The Ghosts of Auschwitz in the Middle East

In exile in Argentina, the world’s most wanted man was writing a defense of the indefensible.He rejected “so-called Western culture” whose bible “expressly established that everything sacred came from the Jews.” Instead he looked to the “large circle of friends, many millions of people” whose good opinion of his crimes he wanted.
These millions of people were not in Germany. They weren’t even in Argentina.
His fellow Nazis had abandoned him after deciding that the murder of millions of Jews was indefensible and had to be denied instead of defended. But he did not want to be denied. He wanted to be admired.
“You 360 million Mohammedans to whom I have had a strong inner connection since the days of my association with your Grand Mufti of Jerusalem,” Adolf Eichmann, the architect of the Holocaust wrote. “You, who have a greater truth in the surahs of your Koran, I call upon you to pass judgment on me.”
Eichmann knew he could expect a good verdict from a religion whose prophet had ordered the ethnic cleansing of Jews and which believes the end will “not come until the Muslims fight the Jews and kill them. When a Jew hides behind a rock or a tree, it will say, ‘O Muslim, O servant of Allah! There is a Jew behind me, come and kill him!’”
There was Eichmann’s Hadith Holocaust with even the rocks and trees finding Jews for the Islamic SS.
A more literal judgment came Eichmann’s way five years later in Jerusalem when Israeli agents used extraordinary rendition to seize him and bring him to trial. But the Muslim world had issued its own verdict long ago when the Mufti of Jerusalem had come to Europe urging the extermination of the Jews.
“This is your best opportunity to get rid of this dirty race… Kill the Jews,” the Mufti had ranted to fellow Muslims.
On the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, the ghosts of Eichmann and the Mufti of Jerusalem, who had visited its gas chambers while the Holocaust was underway, still linger there.
A Holocaust survivor in Auschwitz recalled being told that the Mufti’s arrival was a working visit.
“When we have won the war he will return to Palestine to build gas chambers and kill the Jews who are living over there,” an SS officer told him.
Eichmann’s Nazis lost, but the Mufti’s Islamists continue their genocidal agenda. Mein Kampf may be banned in Germany, but it’s a bestseller in the Muslim world.
The edition is often the translation of Louis Heiden aka Luis al-Haj, a Nazi convert to Islam whose introduction proclaims, “National Socialism did not die with the death of its herald. Rather, its seeds multiplied under each star.” The reference was meant literarily. The old Egyptian flag had carried a crescent and three stars on a green field. The new flag of the Arab Republic had two green stars.
Haj worked under Johann von Leers aka Omar Amin, another Muslim convert in the Nazi Ministry of Propaganda, who praised the persecution of the Jews under Islam as “an eternal service to the world”.
An earlier edition had been published by the brother of future dictator, Gamal Abdel Nasser.

In two years in Egypt, Mein Kampf had sold 911,000 copies, an extraordinary accomplishment in a country with a working age population of 13 million suggesting that as many as one in fourteen adults might have bought a copy. By American equivalent bestseller standards it had outsold the Da Vinci Code. During those same years the vast majority of Egyptian Jews had been ethnically cleansed by Nasser.
At the beginning of the decade, Muslim Brotherhood godfather Sayyid Qutb had written his own Mein Kampf titled, “Our Struggle against the Jews” in which he claimed that Allah had sent Hitler. The claim has more recently been repeated by the Muslim Brotherhood’s Yusuf al-Qaradawi on Al Jazeera in ’09.
“The last punishment was carried out by Hitler… Allah willing, the next time will be at the hand of the believers,” he said. Today everyone agrees that the Nazis were evil. By the fifties, even Eichmann’s fellow Nazis were looking to jettison the Holocaust and improve their brand. But the Nazis back then were often treated the way that Muslims are today.
Media coverage emphasized distinctions between the radical and moderate Nazis. (Hitler was, of course, a moderate.) Nazi grievances were treated as legitimate. Their crimes were lied about and covered up.
In 1933, the Associated Press’ wire report claimed that the persecution of Jews had already ended. Another wire story headlined “Jew Persecution Over Says Envoy” cited Secretary of State Hull’s relief that the Hitler regime was doing its best to curb further persecution of the Jews.
Hull would later apologize when the Republican Mayor of New York City referred to the Fuhrer as a “man without honor”. Mayor LaGuardia might have been suffering from Fuhrerphobia.
Jewish protests were treated as shrill and baseless alarmism.
“U.S. Investigation Shows No Cause for Protest,” the AP headlined its coverage.
“Notwithstanding assurances given by German government leaders and by Hull that the Nazi excesses against the Jewish race had ceased in Germany, Jewish leaders went ahead with plans for mass protest meetings,” another wire story read. “All requests that these meetings be canceled fell on deaf ears.”
A week before the story, the first official Nazi concentration camp of Dachau had opened.
The media coverage should sound familiar. It’s how Iran’s nuclear buildup is being covered. It’s how Muslim violence against Jews is covered. It’s discussed reluctantly and immediately dismissed. Jews are written off as pests who refuse to listen when Kerry, like Hull, tells them there’s nothing to worry about.
That is how the Holocaust really happened.
Auschwitz just shows us the final stage. It doesn’t show us the sympathy for the Nazis, the willingness of some on the left to see them as allies in overturning the existing system and the anger at the selfishness of the Jews in putting their own desire not to be killed ahead of world peace.
Auschwitz requires more context than just Hitler. It requires that we understand why so many countries and so many world leaders enabled him. And it is not a difficult thing to understand. All we need to do is look at the response to Muslim attempts to kill Jews before and after the Holocaust.
It was easier to appease the Nazis. It is easier to appease the Muslim world. The Jews were not seen as a canary in the coalmine; instead, like the Czechs and then the Poles and then everyone else, they were an obstacle to making a deal with the devil. Today it’s the Nigerian Christians, the Burmese Buddhists and a long list of others around the world including the Jews of Israel who stand in the way of peace.
The Holocaust and the entire war happened because everyone wanted peace with Nazi Germany and refused to accept that Nazism was innately aggressive.
Eichmann envisioned Nazis and Muslims as victims.
“Who are the aggressors here? Who are the war criminals? The victims are Egyptians, Arabs, Mohammedans. Amon and Allah,” Eichmann wrote of the 1956 war.
On the Egyptian side was a long list of Nazis. They, like Eichmann, saw Islam as carrying on their agenda, not only toward the Jews, but toward the West.
The Nazis were not merely anti-Semites. They wanted to tear down civilization and replace it with their own flavor of barbarism.
At war, they had a great deal in common with


ISIS, brutally wiping out entire populations, resettling areas and enslaving those they did not kill. Having no contemporary barbarians in Europe to model themselves on, they willingly modeled themselves on the armies of Islam.
The ghosts of Auschwitz are still haunting Sudan, Nigeria, Pakistan, Gaza, Iraq, Iran and a hundred other places. The victims are Christians, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists, Yazidis and numberless others. The Nazis began with the Jews. The Muslim saying is, “First the Saturday people, then the Sunday people.”
Auschwitz is what happens when we fail to take threats like that seriously because we want peace at any price. The price of peace was Auschwitz, it was millions dead, countries carved to pieces, peoples enslaved for years and others for generations. The price of peace was ignorance, apathy and then war.
Eichmann found support for Auschwitz in the “surahs of your Koran.” So did the Jihadis who murdered Jews in Paris. If we forget that, then we forget the real lesson of Auschwitz.

The Arab World Is on the Brink of Radicalizing

By Michael Hirsh

August 14, 2013

As the Egyptian military consolidates control by murdering pro-Muslim Brotherhood protesters and declaring a state of emergency, we may be witnessing the most dangerous potential for Arab radicalization since the two Palestinian intifadas. Despite the resignation Wednesday of Mohamed ElBaradei, the vice president, in opposition to the Egyptian junta's action, the discomfiting fact is that most of Egypt's liberal "democrats"—along with the United States—have never looked more hypocritical. If the bloody crackdown is allowed to continue while the U.S. and West do nothing, the actions of the Egyptian military could de-legitimize democratic change in the Arab world for a generation or more.

And for Washington, a dream that began with the neoconservative push to turn Iraq into a "model democracy" after the 2003 invasion—the somewhat naïve Western hope that the Arab nations would catch up with the rest of the world—may already be dead.

Worse, the loss of moderate Islamist alternatives, and the failure of democracy, could supply al-Qaida with its biggest recruiting campaign since 9/11.

The images in Egypt are excruciating to behold, both in a literal and philosophical sense. In what appeared to be more of a direct military assault than a police-style crowd-clearing exercise, Egyptian forces reportedly killed nearly 150 people, most of them supporters of ousted President Mohamed Morsi who were engaged in nothing more offensive than a series of sit-ins. Suddenly, in one awful day, the exercise of the democratic rights and ideals that are so dear to America's self-image—and which have formed the heart of U.S. foreign policy since the end of the Cold War—were rendered all but irrelevant to many Arabs, especially because of Washington's mild response. Apart from a few dissenters such as ElBaradei, the once-inspiring secularists who massed in Tahrir Square to oust Hosni Mubarak have now repudiated those democratic rights and values by continuing to support the bloody crackdown. And while the Obama administration issued a rote condemnation, the lack of any more dramatic response continues to fritter away what little moral authority America has left.

The administration's initial response, voiced by White House spokesman Josh Earnest from the president's vacation spot on Martha's Vineyard, was mostly an exercise in posterior-covering. Earnest urged the Egyptian government to refrain from violence even as the violence was fully underway. He added that "we also strongly oppose a return to a State of Emergency law, and call on the government to respect basic human rights such as freedom of peaceful assembly, and due process under the law," even as the Egyptian government was clearly not respecting any of those things, and had already declared a state of emergency.

Secretary of State John Kerry also condemned the military's actions, calling "this a pivotal moment for all Egyptians," but then left the podium without taking questions.

What the administration must also consider—and it has been well behind the curve here—is that Egypt may only be the current epicenter of the radicalization phenomenon. The danger goes well beyond Cairo. Consider:

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• In Iraq and Syria, a newly renamed al-Qaida umbrella group calling itself the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant is dramatically expanding its presence in both countries, The Washington Post reported Tuesday.
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• In Tunisia, where the Arab Spring began, the secular opposition and the ruling Islamist Ennahda party have grown more and more polarized, and two leading secular politicians have been assassinated. The secularists, apparently inspired by the ouster of Morsi in Egypt, have held daily mass protests in an effort to dissolve the national assembly.
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• Even in Afghanistan there is a danger of re-radicalization despite the hundreds of billions of dollars and thousands of lives the United States spent there in what has amounted to America's longest war. According to a report in The Wall Street Journal, President Hamid Karzai is considering anointing as his successor the man who brought Osama bin Laden to the country, Abdul Rasoul Sayyaf, an Islamist warlord and the man who mentored 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.

Marc Lynch, an expert in the Arab world at George Washington University, says that if the Muslim Brotherhood separates itself permanently from the democratic process—and its leaders have vowed to do so until Morsi is restored—then the moderate Islamists the West was hoping to bring into the government may grow scarce.  That, in turn, will empower and reinvigorate the more radical al-Qaida-linked groups who preach the use of force. "What Islamist can now plausibly argue that democratic participation works?" he says. "Many Islamists will likely pull back from politics for a while, go underground, or retreat to charity work, but some portion are going to find extremist ideas much more convincing now. Only takes a small number to make a difference, remember."

Lynch's assessment is endorsed by Reuel Marc Gerecht, a former CIA expert in the region and a conservative commentator at the Foundation for Defense of Democracy. "For radical Islamists who thrive on tyranny, the Nile Valley has again become exceptionally fertile ground," Gerecht says. "The secular crowd blew it. They can try to walk away from the military now … but it's too late.

Egyptian society is badly, probably irretrievably, polarized with the potential for horrendous violence. The secular crowd who thought they'd pulled off a 'coup-volution' with Morsi's downfall have guaranteed that we only see devolution in Egypt, either to an increasing sad, morally corroding, impoverished society, where liberals have no future, or to an explosion that may consume the country."

Fawaz Gerges, director of the Middle East Center at the London School of Economics, agrees that an excessive fear and loathing of the secularists for Morsi and the Brotherhood may have triggered the current disaster, and it's difficult to see how to turn things around.

"The secular-leaning opposition never allowed Mohamed Morsi a honeymoon period," Gerges says.

In the saddest irony of all, the ultimate outcome could be a return to the Arab ancien regime: the pre-Arab Spring world of retrograde military rule, with radical Islamists as the generals' chief opposition. "There have already been calls by extremists, such as Ayman al-Zawahiri, current chief of al-Qaida, to renounce the electoral box and rely on force as the most effective means to establish God's kingdom on earth," says Gerges. "Although the majority of Islamists will not buy Zawahiri's faulty goods, some would do so out of rage at the hijacking of the toppling of the first democratically elected Islamist president in Egypt's modern history."

As it has for the last two years, the Obama administration is still struggling with the appropriate response. But the perception abroad is that the administration has vacillated without any coherent policy. Initially during the Arab Spring the administration defended its old autocratic allies, such as Egypt's Hosni Mubarak and Yemen's Ali Saleh. Then it moved to championing the young secularists in the street, with hopes of liberal democracy that now look as naive as the visions of the George W. Bush-era neoconservatives. After the election of Morsi, the administration lurched in yet another direction, embracing the Islamist president and the Muslim Brotherhood, even to the exclusion of secularists. And when Morsi was ousted on July 3, the administration avoided calling it a coup so as not to jeopardize its aid relationship with the Egyptian military.

To be sure, there was never any easy course—no obvious choice between an alarmingly Islamist president, which Morsi was becoming, and the military junta that succeeded him. But for months critics of the administration's approach have been urging it to at least speak loudly and clearly, using the $1.3 billion in U.S. aid and military supplies as leverage, in demanding that first the Morsi government and then the military junta uphold democratic principles. That did not happen. And it may be too late now to alter the terrible path that Egypt is on.

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By Michael Hirsh // Michael Hirsh is chief correspondent for National Journal. He also contributes to 2012 Decoded. Hirsh previously served as the senior editor and national economics correspondent for Newsweek, based in its Washington bureau. He was also Newsweek’s Washington web editor and authored a weekly column for Newsweek.com, “The World from Washington.” Earlier on, he was Newsweek’s foreign editor, guiding its award-winning coverage of the September 11 attacks and the war on terror. He has done on-the-ground reporting in Iraq, Afghanistan, and other places around the world, and served as the Tokyo-based Asia Bureau Chief for Institutional Investor from 1992 to 1994. Hirsh has appeared many times as a commentator on Fox News, CNN, MSNBC, and National Public Radio. He has written for the Associated Press, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Foreign Affairs, Harper’s, and Washington Monthly, and authored two books, Capital Offense: How Washington’s Wise Men Turned America’s Future over to Wall Street and At War with Ourselves: Why America Is Squandering its Chance to Build a Better World. Hirsh has received numerous awards, including the Overseas Press Club award for best magazine reporting from abroad in 2001 and for Newsweek’s coverage of the war on terror, which also won a National Magazine Award.

August 14, 2013

http://www.defenseone.com/threats/2013/08/arab-world-brink-radicalizing/68717/

Huma - Alger Hiss

Huma Abedin, Alger Hiss, Huma Abedin, Alger Hiss, Huma Abedin, Alger…

                          Posted By Robert Spencer On August 12, 2013  s

For standing by her putative man, the exposed Anthony Weiner, Huma Abedin has for the first time received some negative press attention amid the avalanche of coverage calling her “smart,” “accomplished” and “elegant.” But still off-limits has been any discussion in the mainstream media of her numerous ties to the Muslim Brotherhood.

It’s not that the evidence is lacking. It’s that the politically correct elites have forbidden examination or discussion of it. Even to question whether Abedin has any connections with the Brotherhood, and whether those connections had any influence over Hillary Clinton’s decisions as secretary of State, is to demonstrate that one is a bigot, a racist, an Islamophobe, and a hatemonger, as well as a hysterical paranoiac.

Indeed, one infallible way to determine a stranger’s political positions on just about anything is to ask if he or she thinks Huma Abedin has ties to the Muslim Brotherhood. If the stranger responds with righteous outrage, you’re dealing with a doctrinaire, mainstream liberal. If, on the other hand, the response is, “Yes, that is something that should be investigated,” you’re face-to-face with a Tea Partier.

That’s why Huma Abedin is the new Alger Hiss. For decades, ever since the former State Department official and advisor to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt was outed as a Soviet spy in the most celebrated espionage case of the nation’s history, the leftist establishment stoutly insisted that Hiss was innocent. Even today, some refuse to acknowledge the “present-day consensus among historians…that Alger Hiss was in fact a Soviet spy.”

But the controversy over whether or not Hiss was a Communist and a spy for the Soviets was (and is) not just a dispute over the evidence. It was, for the Left, a measure of whether or not you were a decent human being. Anna Roosevelt Halsted, the daughter of Eleanor and Franklin, said in 1956 that Hiss’s accuser, Whittaker Chambers, was “contemptible” and clearly “out to get” Hiss. Her mother said at a 1961 dinner party that Chambers was “utterly contemptible and probably a psychopathic liar.” Adlai Stevenson, present at the same gathering of liberal glitterati, agreed that the prosecution of Hiss was “one of the darker chapters in U.S. history.”

Alger Hiss

Such views were universal on the Left in those days and thereafter, despite the fact that it was abundantly clear from the beginning that Hiss was what Chambers said he was. But the denials began immediately, and with Hiss himself: when Chambers produced classified State Department documents that Hiss had given him when they were both Communist spies and the documents were proven to have been typed on Hiss’s typewriter, Hiss accused Chambers of “forgery by typewriter.”

Even today, some claim that military intelligence agents fabricated a typewriter identical to Hiss’s in order to frame him, although they lack a motive. Chambers is supposed to have falsely accused Hiss out of rage at Hiss’s rejection of his homosexual advances, but how this Communist spy and rejected homosexual convinced military intelligence operatives to forge documents to frame the object of spurned affections has never been explained.

Nonetheless, right up to the moment when material from the Soviet archives revealed that Hiss was indeed a Soviet spy, and even after that, if you didn’t love Hiss, you weren’t just wrong: you were a bad person. It was reminiscent of Senator John McCain’s 2012 defense of Huma Abedin on the Senate floor, when he thundered that “these allegations about Huma, and the report from which they are drawn, are nothing less than an unwarranted and unfounded attack on an honorable woman, a dedicated American, and a loyal public servant.”

McCain called the accusations “sinister” and accused the members of the House of Representatives who had asked for an investigation of Abedin’s Brotherhood ties of launching “specious and degrading attacks against fellow Americans on the basis of nothing more than fear of who they are and ignorance of what they stand for.”

McCain’s indignation over these charges against Abedin was ironic, since he likely doesn’t have much of a problem with the Muslim Brotherhood, given the fact that he has cheerfully and unapologetically posed for photos with Syrian jihad terrorists. In the same way, the people who were angriest at the charges against Hiss were hard leftists who wouldn’t have been all that upset with the idea of working for the Soviets in the first place. And “homosexual” was a pejorative term for leftists only when used of Whittaker Chambers.

It is increasingly common for the Left (and its reliable water boys in the loyal opposition like McCain) to demonize its opponents. In Hiss’s day, it wasn’t so common, but his case was the first big instance of it. It is now generally accepted among leftists that those who dare to stand against any aspect of the politically correct agenda are not only wrong. They are evil, morally bankrupt, and stupid to boot – except for the diabolical ingenuity they employed to frame their pure-as-the-driven-snow victims.

This is a pernicious tendency that conservatives should identify and reject whenever and wherever it appears, for the simple fact that even if all her accusers are terrible people who kick their Shih Tzus and don’t recycle, that would not in itself tell us anything about Huma Abedin’s ties to the Muslim Brotherhood. She could still be a Muslim Brotherhood operative even if her accusers were Jeffrey Dahmer and John Wayne Gacy. And to hear the Left tell it, that’s exactly who they are: Alger Hiss and Huma Abedin are innocent, and if you don’t believe that, or even think the questions worthy of investigation, be ready to be bound hand and foot and cast into the outer darkness by an increasingly authoritarian and thuggish Left.

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Article printed from PJ Lifestyle: http://pjmedia.com/lifestyle

Egypt Divide - Fouad Ajami

The Great Schism

Fouad Ajami

Grant Egypt its redeeming consolations: it is neither Algeria, nor Syria.  The terror that came to Algeria in the 1990s, a scorched earth war between Le Pouvoir (The Power Structure) and the Islamists which took a toll of no less than 200,000 lives is unlikely to be visited on Egypt.  It had been a cruel decade in Algeria – the “eradicationists” of the regime pitted against unyielding Islamists who had prevailed at the ballot box only to see the generals bring to an end the whole specter of elections and constitutionalism.  And no fevered imagination could see the sectarianism and the horrors of Syria play out in Egypt.  It is not pretty in Egypt, some fifty supporters of ousted President Mohamed Morsi were killed in a confrontation with the army on July 8, but there is no Homs in Egypt, and the Air Force had not inflicted death and ruin on Alexandria akin to what the Syrian MIGs had done to Aleppo.  The stereotype of an orderly country on the banks of the Nile where the army is made up of sons of the land of Egypt is not without its merit.  General Abdul Fattah el-Sissi, the coup maker who upended the reign of the Muslim Brotherhood, bears no resemblance to the faceless generals of Algeria, or the Alawi commanders in Syria fighting a brutal religious war.

But consolations can betray.  There is a great schism in Egypt, and the national mood is foul.  For all its vaunted stability – the hydraulic society on the banks of a life-saving river – Egypt has been perennially prone to violent shifts of mood and opinion.  In the three decades between the declaration of its independence in 1923 and the coup d’état that overthrew the monarchy in 1952, the place was a playground for all kinds of ideological movements.  Constitutionalists, genuine Fascists inspired by the examples of Italy and Germany, devoted Communists, and the Muslim Brotherhood did battle over power and the country’s direction.  Pick up the work of the great Cairene, the Nobel laureate Naguib Mahfouz, and you are treated to an unsparing portrait of a country in distress.  The crisis of modern Egypt can be seen in the Mahfouzian characters struggling for order and meaning, in the opportunists who proclaim lofty principles only to betray them.  A struggle rages in that unique rendition of the struggle between the idealism of those who want to repair the burdened country and the nemesis that sinks those hopes again and again.

It has taken an irreverent young physician and satirist, Bassem Youssef (Egypt’s Jon Stewart, he has been dubbed), to tell his country of the depth of the animus between its secular forces and the Islamists.  In a piece published on July 19, Bassem Youssef mocked the secularists’ fantasy of a “normal state” of “good looking people” without veils and beards.  The liberals of Egypt, he said, are on a “victory high”, their media outlets full of “discrimination and inciting rhetoric.”  The satirist cut to the heart of things: the liberal secularists averting their gaze from the transgressions of the army and the police are no different from the “Islamists who think that their enemies’ disappearance off this planet would be a victory for the rebellion of God.”  The army had broken the stalemate between the secularists and the Brotherhood, but the rancor of politics had not ended.  “We have replaced the enemies of Islam with the enemies of the state.”  The army and the police can rout the Brotherhood, overturn the verdict of the ballot, but there can be no total victory over the Brotherhood: “These people are never going to disappear…They will return to their home full of hatred, frustration, and disappointment which will augment in the South of Egypt and neglected Delta area; and they will return with more violence and determination in store.”

In their eagerness to overlook their defeat at the polls, the secularists are fierce in their conviction that it was a “revolution” that swept Mohamed Morsi aside.  One figure of the Old Regime, Amr Moussa, a former foreign minister and Secretary General of the Arab League, insists that Morsi had been brought down by “popular impeachment.”  Thus has June 30, the time of the big street protests that led to the coup d’état, been enshrined as a seminal event in Egypt’s political calendar – on par with July 23, 1952, and with January 25, 2011, which marks the agitation that overthrew Hosni Mubarak.  For now, there is infatuation with the army and its commander; there is even revisionism about the police, once the stuff of nightmares for the secularists.  Egypt needs no more revolutionary dates.  What its condition calls for is a recognition of the schism that has brought its political life, once again, into a historical stalemate, and the rule of the army.

Fouad Ajami is the Herbert and Jane Dwight Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and co chair of the Working Group on Islamism and the International Order

How Do You Like Me Now ??? Egypt

THIS MUST BE MORE OF THAT “SMART DIPLOMACY” WE WERE PROMISED:

 Sissi Blasts Obama Administration as Egyptians Turn on US.

“You left the Egyptians. You turned your back on the Egyptians, and they won’t forget that,” Gen. Abdel Fatah al-Sissi said angrily in a rare interview with a Western newspaper. “Now you want to continue turning your backs on Egyptians?”

Given the state of public opinion in Egypt, it makes lots of sense for Sissi to stress his differences with the US. Nobody wants to look like our friends there. But Sissi is probably not as unhappy with Washington’s scolding as he lets on and this Post article confuses a few things about the relationship between Washington and Cairo.

This sentence in particular seems a bit strained: “The Egyptian military has long received critical support from the United States, and in return has upheld Egypt’s decades-old peace treaty with Israel while serving as a key regional ally.” The idea that observing the treaty with Israel is something the US “buys” from the Egyptian military with aid is a typical US liberal media construct. It magnifies our importance and flatters our narcissism, distorts the nature of our relationships with Israel and its neighbors, and provides a simplistic picture of both Egypt and US policy. The Egyptian military supports the peace treaty with Israel because stability on its eastern frontier (and the return of Sinai, which came with the treaty) are in Egypt’s national interest.

The US values the treaty not just because it protects Israel, but because it (with the work of the Egyptian military) ensures the stability of a vital waterway, the Suez Canal, and the Egyptian military is an important part of regional security and stability for reasons that have nothing to do with Israel.

Sissi Blasts Obama Administration as Egyptians Turn on US

“You left the Egyptians. You turned your back on the Egyptians, and they won’t forget that,”  Gen. Abdel Fatah al-Sissi said angrily in a rare interview with a Western newspaper. “Now you want to continue turning your backs on Egyptians?”

Given the state of public opinion in Egypt, it makes lots of sense for Sissi to stress his differences with the US. Nobody wants to look like our friends there. But Sissi is probably not as unhappy with Washington’s scolding as he lets on and this Post article confuses a few things about the relationship between Washington and Cairo.

This sentence in particular seems a bit strained: “The Egyptian military has long received critical support from the United States, and in return has upheld Egypt’s decades-old peace treaty with Israel while serving as a key regional ally.” The idea that observing the treaty with Israel is something the US “buys” from the Egyptian military with aid is a typical US liberal media construct. It magnifies our importance and flatters our narcissism, distorts the nature of our relationships with Israel and its neighbors, and provides a simplistic picture of both Egypt and US policy. The Egyptian military supports the peace treaty with Israel because stability on its eastern frontier (and the return of Sinai, which came with the treaty) are in Egypt’s national interest.

The US values the treaty not just because it protects Israel, but because it (with the work of the Egyptian military) ensures the stability of a vital waterway, the Suez Canal, and the Egyptian military is an important part of regional security and stability for reasons that have nothing to do with Israel.

King Barach's New World Order

Obama’s New World Order: Power to Our Enemies, Death to Our Friends, and a Fish in the President’s Face

July 3rd, 2013 - 6:28 am

The anti-Morsi, anti-Muslim Brotherhood, and therefore anti-Obama demonstrations in Egypt are the biggest in human history.  It’s quite something, an historic event.  Whatever the outcome, we should pay attention. What does it signify? Are we now in a new world?  Has there been a paradigm shift?  Does it portend similar huge protests elsewhere, even here in the USA? Does it require rethinking basic policy options?  Or is it just an Egyptian thing, or maybe an “Arab street” thing?

 If you’ve been following Spengler, as you should, you know that Egypt is a failed state, where there is a real danger of starvation, and it is tempting to describe the demonstrations as a reaction to misery, as an act of desperation.

No doubt that’s a big part of the monster demonstration. How could it not be? On the other hand, politics is an independent variable, and I think that, alongside those threatened with starvation, many Egyptians don’t want to become “the new Iran.” Those millions of Egyptians look to me more like “the people” — all classes, heterogeneous convictions, even multigender — than a sociological, political, or religious category.

Egypt under the fist of the Muslim Brotherhood was looking more and more like Khomeini’s vision of Islamic government, and millions of Egyptians don’t want to go there, let alone do that.

The Muslim Brotherhood organized its takeover of Egypt by following the same strategy as Hezbollah in Lebanon: offering social services the state was unable to provide, organizing the faithful and telling them that their government was failing because it was godless, and assuring them that Allah would bless a regime that followed his dictates. The Egyptians got the Brothers’ version of sharia, hence less freedom, alongside the hunger pains. The biggest demonstration in human history thus pits Sunni Muslim against Sunni Muslim, not Sunni against Shia, or Muslim against infidel.

The biggest demonstration in human history is a blow to Obama as well as a humiliation of Islamism. And you might expect Obama — who has favored the Muslim Brotherhood ever since he insisted they sit in the VIP seats at his Cairo speech to “the Muslim world” — to have worked out some sort of effective strategy for this crisis, which was not hard to foresee, and which was announced well in advance.  So what did he do? True to his principles, the president is sticking with the Islamists.  He’s even sent “crowd control” experts to Cairo to give advice to his pal Morsi (is there such a thing as an “expert” capable of “controlling” more than ten million people en masse?  I don’t think so). He instructed his ambassador to lecture Egyptian Coptic Christians about the importance of supporting the Brothers, even though the Copts are being attacked in the streets and killed in their churches.

It’s reminiscent of the worst moments of the first Bush presidency, when George H.W.B. called on the Ukrainians to resist the temptations of independence and stick with the just-become-former-Soviets in his infamous “Chicken Kiev” speech. Like Bush The Elder, Obama is sticking with the tyrant he knows and likes, rather than rallying to the side of Morsi’s suffering people, who cheekily embrace American values, even as they express their contempt for an American leader who supports the Brotherhood.
Obama is hoping that Egypt 2013 will be a replay of Iran 2009, that the people will be crushed, and that the regime will survive.

History’s on his side. Most revolutions fail. On the other hand, tyrannies are the least stable form of government, and ours is a revolutionary epoch. The Muslim Brothers may well be the Bolsheviks of the Arab world, but they don’t have Lenin’s evil genius for enforcing their will on the masses, Kerensky didn’t have Twitter, and Morsi doesn’t have Felix Dzerzhinsky (Islamists don’t put Polish Jews at the head of the security service, so far as I know).

Time will tell, but Obama’s luck may have run out, both in Egypt and in Syria.  His pals in the Brotherhood — and their Salafist fellow travellers — may crash and burn, and Bashar Assad — best thought of as the factotum of the Russian and Iranian tyrannical counter revolutionaries — may prevail over the “Syrian opposition.” And for extras, Obama’s close friend and advisor, Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan, is facing demonstrators against his Islamist government, which is increasingly stressed by economic and demographic stresses and strains.

FOOTNOTE:

Claire Berlinsky, who writes from Istanbul, should get a Pulitzer for her wonderfully informative and delightfully written accounts of events in Turkey for City Journal. Take this one, for example, in which she reports that “during the initial days of the crackdown, CNN Turkey aired a documentary about penguins precisely as the international media showed the chaos on Istanbul’s streets to the rest of the world.” Isn’t that terrific? And she goes on to compare it with the weak performance of the U.S. ambassdor in Ankara. Read the whole thing.

With all the excitement, it’s hard to tell who’s winning, even with a good score card, so let’s do a preliminary tally. In Syria, Obama’s supporting the largely Islamist opposition, and says “Assad must go.” In Egypt, he’s with the Islamist Morsi and the Brothers. In Turkey, he’s with the Islamist Erdogan. Can you spot a trend? They’re all radical ideologues who condemn the United States as a force for evil.  (To be sure, the Syrian case offers no attractive “solution,” but that is largely because Obama failed to support the opposition when it was seemingly politically and religiously moderate). His guys are under siege, as is Obama himself, and not just in the Middle East.

His African expedition produced stern moral lectures about gay marriage from the presidents of Senegal and Kenya, and a cold fish in the face from Vladimir Putin, who trampled Obama at their latest get-together. The Russian president has thrown more cold fish regarding the Snowden affair.

Add it all up: embrace radical ideologues, abandon those who advocate greater freedom, and what do you get? Contempt, which Machiavelli tells us is the most dangerous reaction to any would-be leader.

Contempt is fully justified; Obama is constantly overtaken by events. “Leading from behind” is simply another way of admitting that this president doesn’t understand the dynamics that are roiling the world.  Well, what did you expect from a product of our failed educational system? Our most prestigious colleges produce graduates who know very little about the real world;  they get indoctrinated rather than educated. They are ignorant, yet they are firmly convinced that America is the root cause of the world’s problems, and they sing the false incantations of political correctness: that all cultures (except ours) are equally worthy of respect, and all men (except ours) are basically good.

You can find true believers in the dormitories of our best liberal arts universities, often side by side with their professors. One of them
got himself elected president, and he is producing the ruinous results you’d expect from such a misguided worldview.

Unable to cope, incapable of leading, Obama is dragged along in the wake of a geopolitical tidal wave. He takes “credit” for whatever actually happens, and pretends that it’s a Good Thing. This worked for a while, thanks in large part to a sycophantic media and a pathetic opposition in Washington, but Obama’s dropping popularity suggests that time is now working against him.  The world see through the fluff and feathers.

When the president of the United States only attracts a handful of admirers to hear him speak in Berlin, and gets booed in Soweto, you know that things are not going well.