The Patriot Post® · Obama Demands Peaceful Surrender to Brotherhood
Barack Obama’s administration is the best American friend the global caliphate movement has ever had. Obama, a notorious back-stabber of accomplices who have outlived their usefulness, is now demonstrating that he is capable of steadfast comradeship when his heart is in it, responding to the mass uprising and military coup that has toppled Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood regime by demanding that the Brotherhood be allowed to participate in whatever form of government comes next.
From Bloomberg News, we get this:
While President Barack Obama’s administration has stopped short of condemning the July 3 military takeover, it has called on Egyptian leaders to pursue “a transparent political process that is inclusive of all parties and groups,” including “avoiding any arbitrary arrests of Morsi and his supporters,” Bernadette Meehan, a spokeswoman for the National Security Council, said July 4 in a statement.
Let us leave aside the obvious hilarity of the Obama administration demanding “a transparent political process” from anyone else – while secretly collecting personal communications and financial data on all of its citizens, using federal agencies to target political opponents, concocting elaborate lies to cover for the gravest moral misdeeds, and arbitrarily micromanaging the implementation of destructive laws to shield its party from election fallout. The more important consideration here is what exactly this call for an “inclusive” process in Egypt is intended to achieve.
With his demands that today’s Egyptian leaders pursue transparency and “avoid any arbitrary arrests,” Obama is suggesting that the new leaders need to be pushed into behaving with restraint, thus implicitly painting the Morsi government as the victim in this struggle. Further, the Obama administration has implied, though they have “stopped short of” declaring, that the ouster of Morsi was illegitimate; why else would they demand that the faction just removed from government in a popular uprising must be allowed right back in as quickly as possible?
Note to the duplicitous “fact checkers” out there: of course you will not find Obama’s direct statement of support for the MB. At the risk of vindicating Michele Bachmann’s account of MB influence within the government, Obama obviously cannot come straight out and say, “If I had a son, he’d look like the boy who killed Tyrone Woods with mortar fire.” Instead, the administration is reverting to the progressives’ standard method of indirect support for anti-Western tyrants: moral equivalency arguments. Thus, in answer to accusations from Egyptians that the Obama administration had long supported Morsi’s government, the administration’s official answer is that Obama “is not aligned with, and does not support, any particular Egyptian party or group.” That’s the administration’s strongest effort to dissociate itself from a terrorist-supporting organization openly advocating world dictatorship – moral equivalency. In effect, “We don’t support them, any more than we support anyone else.”
Predictably, the rationale for this tacit moral support of the Muslim Brotherhood is that MB involvement in the “process” is a prerequisite of peace.
The administration has urged the Egyptian military to stop using heavy-handed tactics, according to two U.S. officials who asked not to be identified commenting on private communications. They said the administration is concerned that some in the military may want to provoke the Islamists to violence and provide a rationale for crushing the movement once and for all.
Such a move would fail and probably prompt a shift to al-Qaeda type terrorist tactics by extremists in the Islamist movement in Egypt and elsewhere, the U.S. officials said.
There it is, in bold colors: the progressive case for appeasement that, over the past century, has served the modern world up to global socialism, and now does double duty on behalf of an Islamic jihadist movement that would swallow Western civilization whole, while destroying the remnants of political liberty and the fruits of the industrial revolution in the “process.”
The Obama administration is “concerned” that Egypt’s military leadership may wish to instigate an all-out fight with the MB support base, with the intention of wiping out the movement. As an alternative, they are urging that the MB be allowed to participate equally in a new democratic political process – exactly what they were urging a year ago. And what happened a year ago? Mohamed Morsi, a Brotherhood leader, was elected with the support of the large faction of Egyptian Sunnis who advocate political rule by Sharia law, support Hamas, and would eliminate all alternative voices within the Egyptian press and political community.
Notice how the administration’s reasoning also buys into the “root causes” talk that is typically favored by jihadist sympathizers. Muslims are radicalized by feeling excluded from the political process, we are told; and remember that in this case we are not even talking about Muslims in general, but rather a particular faction of Sunni Muslims that openly supports terrorist groups and hopes to eliminate all religious competitors within and without Islam. A group that would “probably” “shift to al-Qaeda type terrorist tactics” if they didn’t get their way is already radicalized. If al-Qaeda itself wished to be granted official party status, would Obama go out of his way to demand it? (Sadly, the answer is probably yes; following the thinking of his Chicago friend Rashid Khalidi, he would accept the premise that it is only a sense of disenfranchisement – ultimately caused by the Jews – that has radicalized the terrorists.)
The question the Obama administration, like all progressive organizations, wishes to elide is whether demanding that an extremely intolerant, tyrannical faction be allowed to participate as an equal partner in a “democratic political process” is not a recipe for a speedy drift into tyranny. In fact, arguments for compromise with tyranny made in the name of “peace” and “justice” are the progressives’ stock-in-trade in both domestic and foreign policy, as these have been pursued throughout the late modern world.
The League of Nations and the United Nations were progressive ideas, grand moral equivalency schemes foisted upon the West by men who wished to achieve gradually what the world’s tyrants wished to achieve immediately, namely “global governance” in the name of collectivist peace. The abolition of property rights, the dilution of national sovereignty, and the establishment of an international technocratic elite that would supersede elected governments and seek peace through compromise of the fundamental principles of individualism and freedom – these progressive goals lulled the West into a sleepwalk through fascism, and finally built an entire culture of apologetics for the spread of communism.
The tyrannical men and regimes of the world must be included in any legitimate political process, the West was repeatedly told by its leaders – they must “have a voice” – lest they become militant and unmanageable. The worst thing we could do, the progressives continually warned, would be to exclude the totalitarians from the discussion, for this might “provoke” them into a more radical and threatening position.
The present case could not demonstrate the folly (let’s be generous) of such a position any more clearly. The Muslim Brotherhood is an international organization bent on achieving world Islamic rule. And their notion of Islamic rule is in no way morally or politically equivalent to what defenders of Israel mean when they speak of a “Jewish state.” For one thing, the state they seek is global – there would be no alternative homeland for those who do not wish to live in this “Islamic state.” And for another, the society they envision, and toward which they strive, is not a pluralistic, open society, but the most monolithic, closed society imaginable – outside of the communist totalitarian world, toward which Western progressives also urged tolerance, inclusion and understanding.
The Talibanization of the Earth would, in practice, differ from the dream of world communism primarily in that the chains would come down most heavily on women and infidels first, rather than on everyone at once. In the end, a global approximation of Taliban Afghanistan would be the result in either case; whether the murdered and re-educated are called “infidels” or “capitalists” makes very little difference. The only significant difference would be perceptual: we wouldn’t actually be able to see the women’s starving faces.
The Morsi government was supposed to be the “friendly” face of this global caliphate fantasy. Within a year of the election of these “moderates,” they had begun in earnest the process of reconfiguring Egypt to destroy secular politics, and to eliminate modern (non-jihadist) culture. This is the faction that the Obama administration is offering its tacit moral backing, by demanding that it be included in the political machinery that evolves out of the latest crisis.
Consider, once again, the standard progressive argument for appeasement, as promoted by the anonymous Obama administration officials. Marginalizing and excluding the MB from the political process would “probably prompt a shift to al-Qaeda type terrorist tactics by extremists in the Islamist movement in Egypt and elsewhere.” In other words, their goals are coercive and authoritarian, so the best course of action is to allow them to achieve those goals gradually and peacefully rather than forcing them to resort to violence. To restate: “Give them what they want, and nobody gets hurt.” You might hand over your wallet to an armed thief on such terms; but would you deliver millions of people into Taliban-like servitude on the same terms?
The current predicament in Egypt is more evidence – as if we needed it – for the principle that broadly “democratic” political arrangements cannot be superimposed on a society that does not have a populace morally and intellectually prepared for self-governance. A population that votes itself into tyranny is like a free man who sells himself into slavery – he is not spiritually mature enough for self-determination. And the nations of the West are hardly in a position to look smugly at the unfitness of the Arab world for self-government, given that we have had all the historical preparation and civilizational establishment one could hope for, and are nevertheless well along in the process of doing the same thing Egypt did last year, and will likely do again this year.
The fact that the Obama administration’s instinct, when secular tyrants were being ousted in favor of Islamic rule, was to encourage this shift as evidence of “hope and change,” while, when the developing Islamic tyranny is ousted, the administration’s instinct is to admonish Egyptians and make demands on behalf of political Islam, is both telling and revolting. I cannot pretend to understand what is happening in Egypt, or to predict what will happen next. The horror stories of dozens of rapes during the recent protests, and recent stories about the character of the general leading the coup, indicate that this mass movement is threatened from the inside, probably by the involvement of radical Muslims who happen to oppose the MB’s methods. It is likely, however, that there are also a good number of people who genuinely desire a new start for their country, on a footing of reasonable, pluralistic government. No population votes itself into tyranny unanimously: rather, the majority uses its own submission to authority to strip away the freedoms of any minority faction that might have preferred a more civil order. (Sound familiar?) Given the history of Egypt and the region, the well-intentioned minority’s chances don’t look good. But they could not look much worse than they did under the quickly tightening authority of the MB regime.
Given the turmoil this decent minority is going through now, nothing, I imagine, could be more disheartening than the thought that after all this, they will simply end up in another “democratic process” that brings some version of the global caliphate movement back into power. And yet the likelihood of that miserable outcome is being enhanced, and even promoted, by the Obama administration’s demands that “democracy” be restored quickly, and that this “democracy” include the Muslim Brotherhood. What we are witnessing, among other things, is the vindication of everyone who ever warned that democracy without limiting principles quickly devolves into the tyranny of the majority.
It is usually best to avoid overused comparisons, but this time the obvious seems inevitable: Had Hitler survived his defeat in WWII, would the Allies have demanded, as a condition of Germany’s restoration, that he be reinstated as a candidate for Chancellor immediately? Imagine seeing those campaign posters on your ride home from Auschwitz.
What should happen next in Egypt is hardly clear. And it is almost a given that this is not what will happen. Is it not unseemly, however, for a U.S. administration to declare that a “democratic process” cannot be judged legitimate unless it includes the advocates of global tyranny? On the other hand, if ever there were a U.S. administration well-positioned to make such a declaration, it would be this one.
(This article originally appeared at American Thinker.)