Rice — who reportedly holds no grudges against Clinton [who supposedly did not do the Sunday talk shows following the murder of Ambassador Stevens in Benghazi because she “hates” them]— walked into her fateful Sunday trial with eyes wide open and bent on discussing issues other than the Libya crisis, according to a senior administration official.
The ambassador, who is said to be in the running for the NSA job when Donilon [National Security Advisor Tom Donilon, apparently too shy to do talk shows] steps aide, was alarmed at violent anti-American protests the previous Friday in Tunis, Khartoum and Pakistan.
That was one of the reasons why Rice was so focused on the impact of the video. She believed — and still believes — it was responsible for feeding a larger reservoir of anti-U.S. hatred that ultimately leads to incidents like Benghazi, the official said.
If Rice would bother to pay attention, she would notice the highly selective nature of Muslim outrage, which explodes over cartoons and grotesque videos, but seemingly ignores anything of substance. The real source of much of this Muslim rage is simply confusion over the place of Islam in the modern world—a massive culture clash that often leads frustrated Muslims to define themselves as “not the West,” redefining and reshaping Islamic traditions, often in a deeply reactionary manner—the obsessive subjection of women is a classic example, not to mention the continuous outpouring of anti-Semitic bigotry and hatred.
There is nothing we can do to resolve this. If Muslims wanted to, they could riot over Dante’s portrayal of Mohammed in The Divine Comedy, his damned spirit wandering in one of the deepest circles of Hell, his body physically split in half from head to navel—mutilation being the punishment for having encouraged division in the Christian faith. They would probably object with even greater fervor to Gibbon’s meticulous depiction of the Prophet’s massive sexual appetite—when his many wives (he had more than seven) objected to his taking yet another wife, he told them that Allah had told him in a dream that they would all go to Hell if they didn’t shut up. Does Rice think that we need to rewrite history to make us safe?
We can’t change history, but we can change our current conduct. We can stop subsidizing Israel’s unending settlements. We can stop our massively destructive sanctions against Iran, which we conduct for domestic political reasons rather than anything to do with foreign policy. We can stop our remote-control murders, which have killed hundreds of innocent people. We can’t stop people from making dumb videos, or from drawing funny cartoons, or from telling the truth about the history of Islam. But we can stop killing the innocent just because it pays off on election day.
