Sept 2012: U.S. Ambassador in Libya and two others killed in attack of consulate

[Edward Campbell]

The difference being, that these people aren't cutting the heads off others, because they don't agree with them.

Fair enough, but they do appear to fall within Brad's description ~ people with too much time on their hands because they have too few responsibilities.

 

[Haletown]

The narrative so far seems to be inconsistent with the facts.

"CHAOS AT THE STATE DEPT?
I spoke with a well-placed journalist last night whose sources describe the situation at the State Department in one word: “Chaos.”  The working assumption is that several American embassies may have been penetrated, or are vulnerable to attack, because so many of them rely on local residents for staff needs at the embassy, and as such may be in a position to breach security if they have been recruited by Al Qaida.  Moreover, the full story of the attack on the Benghazi consulate is much worse than we have been told (except by the Independent newspaper report John and I linked to here on Thursday).

The consulate in Benghazi was an interim facility, with only a standard door lock for security, and worse, Ambassador Stevens was traveling with only a light security detail, rather than in the heavily armed convoys our diplomats in the region usually employ.  The attack on the Benghazi was no mere target of opportunity spurred by reaction to the “Innocence of Muslims” film; the film is just a pretext.  The killing of Amb. Stevens was a premeditated hit, planned and carried out as retaliation for the recent drone strike that killed the number two Al Qaida operative in Afghanistan recently.  The vulnerability of Stevens at the Benghazi compound was scouted out carefully.  All the other embassy protest activity is just covering theater.

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2012/09/chaos-at-the-state-dept.php

 

[Old Sweat]

And Mark Steyn joins in the criticism of the administration and the majority of media outlets with this blog from the National Review site which is reproduced under the Fair Dealing provision of the Copyright Act.

Lying in State

By Mark Steyn

September 15, 2012 9:12 A.M.

Rich, re the silence of the State Department, I understand that America has decayed from a land of laws to a land of legalisms but the position that no one at State can say a word about Benghazi because there’s now an FBI investigation, and so it’s a sub judice police matter, and Sergeant Friday has flown out with an extra long roll of yellow “DO NOT CROSS” tape and strung it round the smoking ruins of the U.S. consulate and the “safe house” is stark staring nuts.

This is a security fiasco and a strategic debacle for the foreign policy of the United States, not a liquor store hold-up. What is wrong even with the bland, compliant, desiccated, over-credentialed, pansified, groupthink poodles of the press corps that they don’t hoot and jeer at Victoria Nuland? I know why she’s doing it; I know why Hillary Clinton is desperately trying to suggest that some movie trailer on YouTube is the reason that a mob in Benghazi knows the location of the U.S. ambassador’s safe house. But why would anybody else even pretend to take this stuff seriously? Elderly Soviet propagandists must be wondering why they wasted their time jamming radio transmitters and smashing printing presses when they could just have sent everyone to Columbia Journalism School.

More on the insane, post-modern unreality of the dying superpower in my weekend column. 

Edit: Here is the link to his weekend column: http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/320283/disgrace-benghazi-mark-steyn

 

[tomahawk6]

Hillary's chickens have come home to roost - or are they Obama's ?

 

[cupper]

It seems that the internet companies are now the defacto arbiters of free speech.

Google’s restricting of anti-Muslim video shows role of Web firms as free-speech arbiters

http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/googles-restricting-of-anti-muslim-video-shows-role-of-web-firms-as-free-speech-arbiters/2012/09/14/ec0f8ce0-fe9b-11e1-8adc-499661afe377_story.html?hpid=z1

Google lists eight reasons on its “YouTube Community Guidelines” page for why it might take down a video. Inciting riots is not among them. But after the White House warned Tuesday that a crude anti-Muslim movie trailer had sparked lethal violence in the Middle East, Google acted.

Days later, controversy over the 14-minute clip from “The Innocence of Muslims” was still roiling the Islamic world, with access blocked in Egypt, Libya, India, Indonesia and Afghanistan — keeping it from easy viewing in countries where more than a quarter of the world’s 1.6 billion Muslims live.



Legal experts and civil libertarians, meanwhile, said the controversy highlighted how Internet companies, most based in the United States, have become global arbiters of free speech, weighing complex issues that traditionally are the province of courts, judges, and occasionally, international treaty.

“Notice that Google has more power over this than either the Egyptian or the U.S. government,” said Tim Wu, a Columbia University law professor. “Most free speech today has nothing to do with governments and everything to do with companies.”

In temporarily blocking the video in some countries, legal experts say, Google implicitly invoked the concept of “clear and present danger.” That’s a key exception to the broad First Amendment protections in the United States, where free speech is more jealously guarded than almost anywhere in the world.

The Internet has been a boon to free speech, bringing access to information that governments have long tried to suppress. Recall last spring’s freewheeling Internet chatter over Chen Guangcheng, the blind Chinese dissident, as he evaded capture in a country known for its tight control of news sources.

Google has positioned itself as an ally of such freedoms, as newspapers, book publishers and television stations long have. But because of the immediacy and global reach of Internet companies, they face particular challenges in addressing a range of legal restrictions, cultural sensitivities and, occasionally, national security concerns.

“Google, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter now play this adjudicatory role on free speech,” said Andrew McLaughlin, a former top policy official at Google who later worked the Obama White House as deputy chief technology officer.

Nazi propaganda, for example, can be found on Google.com but not Google.de, the site tailored for use in Germany, where such speech is illegal. In the United States, images of animal cruelty can be found through Google’s search algorithm — which is a key tool for legitimate researchers — but are blocked on YouTube, which the company owns but strives for a more PG sensibility, blocking pornography, gratuitous violence and hate speech.

Despite Google’s history as a steward of appropriate content, the White House outreach on the movie clip was remarkable, longtime observers of the company say.

Upset foreign governments occasionally block YouTube entirely within their borders to stop a video from being watched, as Afghanistan has done. Sometimes governments formally ask Google to block a YouTube video, which India and Indonesia have both done with the controversial movie clip. (Google said it complies with legal, written requests by governments to block videos from being viewed in their countries.)

But for the White House to ask Google to review a video that was causing trouble in a foreign land was an unusual step — and perhaps unprecedented. McLaughlin, the former Google and White House official, could think of no similar request in the past.

Both government and Google officials said the company made its own decision after the White House raised the issue of the video on Tuesday, the day that U.S. Ambassador to Libya J. Christopher Stevens and three other Americans were killed.

“We reached out to YouTube to call the video to their attention and asked them to review whether it violates their terms of use,” National Security Council spokesman Tommy Vietor said on Friday.

Google said it decided to block the video in Egypt and Libya because of the “very sensitive situations there” and not because the White House requested it.

A company official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to describe internal thinking at Google, said, “Dealing with controversial content is one of the biggest challenges we face as a company.”

The decision has drawn an uneasy reaction, with some civil libertarians blasting Google for essentially censoring access for some potential viewers. For critics, the decision recalled Google’s former compliance with Chinese government restrictions on a wide range of content — before the company moved its offices and servers to Hong Kong in 2010, beyond the reach of Chinese censorship laws.

The motives of both Google and the White House drew suspicion this week, with some saying that U.S. officials might have sought to send a political message — distancing the United States from the anti-Muslim video — by revealing their efforts to have it blocked. The officials had no legal authority to demand action, legal experts say.

“It’s a little bit of censorship and a little bit of diplomacy in a difficult situation,” said Jennifer Granick, director of civil liberties for the Stanford Law School Center for Internet and Society.

Yet the controversy has highlighted how much of the world’s information is concentrated in the hands of a relatively small number of powerful companies. Harvard law professor Jonathan Zittrain said these “corporate gatekeepers” are essential to keeping free speech robust.

He praised efforts to establish guidelines for when content is removed or blocked from some viewers. Yet he said many hard decisions will come when actual cases arise.

“Anyone who says this is a no-brainer, I’m dubious about,” Zittrain said. “Because it’s not a no-brainer, and it’s not going to go away.”

 

[tomahawk6]

If you notice the administration is spinning the cause of these attacks are a video,when in fact the attacks were well planned and across the region. Notice the lack of attacks in Turkey,Jordan,Saudi Arabai ,Morrocco ,Iraq and Algeria.

 

[armyvern]

If you notice the administration is spinning the cause of these attacks are a video,when in fact the attacks were well planned and across the region. Notice the lack of attacks in Turkey,Jordan,Saudi Arabai ,Morrocco ,Iraq and Algeria.

I don't think it's so much as the administration spinning it this way as it is the radical Muslims using that video as their excuse for their co-ordinated effort.

As for the earlier comment by a previous poster regarding poor Muslim countries and their lack of ability to high tech ... eerily, when I was in Syria circa 2001, even those who were poor and living in their mud houses had satellite dishes on their "roofs" and cellphones clutched in their hands. Many of us made comments regarding their priorities as it was a time when a lot of us 1st worlders didn't even have them - especially when deployed. They may be uneducated, but they quite often have electronic access that you wouldn't associate with, let's say, third world countries in Africa.

 

[cupper]

The right to free speech is not absolute in the cases of:

Libel and slander
Misrepresentation (to commit fraud)
Sedation Sedition [ftfy, unless you really meant speech so boring it puts people to sleep  ;D]
Incitement to commit violence
Treason


The film, bad as it may be, fall under none of these categories, and bad movies are not a reason to commit murder or mayhem. The film was only a useful excuse, and the fact that the attacks happened on 9/11 suggests that if the film had never been made there would still have been an attack, with some other excuse presented as the reason.

I don't want to get into a debate over whether this piece of crap fails the various tests for limits of free speech, but it would not be hard to fathom a situation where some radical group (and these ass hats are all supposedly connected to various radical Coptic Christian, or Anti-Islamic groups) putting out something like this to foment unrest and drag foreign government (read The U.S.) into taking some sort of action, or at least bringing Western attention  into focus for their cause.

But having said all of that, the situation in Benghazi that lead to the deaths of the 4 Americans was a different and unrelated incident from all of the other protests that are taking place in the rest of the Arab / Muslim world. It appears that the attackers may have used the protests in Benghazi as cover or diversion.

 

[Old Sweat]

Cupper

I could not agree more with the gist of your analysis. What I find disturbing when all else is said and done is that the majority of the media are ignoring the second point you make. It is hard to believe that they are not aware of the facts of the matter, and disturbing that they are giving the administration a free ride. It will be interesting to see what sort of approach the Sunday morning TV talk shows take.

 

[cupper]

Found this on David Frum's Daily Beast site. The author asks a very thought provoking question. I'd be very interested in the answer as well.

Why the Absolutist Rage, Islamists?

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/09/14/why-so-mad-islamist-radicals.html

Koplow (at this point, I'm assuming you know Michael Koplow is the author of the wonderful Ottomans and Zionists blog) wonders why radical Islamists feel compelled to assail the actions of outsiders, as opposed to merely policing the ummah.

Something that I am eager to have explained to me by someone whose understanding of Islamic theology is deeper than mine (and I am not being sarcastic; I am genuinely interested): why is there an assumption on the part of the rioters and protestors that Muslim religious principles should be universal?

An article in the Egypt Independent on the reasons behind the protests in Egypt quoted a protestor explaining his anger by saying, “It is forbidden to depict the Prophet, especially when they say the exact opposite of the truth about him.”

I get that the prohibition exists in Islam, but I don’t get why that means that non-Muslims across the entire world have to adhere to it. Judaism forbids eating milk and meat together, but Jews are not going around burning McDonalds franchises because they serve cheeseburgers, nor are Mormons ransacking Starbucks stores because they sell caffeine.

For that matter, Islam forbids eating pork and drinking alcohol but Muslims are not demanding that all of Earth’s 6 billion residents refrain from having a beer with their barbecued ribs. Why is the expectation that everyone adhere to Islam’s prohibitions on depicting the prophet, and why does it only apply in this case but not to other activities prohibited by Islam? Again, I am not being snide but am actually looking for an answer.

 

[ModlrMike]

It may not be Obama's fault, but it is his problem. How the administration manages this crisis could well determine November's outcome.

 

[cupper]

Interesting pushback by John McCain against Hannity and Fox News line of BS.

McCain to Hannity: Fox 'wrong about Libya'

http://www.politico.com/blogs/media/2012/09/mccain-to-hannity-you-and-fox-news-were-wrong-about-135607.html?hp=l5

Sen. John McCain on Thursday night clashed with Sean Hannity, telling the Fox News host that he and others on the network “were wrong about Libya.”

McCain's remarks came after Hannity claimed he had accurately predicted that the Muslim Brotherhood would take control of Egypt, and pressed the Arizona Republican on why the Obama administration was not able to foresee this week's attacks on U.S. diplomats in North Africa.

“How is it that Sean Hannity and a few others of us out here predicted with pinpoint accuracy that the Muslim Brotherhood would be in charge in Egypt? Their first task when they took over the Parliament was to declare Israel, our closest ally, an enemy. First, their number one enemy,” Hannity said. “How is it that the administration with all their intelligence and all the money we spend to help them and the CIA — how is it that they didn’t see this coming? And they kept telling the American people, this is democracy. Democracy. I don’t view the Muslim Brotherhood as democracy. They want Sharia law implemented now in Egypt.”

McCain pushed back, telling Hannity that “that’s not clear that that’s true” and that he and Fox News were wrong with their take on the elections in Libya.

“But also it was you and people on Fox that said in Libya, ‘we didn’t know who they were and let’s not help these people.’ They had an election and they elected moderates. They rejected Islamists,” McCain said. “And yes, there are Al Qaeda factors and there are extremists in Libya today, but the Libyan people are friends of ours, and they support us, and they support democracy. So you were wrong about Libya.”

“I don’t think I was wrong about Libya at all,” Hannity replied.

McCain jumped in, telling Hannity, “Yes I do, I know you were.”

“No, I was not,” the Fox News host said.

“I know you were. They had a free and fair election, and a democratic non-Islamic government was elected. So you were wrong,” McCain said.

Hannity then said he was surprised McCain wasn’t siding with him.

“They didn’t think the Muslim Brotherhood would take over? This is a known terror organization. We say we’re fighting a war on terror, we’re apologizing, our government, to Egypt after they raid our embassy and rip our flag down?” Hannity said. “Frankly, Senator, I would think you are with me on this.”

The interview wrapped after McCain replied, “I am not taking the side of the administration. I am saying that the largest nation in the Arab world is something we have to carefully calibrate our actions with.”

 

[Edward Campbell]

People who dabble in microeconomics are fond of talking about the rational actor - someone who makes rational choices. The people who riot in North Africa, the Middle East and West Asia are not, in the way we use the word, rational. (I'm not talking about the ones who mount well planned, carefully executed, deadly attacks à la Benghazi.) Their rage is, as I have said over and over, inchoate, unformed, fueled by religious fervor and, therefore, almost by definition irrational. I read over and over again that these young men - they almost all seem to be young men, don't they? - march from the mosque directly to the riot target, urged on my the most recent sermon. I have also read, many times, that these young men are mostly graduates of or still students in Saudi funded, fundamentalist madrasahs where they learn, for years, one and only one subject: how to read and interpret the Quran; they are, mostly, as I understand what I have read, innumerate, ignorant of any science (hard or social) and essentially illiterate, except for the Quran. It is hard for anyone to make a rational choice on a religious topic; I suggest it is impossible if one is educated brainwashed in a Saudi madrasah.

So there is no rational explanation for Muslim rage because there is no rational foundation for it. Ignorant young men, fired up by equally ignorant religious leaders vent their anger and frustration on whatever "great satan" is at hand. Think Savonarola, in Florence, 500+ years ago ~ the bonfire of the vanities, and all that.

 

[tomahawk6]

This memo was scrubbed from the OSAC web site.

 

[tomahawk6]

Chaos at DOS.

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2012/09/the-libyan-scandal-deepens.php

The Libyan Scandal Deepens

The Independent is reporting that the State Department had intelligence that American diplomatic facilities in the Middle East were being targeted, but did nothing to enhance security:

According to senior diplomatic sources, the US State Department had credible information 48 hours before mobs charged the consulate in Benghazi, and the embassy in Cairo, that American missions may be targeted, but no warnings were given for diplomats to go on high alert and “lockdown”, under which movement is severely restricted.

It is difficult to get a clear understanding of what happened in Benghazi. Chris Stevens had been traveling in other countries and only recently returned to Libya. There has been no explanation of why he was in Benghazi (as opposed to the capital, Tripoli) or how many other Americans were also there. Apparently the terrorists first attacked the consulate, which was virtually undefended:

According to security sources the consulate had been given a “health check” in preparation for any violence connected to the 9/11 anniversary. In the event, the perimeter was breached within 15 minutes of an angry crowd starting to attack it at around 10pm on Tuesday night. There was, according to witnesses, little defence put up by the 30 or more local guards meant to protect the staff. Ali Fetori, a 59-year-old accountant who lives near by, said: “The security people just all ran away and the people in charge were the young men with guns and bombs.”

So where were the Marines? Stevens and others went to a supposed “safe house,” but the location of the house apparently had been betrayed to the terrorists. The explanation of how Stevens died from smoke inhalation is curious at best:

Mr Stevens, it is believed, was left in the building by the rest of the staff after they failed to find him in dense smoke caused by a blaze which had engulfed the building.

So they fled the building without the Ambassador? And where were the terrorists at that point? They had attacked the building with RPGs, as I understand it, and the building evidently was on fire. Did the terrorists just evaporate and allow the other staff members to leave?

Supposedly, a group of friendly Libyans found Ambassador Stevens lying unconscious in the burned-out safe house and took him to a hospital. This apparently is when the photos we have seen were taken. The crowd doesn’t look particularly friendly to me. But where were the terrorists while that was going on?

Some hours later, apparently, a large group of Americans was rescued from the “safe house.” How can that be? The safe house was on fire. Did they arrive after an earlier group had departed from the safe house, and the friendly Libyans had removed Ambassador Stevens’s body? Apparently, but that makes no sense. In any event, a force was sent from Tripoli to rescue them:

An eight-strong American rescue team was sent from Tripoli and taken by troops under Captain Fathi al- Obeidi, of the February 17 Brigade, to the secret safe house to extract around 40 US staff. The building then came under fire from heavy weapons. “I don’t know how they found the place to carry out the attack. It was planned, the accuracy with which the mortars hit us was too good for any ordinary revolutionaries,” said Captain Obeidi. “It began to rain down on us, about six mortars fell directly on the path to the villa.”

So now apparently the terrorists are back, this time with mortars! This isn’t a mob, it’s a military force. Despite the mortar attack, the eight Americans were able to resuce the 40 US staff from the supposedly burned-out safe house. It was somewhere in this time period when they learned what had happened to Stevens, apparently some hours earlier:

Libyan reinforcements eventually arrived, and the attack ended. News had arrived of Mr Stevens, and his body was picked up from the hospital and taken back to Tripoli with the other dead and the survivors.

This narrative does not make a lot of sense; the time sequence is confused, to say the least, and the story of what happened to Stevens doesn’t appear to add up. A Congressional investigation should be undertaken to find out what happened and why adequate security precautions were not taken. A Congressional committee will also want to inquire into how secret documents fell into the terrorists’ hands, compromising American intelligence assets in Libya:

The US administration is now facing a crisis in Libya. Sensitive documents have gone missing from the consulate in Benghazi and the supposedly secret location of the “safe house” in the city, where the staff had retreated, came under sustained mortar attack. Other such refuges across the country are no longer deemed “safe”.

Some of the missing papers from the consulate are said to list names of Libyans who are working with Americans, putting them potentially at risk from extremist groups, while some of the other documents are said to relate to oil contracts.

There is a great deal more to be learned about what happened in Libya, and why. The Obama administration will carry out its usual cover-up, so it is up to Congress to try to dig out the real story.

 

[cupper]

Hillary's chickens have come home to roost - or are they Obama's ?

Hope you aren't referring to this:

http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/07/16/egyptians-who-jeered-clinton-cite-american-conservatives-to-argue-u-s-secretly-supports-islamists/

As my colleague Kareem Fahim reported on Sunday, some political opponents of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt claim that the United States even plotted to install the Islamist party’s presidential candidate in office. “Although wildly counterintuitive,” my colleagues David Kirkpatrick and Mayy El Sheikh observed on Saturday, “that conspiracy theory has tapped into the deep popular distrust here of the United States.”

The strength of that belief was on full display on Saturday in Cairo, as hundreds rallied outside Mrs. Clinton’s hotel, waving placards that read: “Stop U.S. funding of the Muslim Brotherhood,” “Clinton is the supreme guide of the Muslim Brotherhood” and “To Hillary: Hamas will never rule Egypt,” suggesting an even-wider conspiracy, including the Islamists in neighboring Gaza.

;D

 

[tomahawk6]

Nope. Obama helped fund the Arab Spring.

http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/02/13/us-usa-budget-foreign-idUSTRE81C1C920120213

and Startfor:

http://www.stratfor.com/weekly/20110523-obama-and-arab-spring

If Obama is right that there is a democratic movement in the Muslim world large enough to seize power and create U.S.-friendly regimes, then he has made a wise choice. If he is wrong and the Arab Spring was simply unrest leading nowhere, then he risks the coalition he has by alienating regimes in places like Bahrain or Saudi Arabia without gaining either democracy or friends.

 

[cupper]

Ah yes. Those American Values that Mitt Romney was quick to say he would never apologize for: :sarcasm:

Vandals attack mosques in Falls Church, Harrisonburg, Va.; communities express sympathy

http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/vandals-attack-mosques-in-falls-church-harrisonburg-va-communities-express-sympathy/2012/09/15/4b67fabc-ff4e-11e1-b153-218509a954e1_story.html?hpid=z4

Two mosques in Virginia were vandalized Friday and Saturday, arousing sympathy from their neighbors and speculation that the hostile actions were spurred by the current violent furor in the Middle East over a vulgar anti-Muslim video made in the United States.

On Friday, worshippers at the Islamic Center of the Shenandoah Valley in Harrisonburg arrived at their weekly prayer service to find graffiti sprayed on the building. It used obscene and racial slurs against “Irakis,” and declared, “This is America,” adding another obscenity.

“Nothing like this has ever happened to us before, even after 9/11,” said Ehsan Ahmed, a member of the mosque’s board of directors and an economics professor at nearby James Madison University. “We have always been welcomed here, and we participate in many community activities. We can’t say what their motive was, but the timing is very coincidental.”

On Saturday morning, members of the Dar al-Hijrah mosque in Falls Church emerged from an early prayer service to find that someone had smashed out the front and back windows of about 30 cars parked on streets surrounding the site. There were no written slogans left in this case, but mosque officials said the message was clear.

“I am standing by the remains of what used to be my nice Volvo,” said Imam Johari Abdul Malik, the outreach director at Dar al-Hijrah. “This was definitely not done by our neighbors, because they have known us a long time and they don’t behave like this. It was done by someone who assumed that everyone who parks around here is a Muslim.”

Local police responded quickly to both incidents but have not identified any suspects, mosque officials said. Muslim civil rights activists said they were also receiving reports from police that the vandalism could be the work of teenagers.

The Council on American-Islamic Relations, a Washington-based civil rights group, has called for an FBI investigation into both attacks. The group also announced Saturday that it has issued an appeal in Arabic to Muslims abroad, denouncing the violence and calling for calm.

Non-Muslim leaders in both Falls Church and Harrisonburg condemned the vandalism and said they had many positive dealings with the mosques. They said they could think of no reason for the sudden attacks, except for the strong emotions and religious animosity stirred by the American video and the responding violence in the Middle East.

“Oh, dear. I was worried something like this would happen,” Kathleen Kline Moore, pastor of the First Christian Church of Falls Church, one block away from Dar al-Hijrah, said when she learned of the car smashings. “These people are our friends, and we always let them park in our church lot on Fridays. We support them and we absolutely deplore what has happened to them.”

Dar al-Hijrah has faced controversy in the past because of links between its former leaders and some radical Islamic groups, but it has since been praised for building good relations with the surrounding community. The Shenandoah mosque, built in 1998, has many professional members and participates in many local charities.

Abdul Malik said that earlier in the week, he and other mosque officials had strongly denounced the rioting and violence in the Middle East that led to the death of J. Christopher Stevens, the U.S. ambassador to Libya, and three other American diplomatic workers on Tuesday. He said he had organized a news conference and a prayer vigil outside the White House on Wednesday. “We were seen locally denouncing the barbaric killing,” he said.

In Harrisonburg, some local officials immediately rallied around the vandalized mosque, posting statements of support on a Web site called “We Are All Harrisonburg” and inviting residents to a meeting of solidarity at the mosque on Sunday. They said more than 500 people had already signed up to attend.

“In some ways, this incident has given people an opportunity to reach out and get to know their neighbors, to build something positive from it,” said Kai Degner, a member of the Harrisonburg City Council and a real estate agent. “Our city is growing and changing and becoming more diverse, with 57 languages in our schools. Change can require adjustment, but we have had no horror stories here.”

Mohammed Aslam Afridi, president of the Harrisonburg mosque, is a U.S. government veterinarian who was born in Pakistan but has lived in the city for 38 years and always felt at home.

“I think what happened was an isolated incident,” he said. “Around the world, this anti-Islamic video has stirred people up, and so has the attack on the Sikh temple in Wisconsin. People are angry and upset. But we are all children of Adam. This is my Harrisonburg, my Virginia and my country.”

Kudos for the local communities that rallied their support for their victimized community members.

 

[Oompah-Loompah@]

One of the people killed played the game I moderate for.

Small world it seems...

RIP.

 

[tomahawk6]

Premonition

http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Peace/2012/09/14/State-Department-Rules-of-Engagement-Kept-Marines-Out-of-Tripoli-as-Well-as-Benghazi-in-Libya