The September 11 murder of U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens, a mob’s sacking of the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, and the attack on the U.S. embassy in Cairo demonstrate the war against terrorism is far from over. Disturbingly, 11 years after al Qaida’s devastating attack on New York and Washington, neither the White House nor the State Department appears to recognize what the fight is about.
As protests erupted outside the U.S. embassy in Cairo, embassy public affairs officer Larry Schwartz tweeted — and then re-tweeted — a condemnation of the controversial film which initial reports suggested motivated the rioters. “We firmly reject the actions by those who abuse the universal right of free speech to hurt the religious beliefs of others,” the embassy’s feed declared. The Arabic tweets were even more fervent: “We vehemently reject the actions of those who abuse the worldwide right to freedom of expression in order to injure the religious beliefs of others.” It would be unfair to make Schwartz the fall guy. After all, the tweets — which Secretary of State Hillary Clinton ordered deleted — were no outlier. Even before the smoke cleared from the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, President Barack Obama effused moral equivalency. “While the United States rejects efforts to denigrate the religious beliefs of others,” he declared, “we must all unequivocally oppose the kind of senseless violence that took the lives of these public servants.”
The idea that the riots were spontaneous shows detachment from the reality of the Middle East. Dozens of heavily armed and murderous Islamists sacking embassies are not flash mobs of teenagers converging on a mall food court. When I lived in pre-war Iraq, the Islamic Republic of Iran, and Yemen, my students and colleagues often spoke of how they had been informed by government representatives where to board buses to attend “spontaneous” rallies to be held the following day.
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