 Olympic Egyptian soccer team, which, surprisingly, has no record of him. What is clear is that Nakoula, a Coptic Christian, has a higher-than-average helping of venom in his veins, which he is delighted to decant all over the Internet.
Within the web of fantasy Nakoula has woven in his 55 years, one indisputable constant emerges. He has loathed Muslims almost since he could utter the word. The 2009 massacre at Fort Hood, Texas, he said, sent him over the edge. "I became even more upset and enraged," he told the newspaper. Well, so did plenty of others. Hate metastasizes, particularly when its target is so intimately felt.
I thought about Nakoula in the context of the decision of a friend to leave the Christian faith. Religion, he decided, had done nothing but instigate centuries-worth of violence, pitting intransigence against intransigence.
He was certainly not the first to jettison religion because of its association with violence, but his apostasy disappointed me. As a Catholic I'm certainly well aware of the carnage wrought by religion, from the Crusades, through the Inquisition, to the more recent strife in Northern Ireland.
"We forgive and we ask forgiveness," Pope John Paul II said in 2000. "We are asking pardon for the divisions among Christians, for the use of violence that some have committed in the service of truth, and for attitudes of mistrust and hostility assumed toward followers of other religions."
It was welcome penitence for many, but 1,000 years too late for some. Does it take that long to regret so blatant a crime? What hope does that leave Nakoula and those like him? Can we really afford to indulge so long a germination period for remorse? Is it an ability to express remorse that we need to learn, or more tolerance for views that differ from ours?
Clearly, it is the latter. Two years ago, I used this space to criticize the building of an Islamic center at ground zero. Fearful of the center's potential to spark violence, I maintained that it belonged elsewhere. In the wake of Nakoula's ugly obduracy, I regret that position. I now believe we need such a presence.
We will never get anywhere pretending away serious differences of faith. It is only by understanding our distinctions that we can hope to recognize that an assault against one faith wounds us all.
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