Mark Steyn:

the Egyptian president demands the arrest of an obscure American who made an unseen film. And whaddayaknow? Next thing that happens, back in the land of the free, a large posse of heavily armed officers descends on his apartment at midnight so that he can be “voluntarily” taken into custody for alleged “probation violations” – because, as everyone knows, in civilized societies breach-of-probation orders are always served at midnight on a weekend when the dark is so much more conducive to persuading householders to “volunteer”.

Look at Jonah’s post immediately below; look at the picture. What a pity Ambassador Stevens didn’t enjoy the same level of “protection” as Mr Nakoula. Why, if only the United States could bring the same amount of firepower to bear in its Benghazi compound as it brings to a probation-violation arrest in Cerritos. But it’s all about priorities, isn’t it?

Any curiosity about that? Apparently not, judging from Scarborough’s nothing-to-see-here tweets.

Jim Bennett compares Mrs Thatcher’s response to the Ayatollah Khomeini’s Rushdie fatwa with Obama’s to the Muslim Brotherhood’s demands. Salman Rushdie had been a vicious critic of the Conservative Party and the Prime Minister – he called her “Mrs Torture” – but Her Majesty’s Government has provided him with safe houses and Special Branch protection for almost a quarter-century. By contrast, within 72 hours of Morsi’s demands, Mr Nakoula is in a jail cell – “rounded up at midnight by brownshirted men for making a movie that embarrasses El Presidente“.

I want to know who ordered the FBI to the house.

[Update a few minutes later]

An evil errand:

The essential task of diplomacy is to preserve the security and stability of the international system. By affirming that the “trigger” for the violence in Muslim countries was the conduct of private people in the United States, what the administration has done is to make its international relations officially subject to private conduct. But few principles could be more dangerous for the international system.

A main reason we maintain diplomatic practice is precisely to immunize international relations from popular disruptions. The wall between the U.S. government and protected speech here at home must be as inviolable as the wall between U.S. embassies and the Arab street. Indeed, they are the same wall, meant to accomplish the same separation.

For the U.S. government to try to manage the social psychology of perpetually aggrieved Arabs by interfering in constitutionally protected private conduct is not just a fool’s errand. It is an evil errand, for it makes our government the tool of enemies who seek our submission. And it ignores the very dangerous development we are witnessing, which is the apparent breakdown of our ability to maintain safe embassies in the Muslim world. That breakdown is an institutional failure of other governments, and of our own. It has absolutely nothing to do with any spoofs of any deity, nor with whatever dumb reason may be motivating hateful people to get violent on the Arab street.

Appalling.

[Update a few minutes later]

The Middle East’s peculiar institution:

The past week’s unrest (and the earlier Mohammed-cartoon riots and all the rest) represent the Islamic attempt at a Dred Scott decision — i.e., in both cases sweeping away rules (whether the Missouri Compromise prohibitions on slavery or the First Amendment guarantee of free speech) that seek to limit the spread of the peculiar institution in question. The analogy would appear pretty strong: Just as post offices in the South were prohibited from distributing anti-slavery material, web sites in the Middle East may not question the historicity of the Koran. Just as a mob murdered abolitionist publisher Elijah P. Lovejoy in a free state, filmamker Theo van Gogh was murdered by a Muslim in Amsterdam.

And it’s no coincidence that the partisan reactions to these challenges are the same. On the Republican side, minority factions want rollback, while the dominant share want containment, secure “in the belief that it is in the course of ultimate extinction.” Likewise, a faction of Democrats actively promotes or promoted slavery and Islamism, while the rest were/are clueless appeasers, failing to understand that eventually we had to become all one thing, or all the other.

An interesting analogy.