Whistling Past the Graveyard

The Obama Administration's attempt to say that this conflagration in the Middle East is just outrage over the film and not anti-Americanism per se, is utter nonsense.  Very little of the graffiti scrawled on walls near our embassies even mentioned the film, except indirectly by saying that we Americans have insulted their prophet.  Most of it was sheer unadulterated hatred towards America and the west.

What may I ask, does Germany have to do with this film by an American crank?

The details of the assassination of our ambassador by Al-Quaeda-like armed militants will most likely support the assessment that this attack was well planned and carried out under the cover of a supposedly spontaneous protest against the film.  Details are already getting out that some members of the consulate staff were killed or injured at or near a safe house.  Now how did these militants know about that safe house?  And how was it that they were apparently prepared and waiting with grenade launchers and other arms near the safe house when the American convoy showed up?   Wasn't very safe, I guess.  Reports are also now circulating that there had been several previous attempts to attack the consulate in Benghazi.

And the timing of September 11?  Is that a coincidence?  Apparently, the supposedly outrageous film had been on YouTube since July.  How come no "outrage" before then?   This was all clearly orchestrated to ignite and incite the Muslim masses on 9/11/2012 and, in the case of Benghazi, to provide fog-of-war cover -- in this case fog of civil unrest -- to hide the murderous attack of the terrorists.

Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood President Morsi called for a million-man demonstration on Friday but then called it off at the last minute.  Perhaps he received a phone call from the US State Department threatening to cut off all aid to Egypt.  I hope so.  I hope the State Department did that.

While the left was giddy with glee about the prospects of "Arab Spring" and thought it proof that if you are nice to the Muslim world, they will suddenly embrace you and your values of liberty with open arms, more sober minds were more cautious.  Over a year ago Dennis Prager wrote and article about this.
There he gives 8 reasons to be skeptical about the "Arab Spring" that was just beginning.  Reason #4 is this:  "Neither liberty nor tolerance has roots in the Arab world."


But the left-leaning main stream media has ignored this, of course, and now we are seeing that Prager and others were right.

Prager's Reason #8 was: "Egypt is saturated with Jew and Israel hatred."   The hatred of Jews is about as old as Islam itself and the hatred of Zionists in general and Israel in particular stems from the early part of the 20th century.  Obama's Mideast Policy could fairly be summed up with a slight parody on Woodrow Wilson's view of WWI:  To make the Mideast safe for Jew haters.

From a BBC article posted today:  "According to a June 2012 Pew survey, just 15% of those in Muslim countries held a favourable opinion of the United States, compared to 25% in 2009."

Another maxim that seems to characterize the naivete of President Obama is that "Fools rush in where angels fear to tread."  Probably the biggest let down for the young Egyptians who were perhaps inspired by Mr. Obama's Cairo speech, was that this president is great at giving speeches but much less than great when it comes to following up with action.  Now the Muslim Brotherhood has run roughshod over the secular idealists in Eqypt and Mr. Obama is nowhere to be seen.  So much for democracy!

All of this is very reminiscent of Iran in 1979, when Jimmy Carter's ambassador to the UN Ambassador Andrew Young praised Khomeini's "revolution."   An analysis of US naivete towards Iran during their "revolution" is giving in this article.

The tendency toward wishful thinking continued even after the revolution in February 1979. Whereas Tehran increasingly viewed the U.S. through the darkly hued optic of its paranoid phantasms and loudly demonized America as its Enemy No. 1, Washington plugged its ears and looked back through rose-colored glasses. The American Representative to the UN, Andrew Young, described Khomeini as “some kind of saint,” while National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski was favorably disposed toward him, since he seemed to Brzezinski to represented an effective barrier against Soviet influence. “We can get along with Khomeini!” was the motto in that summer of 1979.

Will we never learn from history?

Marc Steyn says:

The 400-strong assault force in Benghazi showed up with RPGs and mortars: that's not a spontaneous movie protest; that's an act of war, and better planned and executed than the dying superpower's response to it. Clinton and Dempsey are, to put it mildly, misleading the American people when they suggest otherwise.

One can understand why they might do this, given the fiasco in Libya. The men who organized this attack knew the ambassador would be at the consulate in Benghazi rather than at the embassy in Tripoli. How did that happen? They knew when he had been moved from the consulate to a "safe house," and switched their attentions accordingly.

How did that happen? The U.S. government lost track of its ambassador for 10 hours. How did that happen? Perhaps, when they've investigated Mitt Romney's press release for another three or four weeks, the court eunuchs of the American media might like to look into some of these fascinating questions, instead of leaving the only interesting reporting on an American story to the foreign press.