In Front Page this morning I discuss how, after aiding the Libyan jihadists, an American diplomat ends up being tortured and murdered by them.
When
the Libyan uprising against Muammar Gaddafi began to gather steam in
April 2011, American diplomat Christopher Stevens was determined to get
there, but it wasn’t easy. “We arrived April 5th,” he later explained.
“It was difficult to get there at the time. There weren’t any flights.
So we came in by a Greek cargo ship and unloaded our gear and our cars
and set up our office there” — in Benghazi, that is, the center of the
uprising.There were already numerous indications that the Libyan rebels were
not the democratically-minded, America-loving pluralists of media myth.
Rolling Stone magazine, of all publications, had warned in their March 21 issue that “America is now at war to protect a Libyan province that’s been an epicenter of anti-American jihad.”That province was Cyrenaica, with its capital Benghazi. Rolling Stone
noted that in 2008, “a West Point analysis of a cache of al Qaeda
records discovered that nearly 20 percent of foreign fighters in Iraq
were Libyans, and that on a per-capita basis Libya nearly doubled Saudi
Arabia as the top source of foreign fighters.” The main source of those
fighters — who mostly became jihad martyrdom suicide bombers, was
Cyrenaica.Stevens” experience of Benghazi, however, was different — or at very
least, the presence of al-Qaeda operatives among the rebels didn’t
trouble him. According to a December 2011 piece in the State
Department’s magazine State,
“Stevens said the Libyans were genuinely grateful to the United States
for supporting their aspirations for freedom, as demonstrated by the
greeting the team received. The Libyans had hoisted British, French,
Qatari and American flags at Freedom Square, the vast open area in front
of the Benghazi courthouse.”There is no way to tell whether any of the Libyans expressing their
gratitude to Stevens in April 2011 were among those who brutally
tortured and murdered him on September 11, 2012, but it’s entirely
within the realm of possibility. Whatever the case, Christopher Stevens
has now become the quintessential symbol of what U.S. foreign policy is
doing vis-a-vis the global jihad, and of what ultimately will be the
outcome for the U.S. if this continues. His story also demonstrates yet
again how the establishment Left creates monsters that then devour their
creators — as well as numerous bystanders.Perhaps the most notorious example of relatively recent times is
Jimmy Carter’s betrayal and abandonment of the Shah of Iran in 1979, in
favor of the Ayatollah Khomeini. Khomeini and his fellow mullahs showed
their gratitude to Carter by storming the U.S. embassy and taking
hostages that they kept until Ronald Reagan’s first Inauguration Day.
Carter had no one but himself to blame for his crushing defeat the
previous November, for there would have been no hostages, and Khomeini
would not have been in Tehran, had it not been for his efforts.Carter would not and did not understand that there was no winning
over a man like Khomeini, for the Ayatollah’s core beliefs included a
hatred and contempt for non-Muslims simply because they were
non-Muslims. No adjustment of their public policies would mitigate that
hatred and contempt, or the warfare and subjugation that followed from
them.