Those Mealy-Mouthed Statements from Our Cairo Embassy

Near
the beginning of Bruce Bawer’s strong new book, The Victims’ Revolution, he talks about the anti-American attitudes
that are nearly mandatory on campuses today and how they radiate throughout our
culture. Those attitudes, inculcated by so many professors, range from
apologetic and guilt-ridden to outright contemptuous and reflexively supportive
of our enemies. The incredibly abject comments from U.S. officials on the
murder of the US ambassador to Libya and the assaults on our embassies in Libya
and Egypt are fairly mild, but still stunning, examples of these attitudes in
action.

What
did the US Embassy in Cairo have to say about the murder of four Americans by
mob violence? It tweeted “U.S. Embassy condemns religious incitement,”
referring to the homemade and obscure anti-Muhammad movie the mob thought
was worth killing for. Nineteen minutes later the embassy thoughtfully added
that it condemns the attack of the mob as well, perhaps because it dawned
on them that self-hatred wasn’t playing well at home. Those early tweets were
deleted, but the official statement from Cairo was just as bad: “We firmly reject the actions by those who abuse the
universal right of free speech to hurt the religious beliefs of others.”
     

These
same attitudes infected the mainstream media as well. The New York Times buried the mob violence and killings at the bottom of Page 4, not
mentioning that an ambassador was killed and assuring any readers who got that
far that anti-American feelings are confined to “pockets” in the Middle east.
On the First Page, however, was a big story that Mitt Romney was not opposed to
the Vietnam war as a college student in 1966. Likewise, o
n Morning Joe the all-lefties panels focused exclusively on Mitt
Romney’s statement, the point of which I 
couldn’t quite figure out from the indignant discussion. Romney’s campaign said: “It’s
disgraceful that the Obama Administration’s first response was not to condemn attacks
on our diplomatic missions, but to sympathize with those who waged the
attacks.” I’m not sure Romney should have jumped in at that point. However, the
statement is clearly sensible and accurate, particularly since the Obama
statement was almost as mealy-mouthed as those from the tragically inept
embassy in
Cairo.

Aki Peritz, a former U.S. intelligence analyst,
had the best comment: “Upon reflection, a future press release might
state, ‘We condemn the morons who overran part of our Embassy earlier today.”
Yes, whatever their hurt feelings are.

 

Author

  • John Leo

    John Leo is the editor of Minding the Campus, dedicated to chronicling imbalances within higher education and restoring intellectual pluralism to our American universities. His popular column, "On Society," ran in U.S.News & World Report for 17 years.

4 thoughts on “Those Mealy-Mouthed Statements from Our Cairo Embassy

  1. I don’t suppose the reason that the Times didn’t report the Ambassador’s murder on the top left of the front page couldn’t possibly have been because the paper paper (as opposed to the online edition) went to press before the news had been released? No. It was clearly a plot by the ever-pervasive left-wing media. That’s a much better explanation.

  2. As long as many Americans deny the truths that are all around them, as long as they prefer to believe the versions of history provided by the media, as long as they just cannot be bothered to get involved in the operation of our government by taking the time to know real facts and then taking the added time to contact those who are supposed to represent our interests and demand that they do their job, unless and until Americans waken to see the manifold threats to our nation and our way of life, the America of our birth will continue to slid in all meas of measure and we will one day waken to find us occupied.

  3. NYT buried the murder of a US ambassador on Page 4, and put a bizarre anti-Romney piece on Page 1?
    And when I was a kid, we had jokes about Pravda…
    The piece is “bizarre” especially because, in 1966, support for the war was still a majority opinion in the US. He was a regular college kid who probably wasn’t part of the emerging “hippie” movement, and just going to school, looking at graduate programs.

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