Israel Matzav

Aren't you glad we dumped Mubarak?

Give Barry Rubin credit. From Day One, Barry warned that forcing Hosni Mubarak out of office and rushing to elections in a country that had never held them was likely to end badly. And indeed, it is about to end badly.

In the elections that took place this week, the Muslim Brotherhood (the parent organization of Hamas) has unsurprisingly apparently emerged as the largest party. Given that they were the only entity that was organized before the election campaign got underway, that's not surprising.

But it's turned out even worse than most analysts thought. In second place in Egypt are the Salafists, who are even more extreme Islamists than the Brotherhood.

The Muslim Brotherhood, Egypt’s oldest Islamist group, said its new Freedom and Justice Party (FJP) was set to win about 40 percent of seats allocated to party lists in this week’s vote, which passed off peacefully, albeit with many irregularities. Other estimates have put the Brotherhood’s take at close to 50% or even 60%.

The elections’ most unanticipated result, however, came from religious fundamentalist Salafist parties, which some predict will take as many as a quarter of all votes despite having been nonexistent just a year ago.

“People are surprised at how strong the Islamists are showing,” Michael Wahid Hanna, an analyst at the US-based Century Foundation, told The Jerusalem Post from Cairo. “We don’t know final results yet....

We know Islamists will do very well, but the final picture is murky.”

According to Hanna, “It’s the Salafists who are a real, new political force. They won’t run or rule the country, but they’ll have a real say.”

All of this might have been avoided by a more gradual transition from Mubarak to democracy, a transition that the Obama administration nixed overnight. Here's Barry.

What does [Wadah Khanfar, former head of al-Jazira] want specifically? He tells us: The West should not support moderate democratic opposition parties. Of course, this is already Western policy in Iran, Lebanon, Syria, and Turkey. While the Islamists help each other with money and other assistance, the West should shut out the real pro-democratic forces so they die. Alternative media will be shut down; human rights’ groups harassed; dissidents imprisoned.

And here’s a bonus, the fall-back excuse: Well, they haven’t done anything yet so let’s wait and see. That’s fine for regular people. But analysts are supposed to tell people what’s happening and give some sense of the trends. In this case, you have a radical group–two radical groups now that we have the Salafists, too — with a 70-year-long record and that’s making statements every day (in Arabic). We have the case of Turkey, too, which is milder but gives a sense of the direction of events.

Another group that’s supposed to do more than just wait, see, and react is the government. That’s true, of course, unless the government (of the United States in this case) is enthusiastically positive about the Brotherhood victory, apologizes for the Brotherhood, doesn’t help real moderates, and is trying to beat down the only hope for containing the radicals, the armed forces.

With no serious opposition or criticism abroad, majority support at home, and with the opposition increasingly intimidated at home, the Islamists will rule forever even if they do hold elections, especially when they — as we have seen in Iran — are counting the ballots. This is what theocracy looks like.

Question: Are the elite newspapers in the United State, the United Kingdom, and France running op-eds warning about Islamism as twenty-first century totalitarianism? I haven’t seen any.

A short history of Obama Middle East policy:

November 2011: We believe that Islamism is not a threat and that they will become more moderate once in power. There is nothing to worry about.

October 2012: Oops! Sorry about that!

Let's go to the videotape.



Read the whole thing.

And here's National Review's Andrew McCarthy:

Do not be deceived. The MB is itself a Salafist organization. Salafism is a retro-refom movement that seeks to return Muslims to what is seen as the pure Islam of the founding generations (the Salafiyyah — the “righteous companions” of Mohammed). MB founder Hassan al-Banna was a Salafist. So was Sayyid Qutb — the most important MB theorist of the second half of the 20th Century. So is the MB’s leading sharia jurist in modern times, Sheikh Yusuf Qaradawi (despite efforts by his delusional Western fans to portray him as a modernizing reformer). The difference between MB Salafists and more extreme Salafists (like the difference between the MB and al-Qaeda) is much more about methodology than ideology). It is akin to the difference between Saul Alinksy organizers and the New Left radicals of the ’60s and ’70s. The MB has always believed in working with (and penetrating) government, and boring into society’s institutions, in order to Islamize society gradually. More extreme Salafists reject secular society and refuse to interact with its government — on the theory that such interaction corrupts them while legitimizing the secular government. But the goal of both sides is precisely the same: to install sharia law as the foundation for Islamizing the society.

The fact that Islamists even more extreme than the MB are not only participating but winning substantial seats in the election is a disaster on at least three counts. First, it demonstrates yet again the weakness of the secular democrats who have been portrayed, fraudulently, as the dynamic force of the “Arab Spring.” Second, it will push the dominant MB into an even more aggressively Islamist posture. Third, it will have the perverse effect of helping the Obama administration and Western Islamophiles continue to portray the MB as comparatively moderate. Of course, the Brothers are only ostensibly moderate in comparison to Nour (with whom they’ll be delighted to collaborate) — objectively speaking, they are virulently anti-American, anti-Western, and anti-Israeli (indeed, anti-Semitic).

The Islamist ascendancy in Egypt, enabled by the West’s democracy fetishists and its Leftist allies of the MB, will have immediate disastrous consequences — in the imminent drafting of the new Egyptian constitution; in the eventual Egyptian presidential election next year; in overcoming the Egyptian military’s half-hearted attempts to stem the Islamist tide; in the deteriorating security of 8 million Coptic Christians (about 10 percent of the population); in a radically new and more threatening Islamist threat to Israel on a long border it has not had to worry about for the last 30 years; and in ensuring (in cahoots with Islamist Turkey’s Prime Minister Recep Erdogan, a longtime MB intimate) that the Brotherhood will take over Syria when Assad falls — probably sooner rather than later.

I'll try to have more on Syria later. This much is clear: What is going on in Egypt is a disaster for Western interests - let alone for Israel. And the credit for it clearly belongs with Barack Hussein Obama's delusions about Islam.

Labels: Barack Hussein Obama, Egyptian elections, Muslim Brotherhood, Salafists

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 12:43 PM