Robert Spencer’s take on murder of Christopher Stevens is the same as mine

It’s not nice for an American to say, as I’ve said, that a U.S. ambassador foolishly empowered the very people who murdered him, and thus in effect he brought on his own death. But it’s true. And Robert Spencer says the same in the title of his FrontPage Magazine article, “Christopher Stevens: Devoured by a Monster He Helped Create.”

He writes:

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. [LA replies: Unfortunately, Spencer, an employee of David Horowitz, repeats here the standard, deeply dishonest conservative line that the current catastrophe of resurgent empowered jihadism in the Muslim world has been facilitated only by “the Left,” i.e. by Obama and the Democrats, not by former President Bush, the Republican party, and the mainstream conservative/neoconservative movement. In reality, leading Republicans and the neoconservatives not only supported Obama’s toppling of friendly governments for the sake of Muslim “democracy,” which inevitably meant sharia government, but kept attacking him for not doing it fast enough.]

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.

Christopher Stevens, and those for whom he worked, have long made the same mistake, assuming that hearts and minds initiatives and gestures of good will toward the Islamic world will eventually pay off in reciprocal action. What happened to Stevens instead, however, is more indicative of how they actually pay off.

What happened to Stevens is a microcosm of what is happening to the country in general. Christopher Stevens, after aiding the Libyan jihadists, ended up being tortured and murdered by them. And with this murder the Obama administration’s folly in aiding the “Arab Spring” uprisings is laid bare. Just as Stevens rushed to Libya to aid the forces that ended up murdering him, so also the U.S. rushed to aid rebels in Egypt and Syria, as well as Libya, thereby installing regimes that are proving to be much, much more anti-American than those they supplanted. The monster unleashed in the Arab Spring has already begun to devour its chief benefactor.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at September 13, 2012 12:02 PM | Send