of the remaining consulate personnel. It was perhaps at this time that police opened fire on the rioters, killing a reported eleven people and wounding many others. According to the Italian consul general, the police had first attempted to disperse the rioters using tear gas, but had been overwhelmed by their sheer numbers.11
Rioting would continue in Benghazi through the weekend and into the following Monday, when the rioters would turn their attention to symbols of Christianity, laying waste the city’s only church. “No one could stop [them] . . .,” a witness to the attack on the church observed, “They want to teach the crusaders a lesson.”12 A report from Vatican Radio spoke of two priests managing “to hide and miraculously to escape from the enraged mob.”13 Both the church and a Franciscan convent attached to it would be set ablaze.14
On Wednesday, February 23, a triumphant video clip celebrating “Italy’s defeat” appeared on an al-Qaeda-linked Internet forum. The video documented the damage inflicted on the Italian consulate in Benghazi. According to reports in the Italian press, it began with a written exhortation to “Kill the infidels.” A comment in the forum celebrated Benghazi as “one of the Libyan cities most famous for jihad.” The remark suggests that the author already knew what American counterterrorism analysts would only discover a year-and-a-half later, when captured al-Qaeda personnel records revealed a heavy flow of jihadists from Benghazi to Iraq to join the late Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s Iraqi al-Qaeda affiliate. The soundtrack to the Benghazi video is reported to have used some of the same religious chants used in the propaganda videos of the al-Zarqawi group.15
As indicated by the date chosen for the 2011 protests, the deaths of the rioters at the Italian consulate five years earlier represented one of the major simmering grievances driving the eastern Libyan opposition to Qaddafi. In an interview that he gave to the French weekly Le Journal du Dimanche in March 2011, Qaddafi would recognize the fault of the police and regret that they had not used rubber bullets or water cannons to disperse the rioters.16
Italians would not soon forget the trauma of the 2006 Benghazi riots. This helps to explain the Italian government’s initial refusal to support a military intervention in Libya and its reluctance to recognize the Benghazi-based National Transitional Council. Alluding to the creation of an “Islamic Emirate” in eastern Libya in the earliest days of the rebellion, then Italian foreign minister Franco Frattini warned, “We don’t know more [about it]. But we know that they are dangerous. There are elements of al-Qaeda there.”17
It is one of the many ironies of the Libya War that Italy would eventually be pressured into joining its NATO partners in providing air support to a rebellion that was largely sparked by measures taken by the Libyan government to protect Italian citizens from a lynch mob. It is a measure of how thoroughly misinformed the American public was about the Libya crisis that shortly after the start of the NATO bombing campaign, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton could with a straight face include Italy in a list of NATO countries that had allegedly pushed for military intervention, because it was “in their vital national interest.”18 Never mind that Italy had concluded a “friendship agreement” with Libya only three years earlier and received nearly 40% of its oil imports from Libya.
But undoubtedly the greatest irony of the Libya War is that the NATO bombing campaign was led by none other than Anders Fogh Rasmussen: the same Anders Fogh Rasmussen who in his capacity as then Danish prime minister had drawn the ire of Yusuf al-Qaradawi and other Muslim activists by defending the right of Jyllands-Posten to publish the “Mohammed cartoons.”
On October 12, 2005, less than two weeks after the original publication of the cartoons, eleven ambassadors and representatives from Muslim countries and the Palestinian territories addressed a letter to Prime Minister Rasmussen, urging him to call Jyllands-Posten to order and requesting an “urgent meeting.” In his written response, Rasmussen underlined that “freedom of expression is the very foundation of the Danish democracy.”19 Not only did he decline to intervene in the matter. He refused even to meet with the signatories of the appeal.
“This is a matter of principle,” Rasmussen explained at the time, “I will not meet with them because it is so crystal clear what principles Danish democracy is built upon that there is no reason to do so.” “As prime minister, I have no power whatsoever to limit the press,” he added, “nor do I want such power.”20
Barely six years later, on October 30, 2011, Rasmussen, at this point serving as secretary general of NATO, declared the NATO operation in Libya to be one of “the most successful” in the history of the alliance. He did not mention that this “success” facilitated the victory of the very forces that in 2006 had made “crystal clear” that they do not share his principles.
Ten days earlier, on October 20, rebel forces shot and killed a captive Muammar al-Qaddafi. Before doing so, they subjected him to a savage beating, much of it documented on video. The capture of Qaddafi had been made possible by a massive NATO aerial attack on his convoy, as it attempted to flee the besieged city of Sirte. The fact that the convoy was leaving the city in broad daylight lends plausibility to rumors that a deal had been struck to offer Qaddafi and his remaining forces safe-passage in exchange for the surrender of the city.
As the secretary general of NATO would know, the killing of Qaddafi in captivity was a war crime per Western conceptions of the laws and customs of war. But the rebels who first tormented and then murdered Qaddafi would undoubtedly have been less interested in the niceties of the Geneva Conventions than in the rulings on Islamic jurisprudence of Sharia scholars like Yusuf al-Qaradawi—Rasmussen’s old nemesis from the days of the “cartoon jihad.” Per Qaradawi, the summary execution of Qaddafi was not only halal—permitted—it was obligatory. In a fatwa issued on Al-Jazeera on February 21, shortly after the outbreak of the unrest in Libya, he called on “whoever can fire a bullet” to kill the Libyan leader.21 It was, in effect, the fulfillment of al-Qaradawi’s fatwa that brought to a close Rasmussen’s “most successful” operation in NATO’s history.
1. IUMS statement signed by IUMS President Yusuf al-Qaradawi and IUMS Secretary General Mohammad Salim Al-Awa. According to a report published the same day by IslamOnline.net, the statement was originally issued on January 21, 2006. The Muslim-themed website was founded by Qaradawi and served at the time as one of the principal platforms for his edicts and exhortations. A widely available English translation of the IUMS statement is dated January 29, 2006.
2. MEMRI (Middle East Media Research Institute), Special Dispatch no. 1089, February 9, 2006. See too Jytte Klausen, “Muslims Representing Muslims in Europe,” in Abdulkader H. Sinno, Muslims in Western Politics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009), p. 105.
3. See “Qatari University Lecturer Ali Muhi Al-Din Al-Qardaghi: Muhammad Cartoon Is a Jewish Attempt to Divert European Hatred from Jews to Muslims,” MEMRI TV, clip #1030.
