Like old King Ethelred the Unready, who either had no counsel or had no sense, or both, and often paid the Danegeld rather than attempt to deter the Norsemen, so Barack Obama and his lieutenants still believe that they can both appease radical Islam and convince others that is not what they are doing.

Various top-ranking U.S. officials, for instance, following the lead of President Obama himself, for days insisted that the murder of the American ambassador to Libya was a spontaneous act of a crowd that got out of control, enraged by the release of an anti-Islamic video trailer posted by an illiberal private American resident. We were to believe that the fault was not millions of medieval Islamists abroad who hate the West, but one Coptic American at home who had crude taste and ill intent.