Is it springtime yet?...

Muslim Brotherhood ‘paying gangs to go out and rape women and beat men protesting in Egypt’ as thousands of demonstrators fill streets

Extremism in power

Via-Quadrant

by Peter Day

The return of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt

Nearly three months after the fall of Mubarak, Egypt remains in a state of crisis. A newly emerged, de facto political alliance between the governing Army Council and the Muslim Brotherhood is posing a dire threat to the youthful forces of secular, democratic pluralism, in which so many Western hopes had been invested.

Western commentators ponder historical parallels. Is Egypt now like some Eastern European country in 1989, still suffering the inevitable birth pangs of an emerging pluralist democracy as it throws off the shackles of tyranny? Or are we seeing a repeat of the European 1848 ‘springtime of the nations’, fated to be snuffed out amid bitter disappointment?

A more frightening but apt comparison is Egypt itself in the fateful year of 1952. In that year, a political crisis in the old Egyptian constitutional order, accompanied by massive civil disturbances, led to intervention by the Army on a ‘temporary’ basis to restore stability. The military regime established in 1952 has ruled Egypt ever since

This year offers numerous parallels with 1952. In both years, the interim Army council is led by a respected if rather colourless senior military officer. (Then, it was Mohammed Neguib; today, Mohammed Tantawi.) In both years the Army council promises to hold parliamentary elections within six months, and to withdraw from the political scene upon the election of a new government. In both years the country is administered in the meantime by an Army-appointed civilian administration headed by a well-known, respected politician holding the title of prime minister.

The disturbing part is that in 1952, every one of these developments was part of an elaborate facade. The facade was only gradually dismantled – it would be two years before Colonel Gamal Abdul Nasser, the real coup leader all along, would step into the full light of day as the new power in the land.

In 1952 the forces of parliamentary democracy and secularised civil society had been well-established for 30 years. It took Nasser months of careful plotting to out-manoeuvre and finally crush them. Today, after 60 years of oppression, those forces are struggling even to find a place to stand in the politics of the ‘new’ Egypt. They are proving much more easy to dispose of.

In the immediate wake of Mubarak’s fall, hopes were high that the thousands of young, liberal-minded Egyptians who had emerged to demonstrate against him in Cairo’s Tahrir Square would form the core of new parties that would take the lead in a reformed, democratic Egypt. But the machinations of the ruling military council, Nasser’s political descendants, are ensuring that no new groups will hold significant power in post-Mubarak Egypt.

As widely reported, the timing of parliamentary elections for September this year, as approved in a carefully managed recent referendum, will leave any new parties insufficient time to properly organize. On top of that, in the last week of March the Army has announced extremely onerous requirements for the registration of any new political parties.

The upshot is that the dominant forces in the ‘new Egypt’ will be the Army itself and the equally old-established Muslim Brotherhood. The old Mubarak party machine, which in the old regime ruled Egypt in alliance with the Army, still pervades government bureaucracies and will also remain influential.

The emergence of the Muslim Brotherhood (technically illegal under Mubarak) as a fully-fledged political player is in line with the changed position of the United States, which has direct relations with the Army. The US provided Egypt under Mubarak with aid of around $1.3 billion a year - principally military aid for the Army – on the tacit understanding that the regime would continue to keep the Brotherhood away from the levers of power.

That position however has undergone a radical shift. After many years of assiduous lobbying of US officials and Washington foreign policy wonks by Brotherhood representatives, President Obama now says that the Egyptian Islamists should have a ‘seat at the table’ of power in Egypt. The Egyptian army has taken him at his word. The army’s management of arrangements for forthcoming national elections more or less guarantees a powerful position for the Brotherhood in the new parliament. It is the new groups that were so prominent in the Tahrir Square demonstrations after January 25 which will be left out in the cold.

The parliament elected in September will be responsible for drafting a new constitution for the country. A strong Brotherhood presence will produce a constitution based on an even bigger role than at present for sharia – Islamic law.

Needless to say, this is extremely bad news for all non-Islamist and minority groups, including Egypt’s indigenous Coptic Christians (about 10 per cent of the population), human rights activists, writers, intellectuals, and so on. And of course for women.

It also raises significant national security issues for Australia, along with much of the rest of the world. Every year, thousands of Muslim students from around the world – including from some of Australia’s near neighbours -- flock to Cairo to sit at the feet of the scholars of Al Azhar, the Islamic world’s oldest and most prestigious university. They will now find themselves among Islamists who are in the throes of converting mass support into real political power. For many of the students, this may well turn out to be a heady revolutionary experience – one that they could want to take home with them.

The Muslim Brotherhood has the financial backing of Saudi Arabian and Gulf sheikhs possessing untold wealth. It already operates on a huge scale in Europe and the United States, as well as in the developing world, through dozens of front groups. It also has a below-the-radar presence in Australia. To the extent that the Brotherhood now acquires direct access in Egypt to the resources of a fully fledged nation-state, it will be an even more formidable global actor.

The Obama administration is largely discounting the risks inherent in all this and acting on the basis of a benign view of the Brotherhood. The cautionary tale of the Americans’ dealings with Nasser, as outlined below, suggests that the consequences of being wrong about this may well be severe, far reaching, and of long duration.

Politically influential observers such as the New York Times, which recently expressing surprise at the emergence of friendly relations between the Army and the Muslim Brotherhood, would also do well to look more closely at the history of both these institutions, both in the recent and not so recent past.

Obama, Islam, and the Forcible Virginity Test

Via-American Spectator

By James Lewis

Two months after Obama insisted that President Mubarak had to resign after 30 years in office for not being nice enough to the "young democracy demonstrators" in Tahrir Square, the New York Times has finally stated the obvious: the Muslim Brotherhood is winning the power struggle in Egypt. Duh. Ya think?

The media have also belatedly seen fit to print the fact that sixteen unmarried women were arrested in the demonstrations in Tahrir Square, and that Egyptian military submitted all sixteen to a compulsory "virginity test" in jail, just to see if they were properly modest Muslim virgins.

Think about the sadistic "logic" of that. To see if unmarried Muslim women were virgins, obedient to Islam, they were essentially humiliated, abused, and perhaps raped in public.

Will somebody please tell Germaine Greer? Or Helen Thomas? Christiane Ahmanpour? The nearest Women's Studies Department at your local university? Or are their phones busy again, and they're not paying attention? Maybe they're afraid of "Islamophobia"?

Those Cairo cops represent the forces of law and order in Egypt, the same forces we are expecting to work out an enlightened, democratic regime after Hosni Mubarak. That "virginity test" shows what this Muslim revolution is about. It's not about Jeffersonian democracy. It is all about the never-ending failure of Islam to come to terms with civilized values, the ones the West chose two centuries ago during the period called the Enlightenment.

The United States Constitution is still by far the most successful political outcome of the Enlightenment. Nothing else comes close. Constitutionalism is the only successful political tradition that has ever been designed to deal with the disease of abuse of power. If you want an image of raw abuse of power, think Tahrir Square and the forcible virginity test.

Apparently the White House and every liberal looneytunes airhead in the West is stunned, just stunned, m'dear, by the Muslim reactionaries who are grabbing power all over the Arab world. Who coulda thunk? Obama meant so well. All the good libs are eager to vote for him again in 2012, 'cause of all the good intentions and lovely words he has brought to our foreign policy. Liberal delusions are always stronger than reality. If reality had anything to do with it, they would have dumped their dysfunctional beliefs fifty years ago.

Conservatives have known about the threat of Islamic fascism for 30 years, ever since Jimmy Carter let "some kind of saint" Ayatollah Khomeini assume absolute power in Tehran in 1979. When Carter stopped Iran's military from supporting the Shah, Khomeini promptly had assassinated, imprisoned, and tortured the Shah's supporters, plus any democratic opposition groups, plus the Communist faction of the Mujahhedin Khalq, plus anybody else who stood in this way -- including those American diplomats he kept locked up at the US Embassy for a year until Ronald Reagan got elected.

Then Khomeini had a war with Saddam that killed a million people. But Jimmy Carter is still completely convinced that he Did the Right Thing back in 1979. None so blind as will not see.

Obama has never understood the US Constitution, apparently, because he has that basic delusion of all the little leftocrats everywhere: He's the good guy. All that stuff about "power corrupts" just doesn't apply to him. That's only for the bad people, you see. Like Christian conservatives.

Obama is a power-happy ideologue, and the biggest question today is whether the United States Constitution can survive his years in power.  The founders knew about the Obamas of this world, because they saw them everywhere. There is nothing new about grandiosity and fragile self-esteem. You can read all about it in Gibbons' Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, and before that, the Biblical Book of Kings. It's even in the Epic of Gilgamesh.  Human nature hasn't changed one little bit in 6,000 years.

The American founders built the Constitution to withstand narcissistic power grabbers.  After their handiwork was adopted, some of them saw Napoleon rise to power after the French Revolution, the original Man on a White Horse, come to rescue humanity from the anarchy of revolution. Napoleon killed more Europeans than anybody else before the two world wars. The founders didn't like what they saw in France. Jefferson and Franklin both had been US Ambassadors there. They could see it for themselves.

After Napoleon, Europe wandered away from its own Enlightenment tradition into Marxism, National Socialism, monarchism, revenge-driven nationalism, imperialism, Islam (in the Ottoman Empire), and any number of other tyrannies. The trendiest thinkers over there are boasting how they are "post-modern," which means "I'm dead set against the Enlightenment."

That's how Marxism has now become big on American campuses. Our professors are aping their European idols' love affairs with totalitarian ideologies, in spite of the millions of victims those pathologies always leave behind. In the ass-backwards world of the Left this is called "Progressivism." Really. Just check 'em out on Huffpo.

Islam came straight from the Arabian desert of the 7^th century. It reflects the lives of desert pirates, robbers, rapists and genociders, which was perfectly suited to nomadic life in the desert. That's how tribes conquered each other, as Lawrence of Arabia found out again in World War I. Desert Arabs literally took no prisoners -- except for women and children, who became slaves. Lawrence was a British romantic who hero-worshipped the desert Arabs, and then, after putting King Faisal into power, he decided to disappear forever,  in deep disgust with his own romance with murderous primitives.

Wherever reactionary Islam takes over it re-creates  the 7^th century desert. Since the breakdown of the Ottoman Empire at the end of World War I,  the Muslim world has been zig-zagging between modern values, like equality for women, and medieval desert values. Iran was a great victory for the reactionary throwbacks, and Obama has just tipped the balance in that direction again.

This is exactly what the likes of Code Pink and Bill Ayers were agitating for six months ago, in alliance with Hamas and Hezb'allah. It was so Progressive. The Muslim Revolt may spell the end of women's rights around the Muslim world, as well as electoral government and the whole Constitutional order that made the modern world possible -- including nations of laws, science, technology, free speech, the works.  Reactionary Islam took over in Iran thirty years ago, and now it's out of control, thanks to the criminal collusion of the Left. Don't forget that. This is not just the Mo Bros. It's the Mo's plus Code Pink that makes this happen. If you want to know whom to blame for the forcible "virginity test," yes, you can blame Jodie Evans and Medea Benjamins.

The New York Times reports that the Egyptian Bros and the military are now allied to take over. Right at the start the Bros called for war with Israel, because it was their enemy Mubarak who kept the Egyptian-Israeli Peace treaty going for three decades.  The Bros also brought back from exile their own Ayatollah Khomeini, Al Qaradawi, and celebrated with their own Million Muslim March in Tahrir Square. They also threw out the Google twitter mobster who helped make the revolt happen.

So much for the "young democracy demonstrators." They are being treated like the demonstrators in Tehran, the ones Obama didn't give a hoot about for fear of offending ol' bloody-handed  Ahmadinejad.

Are you surprised? I hope not. We are seeing a chain reaction from Morocco to Pakistan. In two years the chain reactions may be nuclear, starting with Iran, but then followed by everyone who can pay for nukes from Pakistan and North Korea: Syria, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, maybe Bahrain and the UAE. Every Saudi billionaire will want his own nuke, and some of them will pass them on to Al Qaida. Islam is all about charity, you see.

The Middle East has always been a powder keg, and Obama just tossed in a match to see what was gonna happen, like a kid with fireworks. Community agitators live to agitate, and now we see one community after another crumbling as a direct result of all that agit-prop. This is the biggest victory for Alinsky's Rules for Radicals:  Let's light it up and see what happens! No wonder Alinsky dedicated that book to Lucifer.

"All the best revolutions are organic" was Obama's Leninist piece of wisdom when he was yelling at Hillary in the White House several weeks ago. "All the best revolutions." Think about that.

Libya is now being bombed, because, after under-reacting to Ahmadinejad in Tehran, Obama is now over-reacting in Egypt and Libya. Hey, it's a revolution, baby! Celebrate!

Before the Watts Riots of 1966, a famous black radio jockey had this signature slogan: Burn, Baby, Burn! Then the riots happened, with people actually burning down houses, and the jock changed his slogan to: "Have Mercy, Baby!" That's Obama. 

What is it about liberals that they can't figure out murderous ideologies?

Future historians will look back and ask "Who lost the Middle East?" The answer is going to hit them right between the eyes: It was Obama's gross arrogance and ignorance, in kowtowing to Islamic fascism just by apologizing to them and giving them the Peace Sign, like some Indian chief in the Lone Ranger. "How! Friend!" "You, me, smoke peace pipe!"

This is because Obama really understands the Underdeveloped World, you see.

Will the US Constitution survive this president? I don't know. Maybe that sturdy old vessel might sail back to harbor, with considerable damage to those old timbers, those strong sails and ropes.

Or maybe it will sink. 

What are the odds?

Do we have any takers?

Toons

Via-

Obama’s 1979

Via-NRO

Victor Davis Hanson


Are the wages of magnanimity to our enemies and snubbing of our allies once again coming due?

Obama’s deer-in-the-headlights, finger-to-the-wind, “I can’t believe this is happening to me” initial reaction to the Mubarak implosion has eerie precedents.

After the debacle in Vietnam, Watergate, the Nixon resignation, and the Ford WIN buttons, voters were willing to bet on the smiling but unknown hope-and-change reformer from Plains, Georgia. Jimmy Carter’s campaign and his early presidential speeches on resetting foreign policy sounded uplifting. They were certainly a rebuke to the supposedly dark Nixon-Kissinger realpolitik and cloak-and-dagger intrigue. Indeed, Carter’s election marked a return to Wilsonian idealism that predicated American support for other nations on shared commitment to human rights and U.N. values. Secretary of State Cyrus Vance exuded probity and almost seemed to suggest at every stop, “I am not Henry Kissinger.”

Carter’s new America was to entertain no more mindless, reductionist inordinate fear of Communism. Nor would we continue to be a cynical arms merchant to our allies and profit from the tools of death. Anti-Communist, anti-fundamentalist strongman modernizers like the Shah were suddenly antithetical to American values. In contrast, his radical Islamist enemies were little more than curious and confused intermediaries whose appreciated opposition to dictators would soon be eclipsed by serious European-like socialist reformers.

While Carter’s America occasionally worried about the Communist consolidation in Vietnam or Central America, these rather violent sorts certainly had legitimate grievances given our prior support for anti-Communist authoritarians. In fact, the new United States worried far more about our own epauletted SOBs in Africa and Latin America than about the less-well-groomed AK-47-toting liberationists.

Rebellion in the Land of the Pharaohs

Via-WSJ


A man who places himself at the helm for three decades inevitably becomes the target of all the realm's discontents.

By FOUAD AJAMI

'When Ramses II was over eighty he celebrated his rejuvenation at the feast of Set, repeating it yearly until he was ninety and more, and displaying his power of rejuvenation to the Gods above in the Obelisks he regularly erected as a memorial, which the aged Pharaoh decorated with electrum at the top so that their brightness should pour over lands of Egypt when the sun was mirrored in them."

This is from a classic account of this ancient and ordered land, "The Nile in Egypt," by Emil Ludwig (1937). Hosni Mubarak, the military officer who became Pharaoh in his own right, is well over 80. His is the third-longest reign since Ramses, who ruled for 67 years. The second-longest had belonged to a remarkable soldier of fortune, Muhammad Ali, an Albanian by birth and the creator of modern Egypt, who conquered the country in the opening years of the 19th century and ruled for five decades. His dynasty was to govern Egypt until the middle years of the 20th century.

In the received image of it, Egypt is the most stable of nations, a place of continuity on the banks of a sanguine river. Egyptians, the chronicles tell us, never killed their pharaohs. Anwar al-Sadat had been the first. But this received image conceals a good deal of tumult. The submission to the will of Gods and rulers has been punctured by ferocious rebellions.

From Ludwig again: "Once the fellahin (the peasants) and the workers of Egypt revolted against their masters; once their resentment burst out: a revolution dispossessed the rich men and the priests of Egypt of their power." One such revolution at the end of the Old Kingdom raged intermittently for two centuries (2350 B.C. to 2150 B.C.).

In more recent times, in 1952, the Egyptians rose in rebellion and set much of modern Cairo to the torch, which would lead to the fall of the monarchy. The agile Sadat faced a big revolt of his own in 1977 when he attempted to reduce the subsidies on bread and sugar and cooking gas. It is said that he had been ready to quit this country in the face of that upheaval.

It is hard to know with precision when Hosni Mubarak, the son of middle peasantry, lost the warrant of his people. It had started out well for this most cautious of men. He had been there on the reviewing stand on Oct. 6, 1981 when a small band of young men from the army struck down Sadat as the flamboyant ruler was reviewing his troops and celebrating the eighth anniversary of the October War of 1973.

The new man had risen by grace of his predecessor's will. He had had no political past. The people of Egypt had not known of him. He was the antidote to two great and ambitious figures—Nasser and Sadat. His promise was modesty. He would tranquilize the realm after three decades of tumult and wars and heartbreaking bids to re-make the country.

A deceased friend of mine, an army general of Mr. Mubarak's class and generation, spoke of the man with familiarity: He was a civil servant with the rank of president, he said of his fellow officer. Mr. Mubarak put the word out that he would serve two six-year terms and be gone. But the appetite grew with the eating. The humble officer would undergo a transformation. A presidency-for-life announced itself. And in an astounding change, where Nasser and Sadat feared the will and the changing moods of their countrymen, Mr. Mubarak grew imperious and dismissive.

Egypt bent to his will. A country with a vibrant parliamentary tradition in the 1920s and 1930s became a sterile tyranny. A land that had opened onto Europe in the course of the 19th century, that had given rise to professional syndicates and associations, to an independent judiciary, was brought low.

There has always been an Egyptian pride in their country—even as Egypt tried and failed to modernize, even as its Sisyphean struggle broke its heart and engendered a deep sense of disappointment—and Mr. Mubarak came to offend that sense of national pride.

In the annals of Muslim dynasties and kingdoms, wives and children have figured prominently in the undoing of rulers. An ambitious wife, Suzanne, with haughty manners, and a taste for wealth and power (a variation on the hairdresser Leila Trabelsi, the wife of the deposed Tunisian dictator Zine El Abidine Ben Ali) and a favored son who, by all indications, was preparing to inherit his father's power, deepened the estrangement between Mr. Mubarak and his people.

Egypt had been the trendsetter in Arab politics, in its self-image the place where all things modern in Arab life—the cinema, radio, women's emancipation, parliamentary life, mass politics, forced industrialization—had begun. The sight of Tunisians, hitherto a marginal people in the Arab consciousness, taking to the streets and deposing their tyrant, both shamed and emboldened the Egyptians. They had wearied of the large prison that Mr. Mubarak had constructed for them. A man who places himself at the helm for three decades inevitably, and justly, becomes the target of all the discontents in the realm.

Revolts of this kind are always a gamble on the unknown. At bottom, they are an attempt at self-purification, a society wishes to be done with the stain of submission to a dictator's transgressions. Amid the tumult, what is so clear today is the hatred felt for the ruler and his immediate family. Reigns like Mr. Mubarak's devour the green and the dry, as a favored Arab expression has it. The sycophants come to the fore and steal what they can. Those with heart and character and pride are hauled off to prison, or banished to the outer margins of public life.

Mr. Mubarak has been merciless with his critics. For this isolated, aging man of the barracks, dissent is always treason. There remains, of course, the Muslim Brotherhood. It was in Egypt where the Muslim Brotherhood was born in the late 1920s. The Brotherhood has been the alibi and the bogeyman with which Hosni Mubarak frightened the middle class at home and the donors abroad in Washington and Europe, who prop his regime out of fear that Egypt would come apart and the zealots would triumph.

In one of the novels by the late Egyptian novelist and Nobel Laureate Naguib Mahfouz, a pharaoh is told by his lovely mistress Rabudis of rumors of pending rebellion, of popular disaffection. "And they say the priests are a powerful group with control over the hearts and the minds of the people." But he smiles and answers. "But I am the stronger." "What of the anger of the people my lord," she asks? "It will calm down when they see me on my chariot." We shall see if and how this modern-day pharaoh copes with a people determined to be rid of him.

Mr. Ajami is a professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution.