On Mistaking Mohamed Mursi For His Mask
Raymond Stock:
… Amid constant bloody demonstrations, incessant, widespread strikes, intensified persecution of Christians and skyrocketing crime, the Brotherhood rode confidently to state power in large part on the back of the Obama administration. …America’s role as the MB’s primary beast of burden didn’t begin even with the January 25th Revolution. Or rather, the revolution did not start on that date. Arguably, it really began on June 4, 2009. On that day, Obama gave his famous “speech to the Islamic world” from Cairo University (Egypt’s first secular university, founded in 1908), but also sponsored by al-Azhar University (Sunni Islam’s most prestigious center of learning, established by the Shi’ite Fatimid dynasty in the 10th century). Not only was the outlawed Muslim Brotherhood’s leadership invited to attend, but to sit in the front row—thus excluding Obama’s official host (according to protocol)—President Mubarak. …
Senate Republicans Arm the Brotherhood
Nearly two-thirds of them voted to give weapons to the Egyptian government.
By Andrew C. McCarthy, NRO
The F-16 — headed to the Muslim Brotherhood
I’m done grumbling about how President Obama is empowering America’s enemies. After all, it is not just Obama. When it comes to abetting the Muslim Brotherhood, Republicans are right there with him.
Not all of them, of course. This week, for example, Senator Rand Paul proposed an amendment that would have prohibited our government from transferring F-16 aircraft and Abrams tanks to Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood–dominated government. This lunatic plan is not just an Obama initiative. It is also a GOP brainstorm — of a piece with 2011’s Libya debacle, in which Republican leaders cheered as Obama, upon consulting with the Arab League, ignored Congress and levied war on behalf of the very jihadists who, quite predictably, have since raided Qaddafi’s arsenal, besieged northern Africa, and massacred Americans in Benghazi.
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How did so many Western analysts get Egypt’s Islamist movement so wrong?
Foreign Policy
BY ERIC TRAGER | JANUARY 28, 2013
“They’re democrats.”
Don’t kid yourself. Long before the Jan. 25 revolution that ousted Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, many academics and policymakers argued that his main adversary — the Muslim Brotherhood — had made its peace with democracy. This was based on the assumption that, since the Muslim Brotherhood participated in virtually every election under Mubarak, it was committed to the rule of the people as a matter of principle.
It was also based on what typically sympathetic Western researchers heard from Muslim Brotherhood leaders, and what I heard as well. “Democracy isshura,” Brotherhood Deputy Supreme Guide Khairat al-Shater told me during a March 2011 interview, referring to the Islamic jurisprudential tool of “consultation.” The implication was that the Brotherhood accepted a political system that encouraged open debate.(Read more…)
Bombing the Syrian Reactor: The Untold Story
Abrams shares with us the decision making process in all its complexities. Rice was against allowing Israel to bomb. She wanted to weaken Israel so it would be more pliable in the peace process. Gates wanted to get brutal:Gates also argued for preventing Israel from bombing the reactor and urged putting the whole relationship between the United States and Israel on the line. His language recalled the “agonizing reappraisal” of relations Eisenhower’s secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, had threatened for Europe in 1953 if the Europeans failed to take certain defense measures: They simply had to do what we demanded or there would be hell to pay.
And surprisingly, when Bush advised Olmert that the US wouldn’t bomb and neither should Israel, Olmert stood his ground.
By Elliott Abrams, COMMENTARY — February 2013
As the civil war in Syria enters its third year, there is much discussion of the regime’s chemical weapons and whether Syria’s Bashar al-Assad will unleash them against Syrian rebels, or whether a power vacuum after Assad’s fall might make those horrific tools available to the highest bidder. The conversation centers on Syria’s chemical weaponry, not on something vastly more serious: its nuclear weaponry. It well might have. This is the inside story of why it does not.
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Hillel’s BDS Battle and Antisemitism
To listen to the arguments put forward by Harvard students to create what they call an “open Hillel,” their fight with the national Hillel group is about the right of young Jews to free association. The students say that rules mandating that the organization not partner with groups that support BDS — the anti-Zionist campaign that aims to boycott, disinvest and sanction the State of Israel — or host speakers that advocate such measures are unfair and limit their ability to have dialogue with Palestinians. To the thinking of the Progressive Jewish Alliance that is, according to the Forward, organizing the campaign against Hillel, such rules “stifle discourse” and discriminate against those who disagree with Israeli policies.
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Ted Belman
Jerusalem, Israel
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