Speaking of threats to Consular staff...

Some disaffected Copt in the US has made some anti-Islam video (I can totally see where this came from) and people are dying again:

The US ambassador to Libya is among four Americans killed in an attack on the US consulate in the eastern Libyan city of Benghazi, President Barack Obama has confirmed.
Unidentified armed men stormed the grounds on Tuesday night in a protest over a US-produced film that is said to insult the Prophet Muhammad.

I can't say this is a big surprise; the "democracy" we've enabled in Libya is an armed free-for-all. You will note the lack of embassy attacks while Qaddafi was running the place. I'm so glad we helped bring things to this point; I guess we can hope that it gets better, but things are looking pretty Mad Max for the near future.

Egypt has done a similarly ineffective job of defending the US embassy, thankfully without lethal result, and the Muslim Brotherhood (in its' English Twitter feed at least) has condemned the attack. The problem as always is with hard-case Muslims, of which there is a nigh-inexhaustible supply in places like Egypt. The offending video was put on the Internet (what isn't?) and it's not like it was beamed from space onto the sides of the Pyramids and to the mobile phone and TV of every Muslim in the world. Even if it was, that is merely a nuisance not exactly "eye for an eye" stuff.

Canada cut ties to Iran for a bunch of reasons, but one of them was a belief (based on the storming of the UK embassy late last year) that Iran was not serious about protecting consular territory and staff. It looks like we can put a few other places in that category, although to be fair these things sometimes catch host governments by surprise. I won't give Iran the benefit of that doubt, as they have a bit of a track record of storming embassies...

Particularly disgusting in this case is the declaration of the US Embassy in Cairo apologizing for "the abuse of freedom of speech". The inside dhimmi threat of "our" people kowtowing to "radical" (read: observant) Muslims is FAR more dangerous than any number of rioting protesters in foreign lands, even armed ones. The loss of an embassy and/or staff is a tactical loss, but at least serves as a litmus test of who our friends really are. When Western governments start apologizing for violence against THEM, that is a disaster.

Fortunately in this case Hillary has come out strongly against the Cairo Embassy "statement" so things at least aren't any worse in the big picture than they were before the attacks. It is interesting to speculate on whether there would have been such a strong repudiation had the White House not been in the middle of an (actual) election campaign. As I write this I expect (as do many others) that the latest paroxysm of Islamic rage over something stupid is not yet spent.