I just became aware of this blog via Ted Belman over at Israpundit.
Here is a sample:
Promoting political Islam has been the real foundation of Obama's Middle East policy. In fact, Obama's foreign policy mentors, Lee Hamilton and Zbig Brzezinski, are both pro-Islamist. Yet this pro-Muslim policy had to be revised after the Arab Spring. To be sure, when crowds in Tahrir Square in Cairo --January-February 2011--- called on Mubarak to leave, Obama echoed those calls and also stated that an MB govt in Egypt would be acceptable to the United States. One of Obama's intelligence honchos, James Clapper, even lied to Congress on the MB's behalf, saying that it was "largely secular," in order to portray the MB as innocuous and even benevolent.
All of this I think speaks to a deeper more ingrained problem. Obama, or the EU or whomever can hitch their wagon to any random fascists, totalitarians or maniacs be they Baathists in Syria or Iraq, the Muslim Brotherhood, or 17th century Wahhabists. They can hem and haw and debate on this, the anniversary of 52 people murdered in the 7/7 bombings in London whether murderous psychopaths spouting Dark Ages voodoo nonsense are indeed what they say they are and whether that's something that some Jews or practically anyone over there who's not that, can live with.
ReplyDeleteBut the fact remains, that whatever John Kerry or Obama think, Egypt stuffed its cloven hoof on the gas pedal of their rickety smoking bus and it's careening off a cliff, on purpose.
Whether the Army appoints this one or that to interim President, whether Elbaradei, who almost universally was declared to be Iran's stooge when he lead the IAEA and helped cut YEARS from their nuclear weapons program, is or is not PM - their problems are at this point too big to salvage. Giving proof to the statement that NO ONE is too big to fail, Egypt will implode.
Even if Qatar and Saudi Arabia toss a few billion dollars to them EVERY MONTH for the next two or three years, it's not enough. Egypt has to buy food to maintain more than 45 million people, almost all of whom are illiterate, at a subsistence level - just as they have done for decades. Egypt has to buy billions of dollars in diesel fuel, propane, butane, gasoline, just to keep the lights on and potable water flowing.
This perhaps is the Obama legacy of hitching The Strong Horse. They gambled on Islamic fascism thinking that this form of fascism is no less capable than any other. And this was their crucial mistake. Unlike all those other authoritarian fascist dictatorships even the ideological ones, Islamic fascism takes ideology to a new insane level. More Pol Pot and Ceausescu and less Estado Novo and Chun Doo-hwan. Capabilty is not the goal. Autarky is not the goal. Soccer stadium executions is the goal. Mass changes to society at any cost is the goal. The higher the cost the better it is.
Anyone who's read Sayyid Qutb and Hassan al Banna knows that they propose a sea change to all societies where the Muslim Brotherhood and radical reactionary Islam generally resides. That's the point of it. That's why they call it radical Islam. If they thought that their goal should be socialism with a quaint religious tinge they'd become Denmark or Malta.
What the Muslim Brotherhood did was set in motion the implosion of Egypt intentionally. This is more or less the direction that radical fundamentalism takes by definition takes. This is what Sudan did, this is what Yemen is doing, this is what Afghanistan did, this what the Chechyans are attempting, and on and on and on. What they intend is no different than what Serbia and Croatia had in mind for Bosnia or what Saddam Hussein had in mind for the Kurds. But the difference between the Muslim Brotherhood and those other insane nations is that radical Islam is imbued with an irrational suicidal ideology little different from Nazism.
So..here you have it. Egypt is falling apart at every nail. Obama is debating whether to continue to feed the Army which will take that money if they get it, to protect themselves from the whirlwind which will destroy the country. He's hitched his wagon to the Strong Horse and hoped that it would pull the country forward. But the strong horse had mad cow disease and the wagon's on fire.
"Anyone who's read Sayyid Qutb and Hassan al Banna knows that they propose a sea change to all societies where the Muslim Brotherhood and radical reactionary Islam generally resides."
DeletePart of the problem is that very few Americans, including perhaps the president of the United States, understand much about the history of the Muslim Brotherhood.
Either they do not know about the Brotherhood's collaboration with Nazi Germany or they think that at this point it is irrelevant, despite the fact that the Brothers called for the overthrow of Jerusalem during a Morsi rally just prior to the election.
I find the general indifference concerning the rise of Islamic fascism in the Middle East by Americans - and most particularly among progressive-left American Jews - to be a disgrace.
What the Muslim Brotherhood did was set in motion the implosion of Egypt intentionally.
What would be the purpose of this in your view?
I do not know for one second that I agree with you, but I am certainly willing to hear your argument.
My sense of it is that utopianistic movements, be they reactionary or not all tend to what Joseph Shumpeter called "Creative Destruction". From the French Revolution, to the failed revolutions of 1848, to Attaturk, to Franco, Mussolini and Hitler. From Lenin and Stalin to Mao Zedong to Pol Pot. From the Taliban and al Qaeda, movements founded on completely erasing the Ancien Regime look to wipe out not only the old government, the Czar, the civil and civic institutions to make way for a glorious new shining city on the hill or proletarian paradise or Teutonic Lebensraum or Iberian Catholic military partnership in Christ - but importantly change the very nature of mankind itself.
ReplyDeleteThe goal of Utopian Dictatorships is, as my Baptist friends allude - "if you want to fix the man you have to change the man". They look to end the connections in families so that children betray their parents. They look to break unions, change the nature of work, end the previous relationships between man and Church. In some cases alter geography itself - either moving millions from the fields to the cities or from the cities to the fields. They burn the libraries and close the schools. They ensure there is only One Message on the TV and radio so that people learn to alter their very thinking and identity. And if that doesn't speed along enough, they resort to mass rapes, concentration camps and worse.
The goal of utopianism is Utopia - an ineffable state of abstract perfection which is attained only when everything else has been stripped away and burned leaving the new leaders as sole owners of state and human identity. I believe the Muslim Brotherhood was attempting to disassemble Egyptian society en masse before building it up in a new version of their Ummah. Meanwhile apocalyptic cults aren't worried very much about the quality of their subjects lives on earth. If a million die, oh well, they are going to a better place with Allah. The Communist historian Eric Hobsbawm was asked if 20 or 30 million dead was an acceptable count if one could finally achieve his view of a perfect Communist state. His one word answer was "Yes".