There was a time when I could have been a consul or an ambassador. No joke. An American consul in Germany said I had the makings of a diplomat, and he tried hard to convince me to join the foreign service.
It was a tempting offer: excellent pay, a high level of responsibility, and an opportunity to see the world. I had always been the person in the group chosen to find the right words to say, and I was sure that even in some of the least desirable spots, like Nouakchott, Mauritania, and Chittagong, Bangladesh, I could have stuck it out.
Two things, however, led me to turn down the offer: the thought of giving up the life in Germany that I’d worked hard to establish, and the rule that, back then, forbade friendships with local people. Other consuls I’d met said their lives were as lonely as their careers were exciting.
There was one more factor that no one had mentioned: the remote, but real, risk of attack. Who knows? As a diplomat, I could have been in Benghazi, Libya, this September 11, or in any of the other places where US embassies and consulates have been targeted.
I admire the courage of Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens, who had represented my country in Libya off and on for the past five years until wackos came along and blew up the building he was in on the anniversary of 9/11. Stevens survived the attack, but died of smoke inhalation a few hours later.
Why was Stevens killed? Possibly because in the country he represented, some idiot had put a video on YouTube that is very insulting to the Islamic prophet Muhammad. The 15-minute video, which goes by several titles, including Innocence of Muslims, claims to be a trailer for a longer film that no one can locate and that may not even exist.
The trailer is insulting enough, though. (I’ve seen it but won’t link to it; it’s easy to find.) It pretends to tell the life story of Muhammad, portraying him as capricious, violent, adulterous and egocentric, inventing strict rules of behavior for others while making an exception for himself. If you wanted to get a billion people really angry, this would be the way to do it.
In recent days, the video has inspired protests — some peaceful, some not — in at least 37 countries as far apart as Canada, Denmark and Australia. In most cases, the protests were not about hate speech or the video in question, but about expressing anger toward the United States in general.
This raises two questions in my mind:
1. If God exists and is all-powerful, why should anyone have to rush to defend him or his prophets?
2. Why not direct your anger at the one guy who made the film instead of declaring war on a whole country?
While the theologians are debating the first question, I’ll give you my thoughts on the second.
It boggles the mind, but ignorant people around the world really seem to think that the nonexistent feature film was shown nationally in movie theaters and watched by millions of people with the official endorsement of the American government. Perhaps they, like the founders of Al Qaeda, see America as a lawless, immoral place, where all sorts of hate crimes and antisocial behavior are permitted. Perhaps they think the US government has, or ought to have, more control over people’s lives than it really does.
America and other Western countries would seem to have a lot of work ahead in terms of explaining how our society functions — that we are nations of individuals who are each responsible for our own actions; that America in particular has a separation of church and state; and that hate crimes do not go unpunished.
Explaining these things is part of the job of an ambassador. It’s a never-ending job, and a noble one. My hat goes off to Ambassador Stevens, and all of his colleagues, for having the courage to try.
