'This Does Not Represent Us': Moving Photos of Pro-American Rallies in Libya

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Just like not all Americans are like the people who made the weird anti-Islam movie that is sparking protests in Muslim nations, not all people in Libya are like the ones who killed U.S. ambassador Chris Stevens. Some of the people of Benghazi, where Stevens was killed, held a demonstration against terrorism and to show sympathy for the U.S. Libya Alhurra TV, an Internet TV channel founded at the start of the Arab Spring in 2011, posted Facebook photos of a rally there showing support for America and sympathy for Stevens. Here are some of those pictures:

Update: With the help from The Atlantic's multilingual Heather Horn and some Facebook commenters, we have a few translations of the Arabic signs.

Update: In the photo above, the sign held by the man on the far left says "No to al Qaeda, no to violence, this is a youth revolution." (Update II: An astute commenter points out the word is "terrorism," not violence.) The middle one says, "No No No to Al Qaeda." The sign held by the boy on the right is hard to read at this angle, but says something against killing.

From the Facebook page of The Libyan Center for Documentation, more images of the demonstration:

Update III: Reader Aicha Benmansour writes in with some translations. Above, the sign held by the woman on the right "is a Quran verse that says something like: 'Is the reward of goodness but goodness?!' (humble tentative, it's difficult to translate Quran from divine to human words -- it means something like a reminder to reward good by good)." 

Update: The Supreme Security Committee Interim Tripoli has more photos of pro-American demonstrations in Tripoli. 

The Arabic phrase above "Islam against terrorism" says "No to violence." That's on a lot of the signs.

Twitter user @2011feb17 says these photos are from a counter-protest in Algeria square in Tripoli:

Update III: Benmansour explains the sign on the right approximately translates as, "We disapprove/condemn the humiliation of the prophet but NOT with Terrorism."

This article is from the archive of our partner The Wire.