Once again we find ourselves sunk in our microcosm, solipsistic navel-gazing even as earth-shaking events happen around us and we barely notice.

The sudden attack on US Ambassador Chris Stevens at the US Consulate in Benghazi was no popular riot that got out of hand.

First of all, who was Chris Stevens: he was a very popular US Ambassador who had been in Libya even in Gaddafi’s day. As his former military attaché Fred Wehrey wrote, “In 2009, he was already famous for his infectious enthusiasm – even in those dark times, under the most despicable of regimes – for the enormous potential of the country’s people.”

He was loved and mourned not just by Americans but also by Libyans who have taken to the social media to protest about his death.

But there are other aspects which should make us pause and think: he was killed on 11 September, pointedly on the anniversary of the Twin Towers terrorist attack.

There are various accounts of the gruesome details of his death and subsequent (if it was subsequent) humiliation, reminiscent perhaps intentionally of the humiliation suffered by Gaddafi before and after his death.

But then, this death may be the first blow in what may become a conflagration that sets this part of the world afire. Such a thing has happened in the past; it may happen again just like one of the storms that crept up on us from a clear sky yesterday.

Ostensibly, the Benghazi riot, and all the other riots from Cairo to Tunis and now even Australia, were occasioned by Muslim anger at an amateur film reportedly backed by the controversial anti-Muslim pastor Terry Jones, which protesters say insults the Prophet Mohammed.

No matter how serious the offence to religious sensibilities, there is no justification for these brutal murders, especially of a man who was so favourable to the Libyan uprising and who represented a power that helped far more than it thought prudent in the uprising.

The film is, nonetheless, a deliberate provocation. It depicts the prophet as a megalomaniac, a child molester and serial womaniser. When posted on YouTube, it attracted more viewers than it ever would have done in the cinema. It has also been translated into Arabic and is being promoted by a notoriously anti-Muslim Egyptian Copt.

This, in turn, is bound to whip up tensions in Egypt where relations between Christians and Muslims have steadily degenerated over the past years. Once again, we find ourselves in the middle of all this and, so fixated and drunk with pre-election vibes and jitters, we barely notice the danger we’re in.

To our south we have a neighbouring country, which far from settling down and becoming a normal country is still struggling with lawlessness as a result of the uprising that put so many weapons in people’s hands.

When, in a little noticed interview that Foreign Minister Tonio Borg gave to an Italian television station at the beginning of the Libyan uprising in which he considered the possibility of a split in Libya and of a Benghazi emirate, many, including this writer, pooh-poohed him.

Now, even though we are told, such as by Mr Wehrey, that this was a “desperate Salafi attack in a weak Libyan state”, we are not so sure. As reported elsewhere in this issue, the seas and air around us are full of mysterious comings and goings as the US “is sending more spies, Marines and drones to Libya, trying to speed the search for those who killed the US ambassador and three other Americans” we are right, so to speak, in the flight path.

While we host conferences to understand the lessons to be had from the Arab Spring, and while we host international conferences for Catholic organisations on the Arab Spring, events ‘out there’ may swiftly move to more tragedies.

There is no template to events in history, whatever others may say. If anything, the history of the conflicts between religions tells us that sudden bursts of fundamentalism usually produce opposite fundamentalism. Following the Chris Stevens murder, no one, except for the Republican candidate in the November presidential election, Mitt Romney, saw fit to mention Malta.

“Will Romney declare war on Malta?” asked The New York Times, adding: “when the crisis in the Middle East flared up, Romney turned out to have no restraining inner core. All the uneasy feelings you got when he went to London and dissed the Olympic organisers can now come into full bloom. Feel free to worry about anything. That he’d declare war on Malta. Lock himself in a nuclear missile silo and refuse to come out until there’s a tax cut.”

Beyond that, of course, there is the tension that is brewing between Israel and Iran over the latter’s nuclear programme. That just about puts everything into proper perspective and makes everything seem incredibly dangerous and fragile where any outrage from a fundamentalist can spark off a world conflagration. It happened in the past (like Sarajevo in 1914) and it can happen again.

Meanwhile, as we go through the motions of these pre-electoral times and allow the rumour mills to swirl around us, let us keep things in perspective and hope and pray that sensible people may be found everywhere to douse the fires being set alight by damned fundamentalists.