It's been just over a week since hundreds, perhaps a thousand, angry and offended Egyptians gathered outside the U.S. Embassy's gates in Cairo. They carried Islamist banners and chanted, "The only God is God and Muhammad is his Prophet."

At one point perhaps two dozen of the more brazen protesters scaled the wall and breached the embassy grounds. They lowered and destroyed the U.S. flag and raised a black, Islamic flag in its place. They fled when security guards (not the Egyptian police) fired warning shots over their heads.

This amounted to little violence, but the act itself was the psychological equivalent of taking a beachhead. Within hours reports emerged that a similarly sized group had stormed the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya. Some were calling it a copycat protest, but it was much more perilous: Four Americans were killed in the melee, including the U.S. ambassador.

Read more at NBC News