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This is the link to the YouTube video of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton talking about the death of Libyan leader Muammar Al-Qaddafi. I understand that it is possible to be happy about the death of a tyrant, but her statement is totally out of bounds. She could have commented on Qaddafi’s death in a much more graceful way.
Andrew McCarthy (a senior fellow at the National Review Institute) posted an article at National Review Online today with his comments on the death of Gaddafi. Mr. McCarthy was the Assistant United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York who prosecuted the ‘Blind Sheik’ after the bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993. In prosecuting that case, Mr. McCarthy studied the Koran and the Islamist culture in order to get a better picture of the root causes of the attack. In National Review Online, he reminds us that the removal of Qaddafi as the ruler of Libya may not have the result America is looking for.
Mr. McCarthy reminds us that the Arab Spring has some ugly aspects:
The most obviously ugly of these is that a throng of seething Islamists stripped, beat, paraded, and finally shot Qaddafi execution-style, all the while screaming the signature “Allahu Akbar!” battle cry with a fervor that would have made Mohamed Atta blush. They then shoved the despot’s corpse into a refrigerator — to maintain it for further triumphant display before thousands of gawking spectators. Too bad there was no official from the Obama administration’s Islamic Thought Police on hand to remind the mob of the Koran’s oft-quoted (but oftener ignored) teaching that to slay a single person is to slay all of mankind.
Mr. McCarthy concludes:
Qaddafi’s escape from his last holdout was thus cut off by NATO airstrikes. Trapped and hidden in a sewer, he was dragged out and brutalized — not for intelligence, but for sport. There is video here if you can stomach it. What NATO abetted was not a military capture. It was an assassination. We will be worse off that it happened. And the way it happened should sicken us.
No one will argue that Qaddafi was a brutal dictator. However, in recent years he had greatly limited his terrorist activities and was no longer a threat to the west. As the new government immediately declared Sharia Law when they took over Libya, it is a pretty safe bet that they will be a threat to the west. Terrorism from Libya may again become an everyday thing. The way Qaddafi died is upsetting. Secretary of State Clinton’s comments on Qaddafi’s death are even more upsetting. I think we have backed the wrong people in the Arab Spring. The only way that freedom and democracy will come the the Middle East and North Africa is the have a revolution in Iran. That was the revolution we refused to support after the last fixed election. The Obama administration seems to have a definite gift for backing the wrong horse.
