Greenfield on Stevens

Here are excerpts from Daniel Greenfield’s September 14 FrontPage Magazine article, “Christopher Stevens Feeds the Crocodile.” Like me and some others, Greenfield sees Stevens as a man who blindly brought on his own death by aligning himself with our mortal enemies:

“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….

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….

“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?…

“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.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at September 16, 2012 04:50 PM | Send