In your book on the Danish cartoons and in your article in Foreign Affairs about the Islamophobic film “Innocence of Muslims”, you analyze the dynamics of the events that inflamed Egypt and other countries and you say that they have something in common, which is that they were expected and then exploited by consolidated powers, even if in almost all of those countries there has been a regime change. It’s quite a strange comparison. Could you explain it?

I actually don’t think it is that strange. Mohammed Morsi moved right into the office of Mubarak and every time we have a change in office we have a revolution but there are also some continuities. This is a standard idea in political science. Mohammed Morsi is new to political power, but he has a problem that is similar to the one Mubarak had: he needs desperately to get help from Unites States, the IMF and the supporters of the West.  But on the other hand he needs to control elements at home that are very Anti-Western.

Young people in Cairo said that the security around the American Embassy was not so strong as it should have been. Why did this happen? As allied of the Americans, needing American economic help, the Egyptian government should have taken care of it.

Sure. They have done that now, although, when the American embassy was attacked by protesters there was a serious problem. The chronology of the event is that also Salafists showed the excerpts from the YouTube video on Saturday September 8 and that was the first time that the YouTube video produced by a Copt in California (who apparently usually makes pornographic movies) got seen. They producers never managed to show it around but then they put Arabic subtexts on in it and in some time in early September they started sending this bit to journalists in the Middle East. The first person ever to show it was running a Salafist Tv station in Cairo: he immediately managed to spread the news and after few minutes 3 million already had seen it. I think is very important to understand the whole sequence. On Saturday, the film was first shown in Cairo by this Sheikh Khalid Abdullah, a Salafist running a Tv show for the Al-Nas Tv station. On Sunday the Grand Mufti Ali Goma came out and condemned the trailer. At this point in time nobody knew about the video outside Cairo, which is why I argue in my Foreign Affair piece that this incident was from the beginning driven by domestic politics in Egypt.

But it had serious unexpected consequences in Libya.

I don’t believe that those were coordinated events. I firmly believe that the attack to the consulate in Bengasi was planned; the hidden hand in the coordination of all of this is the date of 9/11. The events in Libya were not lit from the beginning from what was done in Egypt.

Do you think there is anything “hidden” that one should know to fully understand and judge these events?

No, I don’t think so. The CNN has brought out some news from ambassador Stevens’ diary, which the CNN reporter found in Bengasi. Many questions should be asked about the State Department actions to anticipate and predict what happened. The Embassy in Cairo did some monitoring of the social media networks and tried to prevent demonstrations there,  but it did not get support from the government in Cairo. It is a mystery why Mohammed Morsi took 6-7 hours to send any protection when it should have been there in no more than two hours. That indicates a failure to actually control the police and the Army on the part of Mohammed Morsi’s.

In Libya we know that there was no central Army, there is no police and the weak government was unable to control the militant brigades. The US has utterly failed in understanding the degree of threat posed by militants in Libya. Why they failed I don’t understand, because what we learn from the CNN reports on the basis of Ambassador Stevens’ diary is that Ambassador Stevens knew he was on a hit list by Al Qaeda, which I find very possible.

Al Qaeda has been strong in Libya for a long time. We knew that there were extremist attacks, and this whole organization called Ansar Al Sharia is a rebranding of Al Qaeda affiliates in North Africa. And right now, just as after the terrible shootings in Toulouse in March the French were very keen to say that the killer Mohamed Merah was unpredictable, the State Department is right now deeply invested in saying – I don’t understand why – it was all a surprise and there was no way they could have anticipated while news about Al Qaeda’s presence have been written both in the Guardian and in Foreign Policy for some time. The militants there have carried out previous attacks, they raised the graves of allied soldiers in Benghazi, they have leveled to the ground a Sufi Mosque, there was also a previous attack on the British Ambassador and for some reason the State Department hasn’t been able to add these things up. Even though there was a black flag of the movement outside a compound in Bengasi.

In this situation, the thing that should be useful and important is the presence of a political actor on the Arab side, someone saying «Look people this kind of movie are not the representation of Islam’s perception in the West, it belongs to a minority of provocateurs». There is no such thing though. I talked to a young girl from the Tahrir Square movement and she thinks the same, these are very ordinary simple thoughts. Why there’s no such political player? Could it have been President Morsi?

Morsi has been very busy preparing his trip in the US; this is another reason why I compare him with Mubarak. Why is he so busy traveling to Europe, China and Iran? All of this is a preparation for a trip to the US. He is doing a typical Mubarak thing. He knows that’s where he’s going to get the money, he needs their support. He’s trying to sell himself as expensively as possible and reassuring forces at home that he is not actually becoming an ally of the United States. It’s all a game, he cannot use Chinese military equipment, it would take 25 years for Mohammed Morsi to get the Egyptian military to use Italian gear, he needs military devices and loans from the US, and he’s utterly dependent from them. All of this is a way to throw up smoke screen reassuring the Salafists and conservatives in Egypt that he’s an independent party. But the truth is that the government in Egypt is extremely week.

Do you see any relevant difference between in the role of Muslim Brothers and Salafists in this crisis?

Everybody is exploiting the situation for political purposes. Anybody would tell you that of course yes, this is utterly offensive material – the cartoon, the video – but it is also completely unimportant: they don’t speak about the Western’s perception of Muslims at all, these are extremists on our side. The problem is extremists on both sides have buffered us.

What kind of signal can we broadcast just to moderate the hot reactions?

I think this is all displaced anger. A headline on Al Jazeera said: «Beware of false fury». We have to say again and again that the Evangelical extremists and the Ultrasalafists really have the same goal. The Evangelicals think President Obama is getting too close to islamists in North Africa including Mohammed Morsi and want to split them apart. The Ultrasalafists think Morsi is getting too close to the United States and to President Obama and want to split them apart. We should do as little as possible.

We have to help produce economic stabilization in North Africa, in Egypt in particular. Some sort of security program must be established, possibly with the European assistance. That would help the post-Arab Spring governments to establish authority. Let’s put in an assistance program to built a democratic police force, let the Europeans do some of it, so there won’t be complains that the Americans are doing everything, give little opportunity to exploit anti-American feelings.

Some civilian police force has to be established, law and order and economic development have to be returned as quick as possible. But there is a very serious problem in North Africa right now. It is that the ultra-militants (I’m not talking about the Ultrasalafists here, who are for the most part non-violent) like the Al Qaeda remnants and other groups are very dangerous. A lot of weaponry and arms are floating around, there are brigades and armed gangs traveling in North Africa, Southern Nigeria, Mali, Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, in the Sinai and even Gaza; growing problems are spilling over from Somalia and Yemen. These are wandering brigades of very mixed origins; there are Europeans, Africans, Saudi Arabs ganging behind the black flag.

The role of satellite television has been discussed a lot. What was its function in this crisis? Has it worsened the situation?

No, I don’t think it got worse because of it. Obviously, media competition is a problem; I think influent media are a problem too. I was listening to the BBC and got quite furious because they refer to this stupid video production as an American-made movie; it is nothing of a sort. Why perpetuate the myths of an American produced movie, it’s an amateur movie. It’s just all smoke in the mirrors. That was a mistake of BBC Arabic, Al Jazeera sends mixed messages but they’re fair enough.