Posted on 09/14/2012 2:42:59 AM PDT by Cincinatus' Wife
Winston Churchill once said, “An appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile hoping it will eat him last.” On September 11, Christopher Stevens, a career diplomat, became one of the first Americans in Libya to feed the crocodile of Ansar Al-Sharia and learned too late that while appeasers may hope to be eaten last, they are often eaten first.
Christopher Stevens was a Middle Eastern diplomat who typified the new breed going from the University of Berkeley and the Peace Corps to desks in Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Syria. He taught English to Moroccan children in the Peace Corps and helped Palestinian Arabs in the East Jerusalem Consulate, which has a firm policy of pretending that Israel does not exist.
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said of Christopher Stevens that he “made other people’s hopes his own” and that may serve as a fitting eulogy both for Stevens and for the disastrous foreign policy of making “other people’s hopes” our own that brought on the Arab Spring.
Stevens, like Clinton and Obama, made the hopes of Islamists his own and they repaid him for it, just as Afghans repaid America for supporting them against the Soviet Union, as Lebanon and Somalia repaid America’s peacekeeping efforts by killing American troops and on down the litany of gratitude in bombs and bullets that have come America’s way from the Muslim world.
“He risked his life to stop a tyrant, then gave his life trying to build a better Libya,” Hillary Clinton said, but if anything his murder exposed the lie that there is a better Libya now than there was before Hillary and he intervened in Libya. Clinton’s eulogy comes perilously close to conceding Stevens’ real mission and the degree of American intervention in the overthrow of Gaddafi.
Stevens was the connection between the Islamist Benghazi rebels and the Obama administration’s illegal war to overthrow Gaddafi. His mission, like the true mission of the war, was secret, and the consulate, marginally fortified and devoid of Marines, reflected that secrecy. Stevens did not think that he had anything to fear from the Islamists because they were his friends.
In the Wikileaks cables, Stevens cheerfully described fighters who saw “resistance against coalition forces in Iraq” as “an important act of ‘jihad’” and local businessmen who took pride in the number of suicide bombers who had come out of the area. For years he had walked safely in their company without understanding that he was just as much of a target as a Marine in Baghdad, but without the training, the weapons or the survival skills.
The only reason Christopher Stevens had lasted this long is that the jihadist fighters had known a useful man when they met him. And Stevens proved to be very useful, but his usefulness ended with Gaddafi’s death. Once the US successfully overthrew Gaddafi and began focusing on stabilizing Libya, Stevens ceased to be a useful idiot and became a useless nuisance. Attacks soon followed on the Benghazi consulate and on other consulates as well, but the Marines were not brought in and Stevens continued relying on local goodwill to secure his offices. It was only a matter of time until the attackers got through.
Clinton, her State Department and its media allies appear unnaturally eager to paint Christopher Stevens as an American martyr to the cause of Libyan Islamism, a kinder, gentler Rachel Corrie who willingly died so that the Islamists might have their dream of an Islamic state in Libya.
We will of course never know what was going through Christopher Stevens’ mind on September 11, 2012, as he battled the choking smoke, experiencing what so many New Yorkers had experienced on September 11, 2001. Like them, he was faced with a terrible dilemma, a choice between remaining in the fire and committing suicide by going outside.
Many in the World Trade Center chose to jump to their deaths, but Christopher Stevens chose to remain inside and die rather than face the tender mercies of his attackers. Stevens had spent enough time in Libya to have seen what the jihadist fighters did to their captives and must have known what horrors he could expect at their hands. The photos that have been released, along with claims by Libyan jihadists that they sexually assaulted his corpse, suggest that he made the right choice. And perhaps in those final moments, facing that terrible choice, Christopher Stevens finally understood the true horror of the Muslim world that he had fallen in love with as a Peace Corps volunteer.
“He was an avid student of Islam and the Middle East, and consistently strove to build the proverbial bridge between our two cultures in the face of sometimes overwhelming antagonism and bitter misunderstanding,” a friend from the diplomatic service tells us. But though Christopher Stevens may have studied Islam, he had learned very little about it, and so his final lesson was the bloody one that Westerners who never really learn what Islam is about end up receiving.
“The world needs more Chris Stevenses,” Hillary Clinton said, but does it really? Does it need more tall dead blond Americans lying bloodied in the gutters of Muslim cities? Does it need men who give up the hopes and dreams of their country to take on the dreams of their enemies without ever realizing where the fatal road of those dreams leads?
Stevens’ former Peace Corps colleague says of him, “Chris devoted his career, and life, to improving relations between the Arabic/Islamic world and the West.” That he did and he died doing it, losing whatever career or life he might have had if he had not embarked on a futile errand to make the Muslims who killed him and paraded around his body like him. And like all those who have died over the years in the same cause, the effort was to no avail.
“It’s especially tragic that Chris Stevens died in Benghazi because it is a city that he helped to save,” Obama said, repeating the same lie that he used to drag America into his illegal war. Benghazi was not in any need of saving, it was the Americans who came to Benghazi, like Chris Stevens, who needed saving.
That is the terrible blind spot in our vision which, like Christopher Stevens, tells us that we need to save the Muslims who hate us, rather than showing us that we need to save ourselves.
the truth!
Possibly that hopefulness could become naivete and a false sense of security.
We don't know what kind of resources were available for security upgrades, whether he requested more security and was turned down, or whether it just wasn't a concern for him, whether he knew the risks but couldn't get what he needed to be safe or whether he was foolish and overconfident.
But anybody who took the job, hopeful or not, naive or not, might find himself going to the Benghazi consolate as it was, without much security, if that was what the job demanded.
You may be right, but I'll wait for more information. It's too easy to make him out to be foolish caricature do-gooder -- and it's too soon as well.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/wikileaks-files/libya-wikileaks/8294818/DIE-HARD-IN-DERNA.html
From the original article.
If you read the WIKI leak you will find out the whole thing is Bruce Willis’ fault. What the hell, it’s anybody’s fault but Zero’s.
Well sure, I’m extrapolating some here. You have a Peace Corps volunteer and a guy who spent his life doing outreach to Muslims, working for an administration whose understanding of the world is pretty muddled. He’s in a dangerous place on a dangerous day in an unfortified building with minimal security. It just seems oddly cavalier to me. No doubt we’ll get more background on all of this soon, and I’ll be surprised if a certain amount of naivite on Stevens’ part doesn’t turn out to be a factor.
I read it yesterday. My interpretation of some of it is different from Greenfield’s.
written BEFORE 9/11/01
very precient ... thanks for posting
Huh? Nobody said the Japanese or the Koreans were tribal. They are very ancestor linked, like the pre-Christian Romans, and of course also very class bound.
Tribalism was one of the first things conquered in Europe by Christianity. It took a long time - the further north they went, the more tribal the countries, with Germany being very, very tribal and hostile to Christianity until nearly the 9th century.
However, whatever its problems, Europe ceased to be tribal in many areas with the spread of Christianity and in many others tribalism was already on the decline because of the advance of Roman concepts of citizenship and nation.
It varied in the ME. Tribalism was also something that Judaism ended up fighting against as its concept of tribe expanded beyond that of blood and into those who accepted the Covenant (as Judaism finally began to admit converts, although this was certainly not without opposition). This, of course, was infinitely expanded by Christianity, which was the death of blood-based tribalism.
By the time of the Mohammed, the remaining tribal groups were mostly pagan. Mohammed came from one of these pagan tribes, and his syncretist religion combined tribalism (the special status of being one of his descendants, through one line or another) and beliefs in Arab superiority with the realization that a religious cult provided the best way of subduing other tribes or even states in the undefended, post-Roman world.
Has an autopsy been performed on Mr. Stevens? I heard he died of carbon monoxide poisoning. I hope thats true because it’s heck of lot less painful than the alternative.
Bump and share.
Maybe the story won’t die by Monday, but my son might. He’s in AFG. We are at war. Please adjust your thinking.
I thank your son for his service.
Whether this article is posted on Fri or Mon has no bearing.
The arrogance.......
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fgcd1ghag5Y
There were plenty here and elsewhere who predicted the outcome we are seeing, with Islamists taking power.
Why do we have to pick a side? Why did we intervene in Libya? Without a Congressional vote, by the way. What compelling national interest was involved?
You’re in the right direction, but not quite there.
Stevens was like the “naturalist” in Alaska and his girlfriend who got eaten by the grizzlies.
Wildlife author killed, eaten by bears he loved
Many had warned Treadwell that his encounters with Katmai browns were too close
http://www.adn.com/2003/10/09/43465/wildlife-author-killed-eaten-by.html#storylink=cpy
Post & thread BTTT!
“Genocide?”
Nice try, “x”. Muzzies want genocide or slavery for every last “infidel”, it’s in their Koran.
And try to come up with a more original username.
;^)
Good article. Pulls lots together.
Thanks CW. Posters like you are what make this forum so worthwhile.
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