Obama's Failures

Mike L.

This is a piece that I originally published in January of last year, but one that I would like to republish because I think that it remains relevant.



In a recent post I began the process of outlining Barack Obama's failures viz-a-viz the Arab-Israel conflict.

There are at least four major failures, including:

1) The Ruination of the Peace Process.

Wherein Obama destroyed any near term potential for a negotiated agreement between Israel and the Palestinians by insisting upon "total settlement freeze."

2) The Validation of Palestinian Anti-Semitism.

Wherein Obama seems to agree with the Palestinian Authority that Jews should not be allowed to live, and therefore build housing for themselves, in what Jordan dubbed the "West Bank."

3) The Encouragement of Jihad.

Wherein Obama compared the rise of genocidal Islamism throughout the Arab world to the American Revolution and the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s.

And 4) The Capitulation to Iranian Nukes.

Wherein Obama capitulates to Iranian nukes.

I did forget one, though.

5) The Insistence Upon De-Coupling our Understanding of Terrorism from the Radical Jihad.

Wherein Obama discourages his administration from acknowledging the Islamic nature of Jihadi terrorism.

In response to the first four of these concerns, Obama supporter, Mets102, wrote the following:

Are the Egyptian People not entitled to the same blessings of liberty that Israelis enjoy or that we Americans enjoy? What is wrong with our president engaging the largest political party in an emerging democracy?

It's difficult to know just how to respond to this comment.

Mets seems to believe that a single election in which the genocidal, anti-Semitic Muslim Brotherhood gain 41 percent of the Egyptian vote and the even more extreme Salafists gain an additional 20 percent, thus giving the entire country over to Political Islam, somehow represents the "blessings of liberty that Israelis enjoy or that we Americans enjoy."

Forgive me if I disagree with such an assessment for, at least, two reasons.

The first, of course, is that the mere fact of an election does not suggest democracy.  Mets knows as well as I that the Nazis were democratically elected, as was Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood affiliate in the Gaza strip.  Even dictator Abbas ran out his mandate about 3 years ago and is now a non-elected, non-democratic ruler. What I fail to understand is that, given the fact that Mets knows these things, just why he would raise this canard?

The second reason, which is more important, is that people seem to know little of the history of the Muslim Brotherhood, and must be ignoring what they currently say:

Oh Allah, take this oppressive, Jewish Zionist band of people. Oh Allah, do not spare a single one of them. Oh Allah, count their numbers, and kill them, down to the very last one. - Yusuf al-Qaradawi / Muslim Brotherhood.

One of the themes of this blog is that progressives are remaining willfully ignorant about Radical Islam, both its history and its current behavior, and thereby refuse to educate themselves to the Nazi roots of the Islamist trend. Or, as I like to say, progressives would not acknowledge the Jihad if they were blindfolded and on their knees in some basement in Karachi.

The Nazi roots of the Brotherhood is established historical fact that anyone should learn about before speaking on the subject.

As I have mentioned any number of times previously, there is honest academic work currently being done on this topic. The main writers that I am immediately familiar with are:

Matthias Kuntzel, Jihad and Jew-Hatred: Islamism, Nazism and the Roots of 9/11 (2007).

Paul Berman, Terror and Liberalism (2003) and The Flight of the Intellectuals (2010).

Edwin Black, The Farhud: Roots of the Arab-Nazi Alliance in the Holocaust (2010).

and Jeffrey Herf, Nazi Propaganda for the Arab World. (2009)

This is a fascinating and emerging historiography and you cannot speak about groups like the Brotherhood without having some familiarity with what the historians are saying and what they are showing us is the Nazi provenance of this movement. These are not ideologues.  These are not people involved in political dirt-fights.

These are scholars.

It is time to move on from old alliances that are no longer reliable and old assumptions, such as progressive-left friendship to the Jewish people, which simply no longer hold true.