There is some heavy shit going down around the world. I won't belabor the potential ugliness of the Samarra Shi'ite shrine bombing, because it's all over Rantburg and the rest of the blogsphere, and because it's so clearly a situation on the verge of a full-blown pogrom. But this bit from Michael Ledeen about the riots in Benghazi is something I had *not* noticed, and illustrates just how much gets covered up & ignored when emotion & knee-jerk reaction filters the news, on the right as well as the left.

Those Benghazi riots, with more than a dozen dead, got reported as just another particularly violent set of protests in the wave of anti-Danish-cartoon violence. But Ledeen's emailer suggests that A) it actually had more to do with a calculated anti-Italian move by the Libyan government and B) the actual violence occurred after the authorities lost control of their rent-a-mob and it turned into a nasty anti-regime riot bordering on an uprising. Ledeen & his emailer make it sound like a mini-Hama in the offing, which would be deeply, deeply ugly if it's the case.