Obama Supports the Muslim Brotherhood

Karam

I seem to be on some sort-of Barry Rubin marathon, but the guy's work resonates and he has a recent piece entitled, Such a ‘Great’ Idea It Can Now Be Proclaimed But Not Criticized: Obama Supports the Muslim Brotherhood, as Dan pointed out the other day.

I read pretty much everything that Rubin writes and I have to say that close-minded "progressives" make a great mistake when they assume they can simply dismiss his analyses because he is "right-wing"... as if that, in itself, represents cause to dismiss a significant scholar.

The fact of the matter is that Rubin is a supporter of the Labor Party, as he mentioned to me in a personal email some time back.

He writes:

Not only is the Obama administration, as I’ve written for the last year, favoring radical Islamist forces — despite the fact that these are anti-Western, pro-terrorism, building dictatorships, and openly antisemitic and anti-Christian — but now even the establishment media is admitting it.

The link goes to a New York Times article with the following headline:

Overtures to Egypt’s Islamists Reverse Longtime U.S. Policy

Now, am I to understand that "progressives," as well as the Obama administration, actually favors genocidal Muslim fascism?   That's what making "overtures" to Egypt's Islamists means, after all.  It means accepting contemporary Nazism as a reasonable part of the international discussion.

And so for the first time in U.S. history an American government, to the applause of the vast majority of the mass media, is backing an anti-American authoritarian movement. Here’s how the New York Times explains it:

The Obama administration has begun to reverse decades of mistrust and hostility as it seeks to forge closer ties with an organization [the Muslim Brotherhood] once viewed as irreconcilably opposed to United States interests.

For a number of years, now, I have been arguing that progressives have buried their heads in the sand when it comes to the issue of Radical Islam, but this is beginning to no longer be the case. What we are seeing, instead, is the embrace of genocidal, anti-Semitic Islamism by progressives of high rank, such as the president of the United States.

I was fairly shocked when a group of leftists, including western politicians, joined with Jihadis aboard the Mavi Marmara in order to confront the Jews on the high seas, but I certainly never expected the president of the United States to quietly endorse the Jihad, as Obama is now doing.

As Rubin writes:

of course the U.S. government must deal with Egypt’s government, but that doesn’t mean it should publicly proclaim that the Brotherhood is a nice group and give what amounts to an unconditional endorsement of it.

This is essentially giving the presidential "thumbs-up" to Arab Nazis who continue to support the slaughter of Jewish people. How ideologically blinkered must one be to support a president that bolsters a fascistic theological organization like the Muslim Brotherhood?

It's frankly amazing.

What we are now witnessing is absolutely profound in its implications, but do not look to the progressive-left for any meaningful analysis of the subject. They won't because they can't and the reason that they can't, aside from the shear inconvenience of having to explain just why they are now supporting contemporary Nazism, is because it is entirely inexcusable.

As I’ve written before, it’s possible to elect a dictatorship. The Egyptian people have a right to do so, but that doesn’t mean the West should like it.

Is that not obvious? As naive, and sometimes malicious, progressives love to remind us, the Egyptian people are engaging in democracy and therefore who are we to deny them that most fundamental right?

It's stupid, I know, because none of us are saying that the Egyptians should be denied democracy, it's just that those of us who are conscious would very much appreciate it if they did not help bring a long-standing theocratic fascist organization, with a history that goes to Nazi Germany, to power right next door to all those Jews.

Second, why should the burden of reversing “decades of mistrust and hostility” be exclusively on the United States? Doesn’t the Brotherhood, which benefits from U.S. engagement, need to do that also or even beforehand? Why is there no conditionality here, no hint that the Obama administration or New York Times understands how hostile the Brotherhood has been and continues to be? If the U.S. president won’t demand a quid pro quo (something in exchange for his concessions), who is going to look after U.S. interests?

Well, clearly, no one is going to look after U.S. interests. Certainly the president of the United States is not going to. Another question to ask is, who is going to look after Jewish interests? Not only will the president not do so, but even Jewish progressives cannot bring themselves to do so.

Third, by saying the Brotherhood was “once viewed as irreconcilably opposed to United States interests,” the author suggests this is no longer true. We know that the Obama administration thinks the Brotherhood has changed. Yet there is no evidence in terms of deeds, ideology, or statement made in Arabic that the Brotherhood has done so.

Quite the contrary. There is every reason to believe that the Brotherhood is just as blood-thirsty as it always was. It takes a certain kind of numbskull to ignore direct threats of the type that we recently heard in Tahrir Square. The crowd, supporters of the Brotherhood, were quite literally calling for the genocide of the Jews and, yet, we have the president of the United States endorsing such an organization.

In other words, Obama isn’t just observing but is affecting events. Now, note how the Obama administration avoids this issue:

“It would be `totally impractical’ not to engage the ‘Brotherhood because of U.S. security and regional interests in Europe,’ a senior administration official” said. But we are not talking about holding talks, we’re talking about becoming apologists for Islamism, a position announced and defended in a detailed explanation by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. It is entirely predictable that as the revolutionary Islamists take anti-American and dictatorial stances, the Western media will underreport them and the Obama administration will ignore them, if only to defend the mistaken ideas they hold and the mistaken policy Obama has staked out.

Yup. The American media will underplay all of this, as will the American progressive-left which is showing itself to be more and more comfortable with the rise of Islamist fascism in the Middle East.

I take it as a betrayal, but I am someone who is emphatically NOT comfortable with the kind of genocidal anti-Semitic rhetoric that comes screeching out of Cairo.

My grandfather and grandmother, on my father's side, got out of Medzhibozh, Ukraine, (the founding place of the Chasids, by the way) while the getting was good, but that entire side of the family was murdered by the Nazis.

Call me a "racist," if you will, but I am opposed to those who seek the murder of Jews. I know that it's an intolerant stance... not nearly so open-minded as a good progressive should be... but I tend to be hard-hearted that way.

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