It’s a long, long way from John Bolton. This morning, Susan Rice, U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, made the rounds on television talk shows. She was peddling the administration’s desperate fantasy narrative that the murders on September 11 (September 11, Kemo Sabe!) of four U.S. diplomats, including Ambassador Chris Stevens, were not premeditated attacks. No, no. That would have been impossible. We had it on the highest authority, namely from El Presidente himself, that the day he was inaugurated “Muslim hostility will cease.” So: those couple hundred chaps, with RPGs in tow, “spontaneously” assembled outside the consulate in Benghazi. Apparently, they just spontaneously knew the ambassador would be there, even though the visit was “confidential.” They also spontaneously knew the layout of the compound and the location of his safe house. I guess there must also be some way to spontaneously equip yourself with RPGs and (according to some reports) mortars in that poverty-stricken city. It’s by no means clear that anyone in Libya had actually seen the 13-minute video Innocence of Muslims. But according to Ambassador Rice, that amateur work of anti-Muslim propaganda was so powerful that it precipitated the spontaneous attack.
Take a look at the clips: You can almost see Ambassador Rice asking herself, “I wonder if they’ll buy it?”
The president of Libya didn’t. Like most people who have bothered to review the incident, he concluded that the attacks were “no doubt” premeditated.
Indeed. But the miasma of official mendacity lies thick and acrid about this whole incident. Consider, to take only what I think is the single most repellent bit of truth twisting, Secretary of State Hillary’s Clinton’s plaintive observation that “Libyans carried Chris’s body to the hospital.”
Pause to wipe a tear and sigh over the spectacle of brotherhood Secretary Clinton had conjured up. The idea was that the people we had (as Secretary Clinton put it) “liberated” joined together in sorrow and respect to bear the body of their country’s guest to a hospital.
That, as Mark Steyn noted, is “one way of putting it.” Secretary Clinton did not accompany her statement with any photographs. Indeed, the Obama administration pleaded with news outlets not to publish any photographs. I think you’ll understand why. Here’s one:
“Libyans carried Chris’s body to the hospital.” Maybe they ended up at the hospital, but that was after they dragged the dead or nearly dead body of Chris Stevens triumphantly through the streets of Benghazi, snapping pictures of the fallen American with their iPhones.
As Mark goes on to observe,
The photographs at the Arab TV network al-Mayadeen show Chris Stevens’s body being dragged through the streets, while the locals take souvenir photographs on their cell phones. A man in a red striped shirt photographs the dead-eyed ambassador from above; another immediately behind his head moves the splayed arm and holds his cell-phone camera an inch from the ambassador’s nose. Some years ago, I had occasion to assist in moving the body of a dead man: We did not stop to take photographs en route. Even allowing for cultural differences, this looks less like “carrying Chris’s body to the hospital” and more like barbarians gleefully feasting on the spoils of savagery.
“Gleefully feasting on the spoils of savagery.” That sums up the foreign fruits of Barack Obama’s accommodationist policy toward Islam. At home, meanwhile, we have the spectacle of a midnight raid by brownshirted enforcers to arrest the man whose crime was making a video that El Presidente didn’t like:
We also have the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff calling Rev. Terry Jones, a private citizen, to cajole him into withdrawing his support for the video.
The former outrage is beginning to attract some of the outrage and disgust it deserves. The action of General Martin Dempsey, however, has yet to receive the public outcry it deserves. I remember once when I was flown out for an overnight visit to an aircraft carrier I was surprised that everyone, even high-ranking officers, addressed me deferentially as “Sir.” I asked the lieutenant commander who was shepherding me around about it. “All civilians outrank us,” he explained. “We work for you.” Somehow, I don’t think General Dempsey sees it that way. Which is another reason he should resign.
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