Melanie Phillips
The abject capitulation of the Obama administration to the forces waging war on the western world was laid bare a few days ago when US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton announced that the US now wanted to open a dialogue with the Muslim Brotherhood. As the Jerusalem Post reported:
‘We believe, given the changing political landscape in Egypt, that it is in the interests of the United States to engage with all parties that are peaceful and committed to nonviolence, that intend to compete for the parliament and the presidency,’ Clinton told reporters in Budapest, Hungary. ‘And we welcome, therefore, dialogue with those Muslim Brotherhood members who wish to talk with us.’
But the Muslim Brotherhood is not ‘non-violent’. It operates a dual strategy of violence and subversion, each acting as an arm of the pincer that is strangling the west. It supports the murder of Jews and Americans in Israel, Afghanistan and Iraq. In 2006 Brotherhood leader Mohammed Mahdi Akef declared he was
‘prepared to send 10,000 jihad fighters immediately to fight at the side of Hezbollah’
during Hezbollah`s war against Israel. Why does the US Secretary of State claim that a movement endorsing and inciting the killing of both Israelis and her own country’s soldiers is ‘peaceful and committed to non-violence’? Does she not know about the Brotherhood’s role in inciting such killings? Does she not care?
In Egypt, the Brotherhood was banned because of the threat it posed to the country from the imposition of a theocratic Islamic tyranny should it ever take power. Egypt’s women in particular have cause to tremble at the prospect. In 2007, Akef objected to America’s abhorrence of female genital mutilation thus:
‘... [the Americans] wage war on Muslim leaders, the traditions of its faith and its ideas. They even wage war against female circumcision, a practice current in 36 countries, which has been prevalent since the time of the Pharaohs.’
Why does supposedly arch-feminist Hillary want to ‘engage’ with a movement that would promote the mutilation of Egyptian women?
A movement, moreover, which conspires to infiltrate, subvert and conquer America, Britain and Europe by appearing moderate and capturing existing western institutions. The Brothers are not shy of stating this aim. A US Brotherhood document stated in 1991:
‘The civilisational-jihadist process…is a kind of grand jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and “sabotaging” its miserable house…so that it is eliminated and God’s religion is made victorious overall other religions’.
Last year, the Brotherhood’s Supreme Guide Muhammed Badi stated:
'Resistance is the only solution against the Zio-American arrogance and tyranny, and all we need is for the Arab and Muslim peoples to stand behind it and support it... The Soviet Union fell dramatically, but the factors that will lead to the collapse of the U.S. are much more powerful than those that led to the collapse of the Soviet empire – for a nation that does not champion moral and human values cannot lead humanity, and its wealth will not avail it once Allah has had His say, as happened with [powerful] nations in the past. The U.S. is now experiencing the beginning of its end, and is heading towards its demise... ‘
As, indeed, Mrs Clinton is apparently all too intent upon demonstrating. Having stupidly hailed the Egyptian ‘Arab Spring’ as heralding the arrival of democracy, the Obama administration (along with the UK Cameron government) may turn out to have facilitated the imposition upon Egypt of the fanatics of the Brotherhood – whom Mrs Clinton now hymns as splendid chaps to whom she’d love to talk.
This epic stupidity has not come out of the blue. For years now, the Brotherhood’s cause as moderate reformers has been promoted by siren voices on both sides of the Atlantic. In an infamous Foreign Affairs article in 2007, Robert Leiken and Steven Brooke advised the Bush administration to enter into a strategic alliance with the Muslim Brothers -- to whom they referred as ‘moderate’ -- in order to promote American interests. Merely because some of the Brothers professed to aspire to democracy, these western gulls believed they were therefore axiomatically ‘moderate’ folk. But as Jonathan Dahoah-Halevi wrote here in the same year:
'The Muslim Brotherhood does indeed participate in political activity and defend the democratic process. That is not, however, because it has accepted the principles of Western democracy as Leiken and Brooke have claimed, but rather because the democratic process can be exploited to establish an Islamic regime which will then obviate democracy, as was made evident by its platform in the 2007 Egyptian parliamentary elections.'
Alas, as so often people wanted to believe what was most convenient rather than the blindingly obvious. Leiken and Brooke aside, the outstanding leaders of this lemming tendency in the west are from the UK -- where the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee, no less, proposed in 2007 opening a dialogue with the Muslim Brotherhood. Yet that very same year, as Dahoah-Halevi reported:
'At a meeting of the National Defense and Security Committee of the Egyptian Parliament held in January 2007, Muslim Brotherhood parliament member Mohammed Shaker Sanar openly admitted that the Muslim Brotherhood was not committed to Western democratic values. He said that nothing about the organization had changed. "The organization was founded in 1928 to re-establish the Caliphate destroyed by Ataturk....With Allah’s help [the Muslim Brotherhood] will institute the law of Allah." ’
The Commons committee’s recommendation resulted from intense lobbying on behalf the Brothers and Hamas. The most plausible and therefore influential group pushing this line over the years has been Forward Thinking, which claims to want to bring ‘marginalised’ groups in the Middle East into the mainstream political process. Forward Thinking has been extremely successful in getting the British and US establishments to take its ideas seriously.
Here it is once again promoting Hamas as a ‘necessary’ part of the peace process. In case you had forgotten, Hamas are committed to the eradication of Israel and every Jew on the planet, and believe not merely that the Protocols of the Elders of Zion was a real conspiracy but that Jews have been responsible for every rotten development since the French Revolution.
And here is Forward Thinking promoting Dr Abdel Moneim Aboul Fotouh , a senior member of the Muslim Brotherhood and a candidate in Egypt’s presidential election this September.
Here is Dr Fotouh in 2009 on the website of the Muslim Brotherhood (also known as the Ikhwan) appealing against his state security detention in Egypt at that time and declaring that he had been
'a victim to a host of fabricated accusations'.
According to this story in the Wall Street Journal, Dr Fotouh is known as a moderate, reformist member of the Brotherhood whose presidential candidacy it has reportedly disowned. Indeed Dr Fotouh claims he is running as an independent.
As Michael Weiss reported on his Telegraph blog, the Egyptian Brothers are fighting amongst themselves. The Brotherhood has announced an electoral coalition with a number of even more fanatical Salafi groups, amongst them Jama’a al-Islamiyya, which played a role in the assassination of President Anwar Sadat in 1981 and recently advocated the formation of a Saudi-style ‘modesty police’ for Egypt. Oh, and Jama’a has been cited by al Qaeda’s new leader as an affiliate member.
But might the reformist Dr Fotouh – who it seems has indeed promoted remarkably unorthodox views, such as the right of Muslims to convert to Christianity – himself merely be a sophisticated stalking horse for an Islamist takeover of Egypt? Indeed, in this interview he appears to see no extremism in the Brotherhood at all:
'The Ikhwan is not a radical group; it is a reforming institution and we aim to reform society and we see that it needs reforming, either civil institutions or state institutions and this has been caused by corruption and tyranny.'
Fascinating! So should we conclude that this from Supreme Guide Badi:
'Resistance is the only solution against the Zio-American arrogance and tyranny'
or this from his same sermon:
‘...the change that the [Muslim] nation seeks can only be attained through jihad and sacrifice and by raising a jihadi generation that pursues death just as the enemies pursue life...’
or this from Brotherhood spiritual leader Sheikh Yusuf Quaradawi:
‘Today the Jews are not the Israelites praised by Allah, but the descendants of the Israelites who defied His word. Allah was angry with them and turned them into monkeys and pigs....There is no doubt that the battle in which the Muslims overcome the Jews [will come]....In that battle the Muslims will fight the Jews and kill them’
are moderate, democratic, reformist statements?
Some Egyptians, at least, are very concerned about Fotouh’s candidacy.
‘He has somehow broken with them, but his background is Muslim Brothers,’ said Mamdouh Hamza, a prominent pro-democracy activist who is organizing a secular political bloc to confront Islamism. Do you think Egypt should have a Muslim Brother as a president? I don’t.’
But then, who cares about an Egyptian pro-democracy activist when Hillary Clinton knows better?
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