The browser tabs I’d left open last night about the embassy attacks are all tragically out-of-date this morning. As you know, our ambassador to Libya, Christopher Stevens, and three others were killed in an RPG attack as they attempted to flee their burning consulate building in Benghazi.
This, I suppose, is what we bought with “leading from behind” as the West helped Libyan Islamists topple the occasionally-deadly-yet-comic-opera government of Muammar Gaddafi. A paraphrase of Dave Mason is in order: “There ain’t no good guys, and there still ain’t no good guys.”
Remember how the Palestinians danced in the streets on 9/11/2001? Well, their allies now own the streets in Tunisia, Libya, and Egypt. And probably soonish in Syria, too. Imagine a new Caliphate, forming a crescent from Tunis to Aleppo, interrupted only by the slender reed of Israel. Not the high civilization Caliphate of the Abbasids or the Fatimids, but something seething and violent and increasingly hungry — and lacking any real central control. I don’t expect the lines on the maps to disappear between the various countries, but they may cease to exist in practice.
Roger L. Simon read the news and has a message for “my fellow Jews who are currently in the Democratic Party or supporting it.” He continues:
How do you sleep?
I’m talking to you David Axelrod, Charles Schumer, and even you, Alan Dershowitz, who made such a big (and welcome) noise when Jerusalem, Hamas, and the “law of return” were left out of the Democratic Party platform for the first time in years and then went suddenly silent when only the first of the three was reinstated.
How about you, Rahm Emanuel, son of the Irgun and one-time volunteer with the IDF? How would you feel if a dirty nuke, slipped by the Revolutionary Guard into the hands of their buddies in Hezbollah, detonated on Dizengoff Street?
And then there’s Jack Lew, Orthodox and the president’s very own chief of staff, sometimes referred to as “The Gate Keeper” or “The Co-President.”
Roger is speaking of the danger of a Second Holocaust, a nuclear holocaust, to the Jews of Israel. That’s a real concern, but not yet a concrete one — the Iranians, fortunately, still have a ways to go before they build launchable nukes. And I trust Benjamin Netanyahu to do what is necessary. The more immediate concern is the continuing collapse of central authority in the populous heart of the Arab world, and what might replace it.
And there’s really no intervention possible to us. The place is too big, the people are too many, our troops are too few, and our will is non-existent. There’s a certain vacuum of leadership in Washington, too — an empty chair, if you will.
Is all this doom & gloom too much to read into a couple of attacks on American embassies? Certainly. But it’s not just this attack or that protest or another government falling. It’s decades worth of watching Arabs strike out in protest against a modern world which their governments and their religious leaders have left them unable to cope with. Like protestors in this country who burn their own neighborhoods, the Arab Street has been burning down entire nations. What will emerge from the ashes will likely be uglier and crdueler even than what preceded it.
CORRECTION: Ambassador Stevens was smothered to death. Pictures and video at the link.
Barbaric.
What kind of tiny little god gets so upset over a movie?
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