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.
In 19th century literature, this was the concept of “the noble savage.”
Never mind the syphilis, the scalpings and the cannibalism; these people are pure and untainted by our depraved culture. Aren’t they wonderful? More to the point, aren’t *I* even more wonderful to discern this?
Well at least he died doing what he loved to do. We can all take comfort in that.
Yes, the cables will reveal the truth.
Here's the fatal mistake for decent people everywhere......believing any other human culture or religious community can peacefully coexist with Islam. Has it ever happened anywhere in the world? In their febble brains they believe they have the right to determine the faith path of every other human being on the earth. That is repugnant.
*Bump!*
Islam delenda est.
Brilliant. But he left out sodomy.
Seems to me there’s a domestic lesson to be learned. Back here in America, we’re being told it’s just HORRIBLE to offend Islam. This, in the throes of this man’s unspeakable fate. Now that millions of Muslims live in America, we have a domestic problem as well, do we not?
What has happened is that the power of Liberalism to re-make society from the top down is on full parade. It isn’t a reflection of the American people. It’s a reflection of the mind of Liberals and their hands on the levers of power to make it happen. The same mindset that led to HIS death is behind Moochelle’s drive to control what we can choose to eat.
Internal contradictions in what Liberals believe, ABOUND. They tout gay marriage and women’s and sexual “liberation”” and they are very HOLLYWOOD in their morals (which means almost no morals at all). Yet tell us we must accommodate to a religion that does “honor killings” of females and follows Sharia Law.
When they are in charge, NOTHING makes sense.
I don’t know about you, but in addition to America being in peril, another thing that animates my reaction to them is, I have always hated things that MAKE NO SENSE.
I was raised to make sense of things and came of age when American society - imperfectly of course - did!
General George Patton once said,”If you’re nice to a skunk, he won’t piss on you. As often.”
Stevens helped a bunch of savages overthrow the government that kept them in check. There wasn’t much to like about Daffy, but he was still better than what replaced him. He died a horrible death for his misplaced idealism.
I DO mourn the two marines and the tech that the scum murdered, though, and for them I’d raze Benghazi and Tripoli.
Excellent piece. And your comment about Rousseauian Third Worldism is right on target. Stevens was a less militaristic version of T.E. Lawrence or any of the other civilized, genteelly brought up, well educated young men of the West who fell in love with the exotic and for some reason couldn’t understand that the very things they liked and projected on these hostile cultures actually came from their own Western cultural heritage. Islamic and all Third World cultures possess only tribal values; the west, thanks to the cumulative influences of Greco-Roman thought, Judaism and Christianity, focus on human values and the values of individuals in a community, rather than the savage anonymous “values” of a tribe.
That said, however, I still feel rather badly for all thse foolish people when they meet up with the brutal Third World or Muslim reality. The biggest failure here is not that of the sad, foolish Stevens, but of our US government, which is supposed to protect and promote US interests (including our legal and governmental system) abroad and instead has devoted itself to turning into one large-scale, institutional Stevens.
Dinesh D’Souza was absolutely correct about Obama, the ultimate Third Worldist.
I have always hated that also. But that is part of their power. You truly have power over people when you can get them to consider, tolerate, and eventually parrot things that MAKE NO SENSE. Ultimate submission.
I am not sure they picked on him because just because he was Stevens. I think they picked on him because he was in a vulnerable location and easy to get to.
BTT
“I am not sure they picked on him because just because he was Stevens. I think they picked on him because he was in a vulnerable location and easy to get to.”
Similar to the questions I still have.....was this a planned trip of Stevens’ that Libyan security knew about in advance? Someone (or more than one) in Libyan security betrayed him. Was it before he got there, or just after?
Was the original target of the attack the embassy or was it specifically to get Stevens?
Yes. I agree with you. The passion for “Otherness” has been a conceit of the White Western Culture for well over a century. In Gilbert & Sullivan’s “THE MIKADO” Koko the Executioner sings of this type as being one who “would not be missed”:
“The idiot who praises
with enthusiastic tone,
All centuries but this,
And every country but his OWN.”
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