Playing With Rattlesnakes: US Ambassador , 3 Others Murdered In Libya

Along with the attack on our embassy in Cairo yesterday, there was a far more serious one at our embassy in Libya, which left Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other embassy personnel dead.

The actual facts are a bit murky, something that could be said of our entire involvement in Libya.

The official excuse given was an obscure film about Mohammed that Islamist clerics used to enrage the crowds at the local mosques, even though none of them had actually seen the movie. Of course, as military analyst Col. Ralph Stevens astutely pointed out this morning on talk show host Heidi Harris' show, this was really about 9/11, just as the one in Egypt was...because much of the Muslim world looks on 9/11 as a victory for Islam over the west and America.

In Libya, the attackers used automatic weapons and RPG's to attack the embassy. Reuters has eyewitnesses who claim the Libyan security personnel simply ran away after evacuating the American personnel to a second supposed safe house, which the attackers then found. Ambassador Stevens and several others were apparently killed by an RPG fired at their car when they were returning to help with evacuating the personnel still in the safe house.

CBS news had a slightly different story, reporting that the Libyan security men evacuated the Americans to a safe house and then told the mob exactly where they were before fleeing, and that Stevens and the others were murdered inside the second building.

The two accounts are not mutually exclusive except for the details on how Ambassador Stevens and th eother three embassy personnel were murdered. But they do differ severely from President Obama's account in his remarks this morning, where he stated explicitly that the Libyan security guards fought the rioters. If they did, they certainly didn't fight very hard, since no casualties among them were reported.

President Obama also said this morning that the Libyan security people 'carried Ambassador Stevens to a hospital'. The above photos show what actually happened, and they look more like the body was paraded through the streets in classic Arab fashion as several sources recounted, and not by uniformed Libyan security. However, I can appreciate President Obama's desire to be diplomatic and attempt to put a good face on this.

The president said that our ties with Libya would continue (translation: our aid money will keep flowing) and that he would be working with the Libyans to ' bring justice to killers who attack our people" adding, "There is absolutely no justification to this type of senseless violence. None."

For its part, the Libyan government has officially apologized for the incident, with its interim president Mohammed el-Megarif calling the attack cowardly and saying, "We extend our apology to America, the American people and the whole world."

That's certainly more than the Egyptians have done.

But this leads us to the meat of the matter.

Much is being made over the fact by President Obama and Secretary of State Clinton that these attacks were committed by a small group of 'extremist Muslims' and are unusual. In fact they are all too usual and there are a significant number of Muslims who approve of these and similar actions. Whether President Obama wants to recognize it or not, these atrocities are characteristic of Islam in our times.

No American embassies were destroyed or diplomats murdered in strongly Catholic Latin America over ' The Last Temptation of Christ' or death sentences issued over Dan Brown's novels. No Muslim diplomats were murdered in Christian countries after 9/11, the British tube bombings, Beslan, Mumbai or any of the numerous atrocities committed in the last decade by Muslims on unbelievers.

No Muslim diplomats were murdered anywhere in Buddhist countries after the centuries old Buddha statues in Afghanistan were destroyed by the Taliban.

Islam is different. That's what no one dares admit. And the implications of that are so frightening for many people that it's far easier to simply ignore them.

This difference is readily apparent if you peruse different religious scriptures and compare them to the the Qu'ran and Hadiths.

Or to make it even simpler, just compare the life and deeds of Mohammed, the Muslim paradigm with those of Christ, Moses or Buddha. The very frame of reference is different. Yet we keep trying to explain the Muslim mindset in terms of our own values.

Many Muslims who live in the west have been able to make that shift. Unfortunately for them and us, their view is one that's being swiftly eroded in the west itself because of our stupidity in allowing countries like Saudi Arabia to fund mosques and madrassahs en masse here in the west that indoctrinate younger Muslims in exactly the religious tenets that provide Muslims religious justification for slavery, murder, and hatred of non-Muslims.

Again, Islam is different. The sooner we face up to that fact, the sooner we'll be able to deal with it's differences and what they entail conclusively and constructively.

As for Ambassador Stevens and the other three victims of jihad, my heart goes out to them and their loved ones. They did their jobs, I'm sure, with competence, exceptional dedication and great diligence, but I doubt they understood that it really involved living among a nest of rattlesnakes until the moment the embassy was attacked and they saw the true nature of what they had likely been glossing over for some time.

Would that we would learn from that mistake.