Mark Steyn:

the Egyptian president demands the arrest of an obscure American who made an unseen film. And whaddayaknow? Next thing that happens, back in the land of the free, a large posse of heavily armed officers descends on his apartment at midnight so that he can be “voluntarily” taken into custody for alleged “probation violations” – because, as everyone knows, in civilized societies breach-of-probation orders are always served at midnight on a weekend when the dark is so much more conducive to persuading householders to “volunteer”.

Look at Jonah’s post immediately below; look at the picture. What a pity Ambassador Stevens didn’t enjoy the same level of “protection” as Mr Nakoula. Why, if only the United States could bring the same amount of firepower to bear in its Benghazi compound as it brings to a probation-violation arrest in Cerritos. But it’s all about priorities, isn’t it?

Any curiosity about that? Apparently not, judging from Scarborough’s nothing-to-see-here tweets.

Jim Bennett compares Mrs Thatcher’s response to the Ayatollah Khomeini’s Rushdie fatwa with Obama’s to the Muslim Brotherhood’s demands. Salman Rushdie had been a vicious critic of the Conservative Party and the Prime Minister – he called her “Mrs Torture” – but Her Majesty’s Government has provided him with safe houses and Special Branch protection for almost a quarter-century. By contrast, within 72 hours of Morsi’s demands, Mr Nakoula is in a jail cell – “rounded up at midnight by brownshirted men for making a movie that embarrasses El Presidente“.

I want to know who ordered the FBI to the house.

[Update a few minutes later]

An evil errand:

The essential task of diplomacy is to preserve the security and stability of the international system. By affirming that the “trigger” for the violence in Muslim countries was the conduct of private people in the United States, what the administration has done is to make its international relations officially subject to private conduct. But few principles could be more dangerous for the international system.

A main reason we maintain diplomatic practice is precisely to immunize international relations from popular disruptions. The wall between the U.S. government and protected speech here at home must be as inviolable as the wall between U.S. embassies and the Arab street. Indeed, they are the same wall, meant to accomplish the same separation.

For the U.S. government to try to manage the social psychology of perpetually aggrieved Arabs by interfering in constitutionally protected private conduct is not just a fool’s errand. It is an evil errand, for it makes our government the tool of enemies who seek our submission. And it ignores the very dangerous development we are witnessing, which is the apparent breakdown of our ability to maintain safe embassies in the Muslim world. That breakdown is an institutional failure of other governments, and of our own. It has absolutely nothing to do with any spoofs of any deity, nor with whatever dumb reason may be motivating hateful people to get violent on the Arab street.

Appalling.

[Update a few minutes later]

The Middle East’s peculiar institution:

The past week’s unrest (and the earlier Mohammed-cartoon riots and all the rest) represent the Islamic attempt at a Dred Scott decision — i.e., in both cases sweeping away rules (whether the Missouri Compromise prohibitions on slavery or the First Amendment guarantee of free speech) that seek to limit the spread of the peculiar institution in question. The analogy would appear pretty strong: Just as post offices in the South were prohibited from distributing anti-slavery material, web sites in the Middle East may not question the historicity of the Koran. Just as a mob murdered abolitionist publisher Elijah P. Lovejoy in a free state, filmamker Theo van Gogh was murdered by a Muslim in Amsterdam.

And it’s no coincidence that the partisan reactions to these challenges are the same. On the Republican side, minority factions want rollback, while the dominant share want containment, secure “in the belief that it is in the course of ultimate extinction.” Likewise, a faction of Democrats actively promotes or promoted slavery and Islamism, while the rest were/are clueless appeasers, failing to understand that eventually we had to become all one thing, or all the other.

An interesting analogy.

The pre-modern Middle East and the postmodern west don’t mix, Mr. President.

He has delusions on many subjects.

It seems to have created a huge speed bump when Obama threw it under the bus.

Not that this is anything new, of course.

[Saturday morning update]

Kirsten Powers: “Mr. President, stop blaming the victim.”

Less than two months for our opportunity to make this constitution contempting, lawless administration history.

Soul brothers.

They are both shameful and shameless.

It’s just part of the larger war:

What are the Libyan government’s options? It can try to appease the opposition by more Islam. But that won’t work really. It can try to appease the opposition by distancing itself from the United States, but given its weakness that won’t work. And it can try to repress the rebels, but since it cannot depend on its own military forces — which are riddled with jihadists — that won’t work either.

That is the real lesson in Libya. For once, Obama took sides against the revolutionary Islamists. We are seeing in Egypt and the Gaza Strip that appeasement doesn’t work; we are seeing in Libya that engaging in conflict has its high costs, too. Obama claims to have “liberated” Libya, but to many Libyans he has enslaved it to infidels.

So what next? American military aid to the Libyan government and U.S. military advisors? An endless war against the jihadists? And what if the government in Libya, which is pretty fragile and cannot fully depend on its own military, starts to fall? In Somalia, the local al-Qaeda branch didn’t win only because Ethiopia and other African nations sent in thousands of troops. In Bahrain — a complicated situation in which there is a mistreated Shia population whose opposition has both moderates and radicals — the government was only saved by Saudi troops and against the will of the White House.

Treating what has happened in Libya as an isolated tragedy misses the point. Viewing it as generalized proof of Obama’s terrible policy doesn’t get us to the solution. There is a battle going on in the Middle East that will continue for decades. Obama has largely helped the enemy side. In Libya, while he gave some help to the Islamists, his basic policy supported the moderates for once. Now the price must be paid or one more country will fall to revolutionary Islamist rule and U.S. influence and credibility will decline even further.

This is a war, not a misunderstanding. It is a battle of ideologies and a struggle for control of state power, not hurt feelings over some obscure video.

And it’s a war that the administration pretends doesn’t exist, and (like all foreign wars) certainly doesn’t want to win.

Read all, it also has a well-justified criticism of our anti-Israel foreign service.

[Update a while later]

Mark Steyn: An act of war, not a movie protest.

As Glenn Reynolds has said for years, a repeat of the Carter administration was a best-case scenario. Will this administration’s epitaph be bloody handprints?

[Update a while later]

…by standing up for it:

William Saletan, I am fairly confident, would be quite effusive in describing all the manifold ways in which the Christian mind is “closed” and “hidebound” and “haunted by superstition.” He would, I’m reasonably certain, be quite in favor of any artistic project which undermined the foundations of Christian thought.

And yet, when we turn to fundamentalist Islam, he becomes… a censor. He becomes not an agent of the Inquisition per se, but a bit of a fanboy of it.

And why? Why the anger directed towards someone who is doing what Saletan would almost certainly praise were it directed at any other religion?

I think I know. There is a line of magnificent wisdom in the film The Spanish Prisoner (by David Mamet). It is spot-on about human nature.

The circumstances of the quote are that a young financial wizard has created a “Process” which is worth, literally, trillions. However, it was created as work-for-hire. He created it, but the company owns it. And he’s wondering if the company will actually compensate him for it, as they have promised.

Steve Martin gives him the bad news (paraphrased): “I think if they have a moral obligation to you but not a legal one you will begin to find them behaving cruelly towards you. You will find them treating you poorly, isolating you, speaking badly about you when you are not present. Even as they decide to stiff you out of what they owe you, they will compound that with bad manners and worse intent. They will not be apologetic about it; they will become increasingly hateful towards you.”

The reason is this: When people know they have a moral obligation towards someone which they do not feel like honoring, for reasons of personal interest, or personal safety, or personal political agenda, they feel awfully bad about themselves for not honoring the moral obligation. They feel awfully bad that they are ignoring a moral obligation in favor of their own personal interests.

And people do not like feeling bad about themselves.

So what people do, is this: They begin demonizing the person to whom they have an inconvenient moral obligation, convincing themselves that he is in fact the Bad Guy because, hey, he makes them feel bad. So he must be the bad guy.

Put more simply, people like this are cowards. And the hypocrisy of these people who hate religion in all forms, other than Islam, is sickening.

…is over. And the emperor is publicly defrocked just in time for the election.

[Update a couple minutes later]

“Good thing we don’t have that dumb cowboy in charge….”

[Update a while later]

Obama’s great Islamist delusion comes home to roost.

[Update a couple minutes later]

The Germans are on to the fraud, too:

US President Barack Obama’s Middle East policy is in ruins. Like no president before him, he tried to win over the Arab world. After some initial hesitation, he came out clearly on the side of the democratic revolutions. … In this context, he must accept the fact that he has snubbed old close allies such as Israel, Saudi Arabia and the Egyptian military. And now parts of the freed societies are turning against the country which helped bring them into being. Anti-Americanism in the Arab world has even increased to levels greater than in the Bush era. It’s a bitter outcome for Obama.

Gee, some of us were saying that four years ago…

In Libya.