Benghazi “demonstrators.”
( I have been picking away at this post since last year. Events always seemed to overtake me. In the wake of the Cairo Embassy and Benghazi attacks and deaths,now seems a good time to bring it to a close.)
In an email to a list of friends that was the predecessor to this blog, I wrote on the first of February 2011:
Some of you, I suspect ,had not heard of the Muslim Brotherhood a week or two ago. By now, I’m sure you all have.
“Allah is our objective.
The Prophet is our leader.
Qur’an is our law.
Jihad is our way.
Dying in the way of Allah is our highest hope.”
– Hassan al-Banna (1906 – 1949),
Have a look at this “explanation” on their official website. Notice that after lines and lines of blather, he gets back to the point.
(Note: shortly after my email, the Brotherhood scrubbed the jihad message from its English website. It was there: I pasted the motto above from it. Screenshots have been preserved on the web.)
@Robert and I have known about these guys since ’81, but our attention wandered.
However, as soon as Tunisia went, I thought (and many much better informed and wiser than I, long before this all started to unwind), it’s all gonna go and then we saw copycat self-immolation across the region, including in Egypt.
And I thought, uh-oh, the Brotherhood, because as anyone keeping up on developments over the years was aware, even from MSM, these are the guys who assassinated Sadat for making peace with Israel, and although outlawed, have been tolerated as they turned their efforts to “social work,” providing services the Egyptian government could not, or perhaps would not provide. An alternate name for Hamas is the Muslim Brotherhood in Palestine
Just as in the early days of the Tunisian revolution the MSM told us Islamists weren’t involved (Listen, any time you hear mobs shouting Allahu Akbar, it’s Islamist!) only to have to cover the return of Islamist exiles and clashes between them and secularists, so the Brotherhood was first ignored, then called marginal, and now of course is being discussed across the media spectrum since the Brotherhood itself has no desire to hide.
Predictably ,we see puff pieces on CNN as to who they have “changed,” and statements by the Brotherhood that they only want to “participate” You should be aware of a core Islamic principle, taqyiya –deception which states that it is acceptable and desirable for Muslims to lie and deceive their opponents in advancing Islam. Peace treaties are signed in times of weakness, abrogated in time of strength. A bit of an archival search will show this same MSM process of threat minimization regarding Iran in 78.
Some of the more “radical” anti Islam commentators I read of course see the minimizing of the MSM as part of an overall “plot.”
I don’t. While there are some elements of the nihilist left – philobaribarists and neo- Rousseauvians – who just plain hate Western civilization( Why? I don’t really care.) in the media and academia, I would characterize the impulse to ignore the threat of Islam as coming from two sources, one reprehensible, and one laudable, but misguided.
Hitler and Lenin said exactly what they were going to do, but no one listened. Muhammad, too, is equally plain spoken.
Chamberlain and his ilk simply couldn’t bear the awful truth. That was cowardice, plain and simple.
In our day, we are the children of Martin Luther King. We have been reared to value diversity ( and I’m not making fun here, although I think the word “diversity” has been hijacked and defiled). It is against our very natures to characterize a group as evil. But that is what we must do to those who adhere to the literal teachings of Islam.
No matter the puff pieces from the MSM, or outreach from the White House and the State Department(Obama invited members of the brotherhood to his Cairo speech, despite their outlaw status, certainly something they would take as a clear signal as to where he stood on Mubarak, whether he meant it that way or not ) The Brotherhood has not changed its mission, nor has its many front groups.( see CAIR)
It will take over Egypt, and Egypt will become a front line jihad state. There is no chance of any kind of democracy – other than the Iranian variety – ultimately emerging. None. Nothing can stop this, and we shouldn’t try. If we acknowledge the threat now we can make rational preparations to counter it.
This is a civilizational crisis, like the earlier ones of the 20th century. The difference is that with Islam, given its utter didacticism ( Marxism was capable of reinterpretation and mutation), and tendency to war with itself –there will be no Muslim Lenin, Hitler or Stalin, so it will be far easier to contain, and when contained, will quickly collapse from its contradictions –as all ideologies do, and as do empires based on conquest(see Rome)
The question is, how long do we wait?
Note: I could provide lots of links to bolster my assertions, but I think it’s better if people look on their own, and base their conclusions on sources they trust.
Not long after this, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, ex-Muslim atheist writer and former member of the Dutch Parliament who fled Holland for America after continuing credible death threats from Islamists, wrote in the Wall Street Journal that a rush to elections in Egypt would bring the Brotherhood to power and that it would be better to put a constitution in place first, one that assured the freedoms that many of the revolution’s early supporters were ready to,and in many cases did die for.
Ms Ali did not reference, but surely had in mind the statement a week earlier for the the US Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, during a House Intelligence Committee hearing that Egypt’s branch of the Muslim Brotherhood movement was “a very heterogeneous group, largely secular, which has eschewed violence and has decried al -Qaeda as a perversion of Islam.”
The Brotherhood has eschewed violence because it has found far more effective ways to work, organizing on the ground through civil society groups, and exploiting the pathetic eagerness of western political, academic and media elites to believe that it’s all going to turn out well..
“The Muslim Brotherhood (is) not seeking power,” said Mohammed Morsi, a member of the organization’s media office. “We want to participate, not to dominate. We will not have a presidential candidate. (We) want to participate and help; we are not seeking power.”UPI feb9 2011
But, by May…
Islamist Leader Pursues Egypt’s Presidency
CAIRO—A popular reformist leader in Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood said he will run for president, in a move that raises the possibility that Islamist politicians could dominate the country’s presidency and its parliament.
And now he is President of Egypt
These lies or “evolution” did nothing to discourage Arab Spring revelers:
29 November 2011:”MPAC(Muslim Public Affairs Council) announced today it will host two special events tomorrow focusing on the Arab Spring, a Capitol Hill forum on “Islamic Political Movements and the Arab Spring: Committed to Democracy and Pluralism?” and a special dinner with Rachid Ghannouchi, leader of Tunisia’s Ennahda Party.”
Now, the question in the event description was rhetorical, but I think the answer should now be obvious.
The re-branding of Islamic supremacism never stops. All Islamist parties are now “moderate.”
VOA:November 03, 2011
Islam in Tunisia – Will Ennahda Win Usher in Religious Reform?
I guess this answers that question: September 14, 2011. The blag flag of jihad flies over the US embassy in Tunis.
Tunisians question the Ennahda Party Constituent Assembly win in a country that has been secular for decades. Others say that’s precisely why the Islamists did win. And everyone is getting an education in democracy.
and: Secularists are still scratching their heads: How, exactly, did Islamists perform so well in the election.
Gosh, I dunno, maybe because Muslims voted for them? Pew Research has been showing high favorables for sharia law in muslim contries, for quiet some time. Stoning adulterers is quite popular.
Islamic reform? What are we to make of this? Nice reforms that lead to a better life under Islam? Or face veils and beheadings? No doubt the Washington establishment expects the former.
Does anyone remember Mao’s cadres being labelled “agrarian reformers?” Indeed they were. So much so that there wasn’t much agriculture to speak of left when they got through with it. Or Castro the Democrat?
NYT:
Moderate Islamist Party Winning Morocco Election
Published: November 26, 2011
quote:“We have a progressive approach to Islam,” Mustafa Ramid, a party leader, said in an interview. “The Islamicization of Morocco will be achieved only by re-establishing justice, and religious freedom.”
Of course, Islam does not allow religious freedom, but in Islamic thought, freedom to submit to Islam is freedom. Still, nothing to worry about, plenty of diversity in that context, according to experts such as Noah Feldman,(November 29, 2011) “the Harvard law professor who has specialised among other things in Islamic law, pointed out that the Muslim Brotherhood would not have to fight for amendments to write sharia into the Egyptian constitution because it’s already there. “The Egyptian constitution as written is perfectly considtent with the Brotherhood’s ideals. It states that Islam is the source of law and that laws cannot contradict the sharia. It is an Islamist constitution — it’s just not applied in a very Islamist way,” he said. The new Iraqi and Afghan constitutions, both drawn up while U.S. troops were fighting armed Islamists there after invading in the last decade, are also both Islamic constitutions in that way.”
Now, this guy was really scary.
Feldman said he expected the Muslim Brotherhood to work within the democratic system while promoting a socially conservative agenda in accordance with Muslim values. So there would be more mosque attendance, possibly more Islamically inspired legislation like better welfare for the poor. But he saw this as essentially a cultural shift somewhat akin to the change seen in Washington in 2001 when another party with strong religious links took power.
Mohamed Morsi, Egyptian President and a real sweetheart.
“It’s not very different from when the Bush administration came to Washington,” he said. “The culture was subtly affected by this. There were more people of evangelical and southwestern backgrounds. The president was seen going to church on Sunday and actually meaning it. These cultural differences are related to religion but it’s too simple to reduce them to religion,” he said.
US Embassy Cairo : It’s not the Jolly Roger, folks. Well, in a way, it is.
What an ass. I don’t recall “theocrat” George W. Bush conducting any blasphemy trials. Instead, he began the pandering to the Religion of Peace that has simply escalated since then., and reached its apogee this week as the President and his Secretary of State continue to blame the assaults on American facilities in the Middle East and elsewhere in the Islamic word as reactions to an offensive video. The simple, and obvious question, that what kind of culture would react so violently to a crude( but not unfounded) criticism, is one they cannot ask themselves, because the answer is so transparently clear that their false construct of an Islamic world that is at heart not so different from ours, will instantly collapse. It is this willful self delusion that led to Benghazi. Indeed, while it may seem harsh, I suspect that murdered ambassador Stevens was subject to it himself.
Panglosssian Globalist and friend
Rather every time the Islamist rulers of Egypt and the other “liberated” countries ramp up their rhetoric, and action, they are simply re-branded . Every time thei rstory changes, they new line becomes truth. Unless its something really unpleasant, like amputating hands, in which case the chattering class ignore it completely. Thus we have the indefatigable globalist Thomas Friedman, schmoozing with veiled women who assure him their votes for the brotherhood and salafis were “not based on religion.” Mr Friedman needs to know that his Lexus has run head on into the Olive Tree. The Lexus is totalled, the tree isn’t going anywhere. The one world convergence of democratic consumerism isn’t happening; the convergence of Islamic supremacism with the human will to power, is.
Now, the question is, if I – and countless others – could figure this out, why couldn’t Washington?http://www.upi.com/Top_News/World-News/2011/02/09/Muslim-Brotherhood-wont-field-candidate/UPI-59081297265941/#ixzz1kI2IarTY