ROGER COHEN: Our Man in Benghazi

 The New York Times                   September 13, 2012

LONDON — Chris Stevens, the American ambassador to Libya killed in an attack on the consulate in Benghazi, represented the best of the U.S. Foreign Service. He was smart, dedicated and adroit. He loved his work and believed in its capacity for good. He knew history’s hold on Middle Eastern minds yet dismissed the notion that ancient conflict was insurmountable. Other cultures fascinated him even as his own inspired him. No American did more to end the tyranny of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi. Like most brave people he had a great sense of humor.

The fanatics who killed him represented the worst of Islam. They attacked the consulate in the midst of Muslim outrage over an amateurish American video portraying the Prophet Muhammad as a buffoon of indiscriminate and consuming sexual appetites. But no religious affront, however vile, can justify killing of a kind that jihadists have made only too familiar over the past two decades.

The makers, funders and promoters of the video, called “Innocence of Muslims,” represent the worst of an American bigotry whose central tenet is that Islam is evil, a religion bent on the takeover of the world and followed by people who are all violent extremists, Jew-haters and sexual predators.

The movie, a procession of insults to Muslims against a background of comically flimsy sets, is of a piece with the ideology, praised at times by Republicans including Newt Gingrich, that has sought to portray Shariah law as a mortal threat to America, perceived stealth jihadists knocking at every door from Phoenix to Peoria, and worked hard to persuade the world that Barack Obama is a Muslim.

Whoever made the film — it was uploaded to YouTube in July by somebody calling himself Sam Bacile and identifying himself as an Israeli-American real estate developer — was driven by the visceral loathing of Islam that forms a significant current in post-9/11 right-wing thinking in the United States.

So perhaps it is no surprise that Mitt Romney, the Republican presidential candidate, would attempt to pander to that thinking in his response to the killing of Mr. Stevens and three of his staff. He claimed the Obama administration’s first response was “to sympathize with those who waged the attacks,” called it “disgraceful,” and said “apology for America’s values is never the right course.”

Huh?

Even coming from a man who on a brief trip abroad in late July lost no opportunity to put his foot in his mouth, blundering into squabbles with the British and the Palestinians, this was heavy-handed. In fact, to use Romney’s word, it was disgraceful.

The Obama administration never expressed sympathy for the assailants. It never apologized for American values. What the Cairo embassy did, as violence brewed in the Egyptian capital and well before the Benghazi attack, was to condemn “actions by those who abuse the universal right of free speech to hurt the religious beliefs of others” — specifically Muslims.

Since when was extreme bigotry that portrays the followers of one of the world’s great religions as child molesters an American value? Religious tolerance is as fundamental an American value as free speech. For Romney to offer implicit defense of a scurrilous movie in the name of free speech, while misrepresenting the Obama administration’s actions and offering not a word about hatred toward the world’s more than 1.5 billion Muslims, suggests he is deluded or desperate or both.

As a free-speech absolutist I defend the right of Bacile — or whoever — to make the video. It is equally important that the United States says what it thinks of such bile. President Obama got it right saying the United States “rejects efforts to denigrate” others’ religious beliefs, while expressing unequivocal opposition to the “senseless violence” that killed Stevens.

This September surprise has given the world cause to appreciate the cool head in the White House and worry about the hothead who aspires to replace him. Romney, in Jacques Chirac’s immortal phrase, “lost a good opportunity to keep quiet.”

His words reflected a shoot-from-the-hip, America-first approach to the world that will not fly in a time of deep interdependency. Two scarring wars have demonstrated that.

Stevens understood the interdependency. He loved his country but did not seek to impose it. Last year, on July 4, shortly after I saw him in Benghazi, he sent a note to family and friends as the war to unseat Qaddafi raged:

“Greetings, all,” Stevens wrote. “I hope you are enjoying a great 4th with plenty of beer, ice cream, hamburgers and Chinese fireworks. I remember well the ‘sparklers’ we used to have in Grass Valley as little tots, and running around the lawn with abandon, catching our hair and eyebrows on fire.” He had celebrated Independence Day by hosting a party with “an entire lamb, grilled chicken, Arab salads and pastries,” ending with remarks expressing “our hope that Libyans would celebrate their freedom soon, too.”

Stevens died for American values. The least Romney might have done was avoid misrepresenting them. His terrible death was a rebuke to the quest for squalid political capital and a demand for reflection on the best of America.