On Tuesday, Egypt's chief prosecutor issued arrest warrants against eight US citizens.
Their
purported crimes relate either to their reported involvement in the
production of the Internet movie critical of Islam that has received so
much attention over the past 10 days, or to other alleged anti-Islamic
activities.
One of the US citizens indicted is a woman who converted from Islam to Christianity.
According
to the Associated Press, Egypt's general prosecution issued a statement
announcing that the eight US citizens have been indicted on charges of
insulting and publicly attacking Islam, spreading false information, and
harming Egyptian national unity.
The
AP write-up of the story quoted Mamdouh Ismail, a Salafi attorney who
praised the prosecution's move. He claimed it would deter others from
exercising their right to free expression in regards to Islam. As he put
it, the prosecutions will "set a deterrent for them and anyone else who
may fall into this." That is, they will deter others from saying
anything critical about Islam.
This desire to
intimidate free people into silence on Islam is clearly the goal the
heads of the Muslim Brotherhood seek to achieve through their protests
of the anti-Islamic movie. This was the message of Muslim Brotherhood
chief Yussuf Qaradawi. Three days after the anti-American assaults began
on the anniversary of the September 11 jihadist attacks on America,
Qaradawi gave a sermon on Qatar television, translated by MEMRI.
Qaradawi
struck a moderate tone. He called on his followers to stop rioting
against the US. Rather than attack the US, Qaradawi urged his Muslim
audience to insist that the US place prohibitions on the free speech
rights of American citizens by outlawing criticism of Islam - just as
the Europeans have done in recent years in the face of Islamic terror
and intimidation.
In his words, "We say to the
US: You must take a strong stance and try to confront this extremism
like the Europeans do. This [anti-Islamic film] is not art. It has
nothing to do with freedom of speech. This is nothing but curses and
insults. Does the freedom to curse and insult constitute freedom of
speech?"
Both the actions of the Egyptian
prosecution and Qaradawi's sermon prove incontrovertibly that the two
policies the US has adopted since September 11, 2001, to contend with
Muslim hatred for the US have failed. The neoconservative policy of
supporting the democratization of Muslim societies adopted by President
Barack Obama's predecessor George W. Bush has failed. And the
appeasement policy adopted by Obama has also failed.
Bush's
democratization policy claimed that the reason the Muslim world had
become a hotbed for anti-Americanism and terror was that the Muslim
world was not governed by democratic regimes. Once the peoples of the
Muslim world were allowed to be free, and to freely elect their
governments, the neoconservatives proclaimed, they would abandon their
hatred of America.
As a consequence of this
belief, when the anti-regime protests against the authoritarian Mubarak
regime began in January 2011, the neoconservatives were outspoken
supporters of the overthrow of then-president Hosni Mubarak, despite the
fact that he had been the US's key ally in the Arab world for three
decades. They supported the political process that brought the Muslim
Brotherhood to power. They supported the process despite the fact that
Qaradawi is the most influential cleric in Egypt. They supported it
despite the fact that just days after Mubarak was ousted from power,
Qaradawi arrived at Cairo's Tahrir Square and before an audience of two
million followers, he called for the invasion of Israel and the conquest
of Jerusalem.
In the event, the Egyptian
people voted for Qaradawi's Muslim Brotherhood and for the Salafi party.
The distinction between the two parties is that Qaradawi and the Muslim
Brotherhood are willing to resort to both violent and nonviolent ways
to dominate the world in the name of Islam. The Salafis abjure
nonviolence. So while Qaradawi called for the riots to end in order to
convince the Americans to criminalize criticism of Islam, his Salafi
counterparts called for the murder of everyone involved in producing the
anti-Islamic film.
For instance, Salafi cleric
Ahmad Fouad Ashoush issued a fatwa on Islamic websites last weekend
calling for American and European Muslims to murder those involved with
the movie. His religious ruling was translated by the SITE Intelligence
Group on Monday.
Ashoush wrote, "Those bastards
who did this film are belligerent disbelievers. I issue a fatwa and
call on the Muslim youth in America and Europe to do this duty, which is
to kill the director, the producer and the actors and everyone who
helped and promoted the film.
"So, hurry,
hurry, O Muslim youth in America and Europe, and teach those filthy
lowly ones a lesson that all the monkeys and pigs in America and Europe
will understand. May Allah guide you and grant you success."
These
are the voices of democratic Egypt. The government, which has indicted
American citizens on capital charges for exercising their most
fundamental right as Americans, is a loyal representative of the
sentiments of the Egyptian people who freely elected it. The Salafi
preacher is a loyal representative of the segment of the Egyptian people
that made the Salafi party the second largest in the Egyptian
parliament. Qaradawi's call for the abolition of freedom of speech in
America - as has happened in Europe - and to ban all criticism of Islam
is subscribed to by millions and millions of Muslims worldwide who
consider him one of the leading Sunni clerics in the world.
Free
elections in Egypt have empowered the Egyptian people to use the organs
of governance to advance their hatred of America. Their hatred has been
empowered, and legitimized, not diminished as the neoconservatives had
hoped.
The behavior of the Egyptian government,
Qaradawi and the Salafis also makes clear that Obama's policy of
appeasing the Muslim world has failed completely. Whereas Bush believed
the source of Muslim hatred was their political oppression at the hands
of their regimes, Obama has blamed their rage and hatred on America's
supposed misdeeds.
By changing the way America
treats the Muslim world, Obama believes he can end their hatred of
America. To this end, he has reached out to the most anti-American
forces and regimes in the region and spurned pro-American regimes and
political forces.
When Obama's policies are
recognized as driven by appeasement, the seeming inconsistency of his
war against Libya's Muammar Gaddafi on the one hand, and his passivity
in the face of the anti-regime uprising in Iran in 2009 and the Syrian
uprising against the Assad regime today makes sense. Gaddafi was not a
threat to the US, so he was unworthy of protection. The mullahs in Iran
and Assad are foes of the US. So they deserve protection. Obama has
assiduously courted the Muslim Brotherhood from the outset of his
presidency.
The official and unofficial
Egyptian exploitation of the Internet film as a means to intimidate and
attack the US into disavowing its core principles is proof that Obama's
theory of the source of Muslim rage is wrong. They do not hate America
because of what the US government does. They hate America because of
what America is. And it is because of this that since September 11, the
rationale for Obama's foreign policy has disintegrated.
Rather
than accept this basic truth and defend the American way of life, Obama
has doubled down in the only way now available to him. He, his
administration, his campaign and his supporters in the media have
responded to the collapse of the foundations of his foreign policy by
resorting to the sort of actions they accused George W. Bush, his
administration and supporters of taking. They have responded with a
campaign of political oppression and nativist bigotry directed against
their political opponents.
Late last Friday
night, law enforcement officers descended on the California home of
Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, the man who made the film that the Muslims of
the newly free Arab lands find so offensive. Nakoula was questioned by
federal authorities and later released. His arrest was photographed. The
image of a dozen officers arresting an unarmed man for making a movie
was broadcast worldwide within moments.
Beyond
persecuting an independent filmmaker, the White House requested that
YouTube block access to it. YouTube - owned by Google - has so far
rejected the White House's request.
The Obama
administration's abetment of bigoted nativism to silence criticism of
its substantively indefensible foreign policy was on prominent display
last Sunday. Obama's campaign endorsed an anti-Semitic screed published
by New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd.
In
her column, titled, "Neocons slither back," Dowd wrote that Republican
Presidential and Vice Presidential nominees Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan
are mere puppets controlled by "neocon puppet master, Dan Senor."
Neocon is a popular code for Jewish. It was so identified by Dowd's Times' colleague David Brooks several years ago.
Dowd
said that "the neocons captured" Bush after the September 11 attacks
and "Now, amid contagious Arab rage sparked on the 11th anniversary of
9/11, they have captured another would-be Republican president and vice
president, both jejeune about the world."
One
telling aspect of Dowd's assault on Senor as a neoconservative is that
he and his boss in the Bush administration, Paul Bremer, were the
nemeses of the neoconservatives at the Pentagon. The only thing Senor
has in common with the likes of Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith is that
all three men are Jews.
Moreover, Dowd drew a
distinction between supposed "neocons" like Senor, and non-Jewish US
leaders Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney who merely "abetted" the
neocons.
So Senor doesn't share the same
ideological worldview as Feith and Wolfowitz but he's a neocon. And
Cheney and Rumseld do share the same worldview as Feith and Wolfowitz.
And they are not neocons.
The Times' public
editor Andrew Rosenthal dismissed claims that Dowd's column was anti-
Semitic, arguing it couldn't be since she never said a word about Jews.
The
Obama campaign linked to Dowd's column on its Twitter account with the
message, "Why Romney and Ryan's foreign policy sounds 'ominously
familiar.'" Obama's campaign's willingness to direct the public to
anti-Semitic screeds against his political opponents is consistent with
the administration's general strategy for defending policies. That
strategy involves responding to criticism not with substantive defense
of his policies, but with ad hominem attacks against his critics.
His
failed economic policies' critics are attacked as "Wall Street fat
cats." His failed foreign policies' critics are demonized as ominous
neocon puppet masters.
There is a difference
between appeasing parties that have been harmed by your actions and
appeasing parties that wish your destruction. In the 1970s the US
appeased the Philippines by transferring sovereignty over the Clark Air
Force Base to the Philippine government. America was still America and
the US and the Philippines became friends.
To
appease a party that hates your way of life, you must change your way of
life. The only way America can appease the Muslim world is for America
to cease to be America.
Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.
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