What was the commander-in-chief of the United States armed forces doing through the night of September 11, 2012, while he knew Americans were under jihadist siege in Libya? You won’t learn the answer to that question by reading the mini-book-length, six-“chapter” revisionist history of the Benghazi massacre cooked up by David D. Kirkpatrick and the New York Times.
The Times report is a labor of love in the service of President Obama and, in particular, the Hillary Clinton 2016 campaign ramp-up. Former secretary of state Clinton, of course, was a key architect of Obama’s Libya policy. She was also chiefly responsible for the protection of American personnel in that country, including our murdered ambassador, J. Christopher Stevens, and the three other Americans killed by Muslim terrorists — State Department technician Sean Smith and a pair of former Navy SEALs, Glen Doherty and Tyrone Woods. Still, theTimes is banking on your not noticing that in its laborious 7,500 words, Kirkpatrick’s account utters the word “Clinton” exactly . . . wait for it . . . zero times.
The word “Obama” comes in for a mere six mentions, four of which are impersonal references to the current administration. The other two are telling, though fleeting.
One is a rehearsal of the president’s vow to exact “justice” against anyone found responsible for this “terrible act” of killing four Americans, including the formal representative of our nation. As it happens, the only person on the planet to have felt the lash of Obama’s justice is Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, the California-based “producer” who filmed the infamous “anti-Mohammed” movie trailer, Innocence of Muslims. In a despicable violation of constitutional free-speech principles, and a bow to sharia blasphemy rules that forbid criticism of Islam, Obama and Clinton publicly portrayed Nakoula and his “film” as the Benghazi culprits — implicitly accepting the Islamic-supremacist premise that verbal insults, no matter how obscure and trifling, justify mass-murder attacks.
In large part, the Times’ autopsy is a futile attempt to breathe new life into this demeaning farce. But Mr. Kirkpatrick is subtler about it than Obama and Clinton. He refers to the trailer as lighting “the fuse” that purportedly contributed to the attack — even the Times cannot quite bring itself to claim the trailer led to the attack. By contrast, Obama and Clinton (a) conspired to defraud the nation into believing the trailer was the singular, proximate cause — then dispatched their minion, Ambassador Susan Rice, to do their dirty work on the Sunday shows; (b) jointly appeared in a preening commercial aired on Islamic (but not American) television to stress that the U.S. government had no part in the video (translation: We elevate sharia blasphemy standards over the Bill of Rights guarantees the U.S. government exists to ensure); (c) told family members of our Benghazi dead that they would get, not the terrorists, but the man responsible for the video; and (d) then trumped up a prosecution against Nakoula: The Justice Department arrested him in the dead of night, imprisoning him on a bogus “violation of supervised release” that no experienced prosecutor would regard as meriting such severe treatment . . . but that could conveniently be portrayed to Muslim countries as the administration’s enforcement of sharia against Americans.
Kirkpatrick’s other mention of President Obama alludes to the president’s policy of supporting what the Times gently calls Libyan “militiamen” — translation: a gaggle of Muslim groups prominently including rabidly anti-American jihadists — in their “uprising against Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi.” It is a passing reference, and fittingly so. After all, this exercise in revisionism is a politically motivated whitewash. In point of fact, Obama’s reckless Libya policy, part of his broader appeasement of Islamic supremacists, is the heart of the matter.
On that score, the Times may soon be able to run another bells-’n’-whistles story headlined “Mission Accomplished!”
Don’t get me wrong. Kirkpatrick’s account is absurd. Its two themes — namely, that the trailer really did have some causal connection to the massacre and that al-Qaeda really did not partake in the Benghazi attack — do not pass the laugh test. They have been ably refuted by Tom Joscelyn, Eli Lake, Steve Hayes, and theeditors of National Review, to cite four of the best rebuttals.
As far as the trailer goes, it should be unacceptable in a civilized society to contend that a movie can “light the fuse” to a murderous assault. And in this instance, as I’ve previously demonstrated, the trailer was not even “responsible” for theSeptember 11 rioting at the American embassy in Cairo, as the Times-approvedsoap-opera script maintains, much less for the coordinated Benghazi attack several hours later. The anti-Mohammed video has never been anything but a pretext for Islamic-supremacist savagery — a rationalization aggressively peddled by the Obama-Clinton State Department.
As for the Times’ exculpation of al-Qaeda, it doesn’t even comport with the Grey Lady’s own prior reporting. It is, more to the point, a continuation of what we’ve been arguing in this space for over a decade now: What knits together the global jihad is Islamic-supremacist ideology — mainstream Middle Eastern Islam, directly traceable to Koranic scripture. The organizational niceties and shifting loyalties of jihadist groups are a sideshow — including what it has become fashionable to call “core al-Qaeda” and its expanding array of franchises, tentacles, and wannabes.
So why do I say, “Mission Accomplished”? Because the objective of Kirkpatrick’s novella is not to persuade; it is to shrink the parameters of newsworthy inquiry to a punctilious debate over nonsense: The cockamamie trailer and the dizzying jihadist org chart.
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