With all the Republican pearl clutching about how scary the Middle East has become as a result of the Arab Spring, too often some of the real progress the US has made in relation to these new nations goes uncovered by the MSM.
Josh Marshall over at TPM reports on a BBC story covering the death of one of the alleged Libyan terrorists responsible for the 9/11 attack on the US Consulate. He was killed by Egyptian security forces in a Cairo suburb, after a daylong gun battle.
Here's how the BBC described the incident;
A man suspected of involvement in an attack on the US consulate in the Libyan city of Benghazi last month has been killed in the Egyptian capital, Cairo, officials say.
The man was killed after an exchange of fire with security services in the Cairo suburb of Madinet Nasr. Authorities named the man only as Hazem...
According to the Egyptian officials the suspect was cornered in a flat in Madinet Nasr early on Wednesday morning. He threw a bomb at the security forces, but it bounced back into the flat.
An exchange of fire with the security services then began and went on for several hours, local media reports say.
Imagine that, security troops, working for the Muslim Brotherhood controlled Egyptian government, tracked down and killed one of the suspects in the Benghazi attack. Aren't these Muslim Brotherhood guys supposed to be scary? Doesn't their rise to power prove the weakness of the Presidents foreign policy?
The BBC appear to be the only outlet reporting on this story. I do hope it gets much broader coverage, especially here in the US where there are too many stories about angry mobs burning US flags and too few on the evolving relationship between the US and these newly democratic governments.
The spontaneous anti-terrorist protests which took place in Benghazi to apologize for the attack on our consulate and to mourn the death of Chris Stevens, who was regard as a hero by the Libyan people, got some coverage, but it was mostly interspersed with pictures of flag burning in other Arab capitals. there was also very little coverage of how President Masri of Egypt reacted after getting a call from President Obama on the night of the protests at the US Embassy in Cairo. The next day, there were hundreds of Egyptian security forces surrounding the Embassy to ensure that the protestors did not get too close to the Embassy compound.
The Middle East is likely to remain a tumultuous place, as it has been for the last sixty years, but there have been seeds sown that may lead to more peace and greater prosperity for the people of the region. President Obama deserves credit for planting some of these seeds over the past four years.
I hope that Americans will grow to understand that our allies in the world come from many different cultures, and we need to work with them in order to keep the peace to our mutual benefit. This requires that we see beyond the differences in culture, to the common aspirations and ideals which unite us within the human family.