Remember all the hoopla the Obama administration engaged in after helping Libya’s “freedom fighters” oust (and sodomize and murder) the nation’s former president, Muammar Gaddafi? Remember the rationale used by Obama to justify using the U.S. military to help Libya’s “opposition”? In his March 28, 2011, speech, he spoke of “our responsibilities to our fellow human beings,” adding that not assisting them “would have been a betrayal of who we are.”
Although it was common knowledge that al-Qaeda and other fiercely anti-American forces were involved in the Libyan jihad, this did not shake Obama’s “responsibilities” to his “fellow human beings.” Predictably, the thanks the U.S. received was an al-Qaeda attack on the American consulate in Benghazi and the murders of four American officials, including Ambassador Chris Stevens (an attack the Obama administration tried to frame as a product of an amateur YouTube video that had “offended” Muslims).
Beyond the attack on Libya’s American embassy, there has been no end of examples of the true nature of the “New Libya” Obama helped create. On Sunday, December 30, an explosion rocked a Coptic Christian church near the western city of Misrata, where a group of U.S. backed rebels hold a major checkpoint, killing two. Two months later, on February 28, another Coptic Christian church located in Benghazi, Libya, was attacked by armed Muslim militants, resulting in serious injuries for the priest and an assistant.
On February 10, four foreign Christians were arrested in Benghazi, including one with American citizenship, on the claim that they were “missionaries.” Three days later, two more Christians from Egypt were arrested. Three days after that, a seventh Christian, also from Egypt, was arrested. Then, on February 27, Benghazi forces raided another Coptic church rounding up some 100 Coptic Christians, accusing them of being missionaries—simply because they were found in possession of Bibles and other Christian “paraphernalia.” Many of these Christians have been tortured, some with acid.
Indeed, it was just revealed that one of these Christians was literally tortured to death by the terrorists Obama helped empower. A March 12 Coptic Solidarity press release has the details:
Coptic Solidarity condemns in the strongest terms the unlawful acts by the group Ansarul Sharia [“Supporters of Sharia”] in Libya to arrest, torture and detain dozens of Copts; and the detention by Libya’s Preventive Security department in Tripoli of the Coptic man Ezzat Hakim Atallah for ten days till he died on March 9 under torture, and the detention of his Coptic colleagues … and others who are still being subjected to torture inside the Preventive Security building.
Coptic Solidarity condemns in the strongest terms the Egyptian authorities, especially the foreign minister, the ambassador in Libya and the Consul in Benghazi, for their failure to defend their fellow citizens. In contrast, the [Egyptian] presidency and the foreign ministry had enthusiastically rushed to defend a Muslim Brotherhood cell that was arrested in the United Arab Emirates on charges of threatening the country’s national security. The attitude of the Egyptian authorities in dealing with the Coptic citizens is shameful.
And Obama’s only response has been to continue empowering jihadis—now in Syria, where the “opposition” he supports has, among other atrocities, been making the lives of the nation’s Christian minority a living hell. Such are the policies of the man a majority of Americans voted for; a man who—in our postmodern world and in the words of the ancient prophet—apparently “calls evil good and good evil.”
Raymond Ibrahim is a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center and an Associate Fellow at the Middle East Forum.
