HERE COMES THE ISLAMIC REPUBLIC OF EGYPT
Michael Freund
Jerusalem Post, June 27, 2012
The Middle East took a sharp turn for the worse [last] week with the ascension to power of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. In what was perhaps the worst possible outcome for Israel and the West, Mohamed Morsy, the Brotherhood’s presidential candidate, was declared the winner of Egypt’s elections.
This marks the first time that an avowed Islamist has been elected to lead an Arab state. And not just any Arab state, but Egypt—the largest, most powerful and influential country in the Arab world. Incredibly, some Westerners have greeted the news with inexplicable optimism bordering on childlike glee, cheerfully celebrating the free expression of the Egyptian public’s popular will while blithely ignoring the horrifying choice they have made.
But don’t let various pundits and talking heads fool you when they deploy loaded terms such as “moderate” to describe the Muslim Brotherhood or its leaders. Morsy and his comrades are a band of extremists and fanatics bent on religious, social and political domination whose agenda does not stop at the Egyptian border.
Their victory at the ballot box is nothing less than a strategic disaster, one which poses grave dangers to the national security interests of Israel and the United States. It will undermine the already tenuous stability of the region, further embolden radical forces throughout the world, and buoy Hamas, which is an offshoot of the Brotherhood and maintains close ties with the organization.
Consider the following. On June 15, two days before the [final] round of Egypt’s presidential vote, terrorists based in Sinai fired a Grad rocket into southern Israel. According to Israeli security officials cited by Haaretz, Hamas ordered the attack at the request of the Muslim Brotherhood, which presumably wanted a provocative anti-Israel action to stir up the Egyptian masses and rally them behind its candidate.
Egypt shares a 15 km.-long border with Gaza, and is likely to ease various restrictions on the movement of people and goods to the Hamas-controlled territory. This will strengthen Hamas’ grip on the area and provide it with an important pipeline for funding, personnel and perhaps even increased weapons transfers.
It is therefore no wonder that the terror group could barely contain its delight over the news of the Brotherhood’s victory, with Hamas leader Mahmoud Zahar crowing that it was “a historic moment and a new era in the history of Egypt” as well as “a defeat for the program of normalization and security cooperation with the enemy [Israel].”
In the run-up to the vote, Morsy and his supporters made a number of chilling statements which give the lie to their alleged moderation. Back in May, when speaking to a gathering of Cairo University students, Morsy reportedly said, “The Koran is our constitution, the prophet is our leader, jihad is our path and death in the name of Allah is our goal.” And in Morsy’s official biography, which appears on the Brotherhood’s English-language website, Ikhwanweb.com, it proudly lists him as a “founder-member of the Egyptian Resist the Zionist Project Committee.”
A brief glance at the site is all that is needed to see that the Brotherhood makes little effort to hide its hostility to the Jewish state. Take, for example, a post dated April 20, which quotes Dr. Farid Ismail, a member of the Brotherhood’s parliamentary commission, as saying the following: “We reject normalization under any name, and refuse to visit Jerusalem while it is under Zionist occupation.…” In a statement published on February 21, the Brotherhood declared that it “condemns Zionist attempts to strip Jerusalem of its Islamic identity and to completely Judaize the Holy City” and demanded “urgent action…to put an end to the Judaization of Jerusalem.…”
Israel woke up [last] week to a new outpost of radicalism along its southern border, the nascent Islamic Republic of Egypt. Don’t be surprised if within a decade, we once again find ourselves confronting the Egyptian army, as Cairo steadily drifts ever deeper into intolerance and zealotry.
There is no doubt that the Egyptian people have handed the Islamists a big victory at the ballot box and in the process condemned themselves to misery and defeat. The only question now is whether they will take the rest of the region down with them.
MORSI’S INFAMOUS FRIEND
Editorial
NY Post, June 30, 2012
There’s disturbing news out of Egypt…and it has worrisome implications for America. In a fiery speech [last week] to hundreds of thousands in Cairo’s Tahrir Square, Mohammed Morsi took the oath of office—and vowed to obtain freedom for the blind sheik, Omar Abdel Rahman.…
So much for those who insist that Morsi, the radical Muslim Brotherhood’s man, is a moderate—and that the group itself has moved beyond its Islamist origins. After all, we’re talking about the same blind sheik now serving a life term in US prison for masterminding the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and plotting attacks on other New York landmarks. The same blind sheik whose fatwa was cited by Osama bin Laden as religious justification for the 9/11 attacks. The same blind sheik whose terrorist movement, Gamaa Ismaliya, has elected members in Egypt’s new Islamist-dominated parliament.…
All of which raises troubling questions. The White House says it wants to work with Egypt’s new leadership.… [However], President Obama and his secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, need to make it clear that they will not truck with terrorists—nor with their apologists in high places.
OBAMA ENABLES AMERICA’S ENEMIES
Robert Spencer
Pajamas Media, July 2, 2012
No sooner was Muslim Brotherhood candidate Mohamed Morsi elected president of Egypt than he announced his determination to work for the freedom of an enemy of the United States: blind sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman. Not since Jimmy Carter helped usher in the Iranian Revolution has an American president done so much to aid those who are determined to destroy the United States.
In fact, the parallels are numerous. Carter betrayed the shah of Iran, a long-time U.S. ally who had a dismal human rights record but was generally loyal, and paved the way for the ascent to power of the Ayatollah Khomeini and the Iranian mullahcracy that quickly showed its gratitude to Carter by taking U.S. Embassy personnel hostage, and has maintained a war footing against the United States ever since.
Obama, for his part, betrayed Hosni Mubarak, another long-time U.S. ally with a record of repressive rule, paving the way for the Muslim Brotherhood’s rise to power. And now President Morsi has shown his gratitude to Obama by announcing his determination to free from prison a man who plotted to murder hundreds of thousands of Americans.
It is said that history repeats itself, but it doesn’t do so by means of some automatic, inexorable, deterministic process. History repeats itself because people refuse to study and learn its lessons, and to face the unpleasant facts it presents.…
The Obama administration didn’t have to be Carter’s second term, but both Carter and Obama are the products of a political culture that consistently discounts the importance of religious motivations. Informed sources have noted that at the time of the Iranian Revolution, only one book by the Ayatollah Khomeini could be found in the State Department, and no one had read it: no one thought the rantings of an obscure fanatic exiled to far-off France were important. That was the manifestation of a willful blindness to rival that of James Clapper, Obama’s director of national intelligence, who famously labeled the Muslim Brotherhood “largely secular.” In fact, it is the same willful blindness, and it has characterized the Washington establishment’s views on Islam and jihad from Carter’s day until now.…
Last week, Yasser Borhamy, a Salafi leader, declared that the Muslim Brotherhood was planning to implement Sharia as the main source for Egyptian law.… By “Sharia law revealed by God,” Borhamy meant the Sharia that stones adulterers, amputates thieves’ hands, mandates death for apostates from Islam, and institutionalizes subjugation of women and non-Muslims. If the Brotherhood does succeed in implementing this in Egypt, it will have Barack Obama to thank: his applause for the “Arab Spring” uprisings, coupled with the universal misrepresentation of them in the Western media as outpourings of a longing for democracy and pluralism, has brought us to the inception of an Egyptian regime that is almost certain to go to war with Israel and pursue a path of unrelenting hostility toward its erstwhile patrons in Washington.…
And so what was old is new again: a man who owes his seat of power to the United States demonstrates his hostility to the ones who put him in place. Then it was Khomeini, now it is Morsi, but in both cases it is the same. One wonders how many times Washington will have the luxury of making this same mistake before the consequences become too terrible to bear.
ISLAMISTS HAVE THE KEYS TO THE ARAB WORLD
Giulio Meotti
FrontPage, July 3, 2012
It’s possible that in the coming years the Arab masses will revolt against their new Islamic rulers. But today, the Muslim Brotherhood, the Salafis, the Wahhabis and all the other followers of the Koran have the keys of the Arab world.
The new president of Egypt, Mohammed Morsi, is a pious revolutionary whose message has always been very simple: “Islam is the solution.” The real Egyptian people were not the secularists described by hypocritical Western journalists based in Tahrir Square. Instead, they are the people revealed in a recent Pew poll: 54% believe men and women should be segregated in the workplace; 82% believe adulterers should be stoned; 84% believe apostates from Islam should face the death penalty; 77% believe thieves should be flogged or have their hands cut off. That’s why the new Islamic rulers will try to impose the veil on women, ban alcohol and attack the cold peace with Israel. That’s why the most important Arab country will move toward a theocratic anti-Western scenario.
The Muslim Brotherhood…want[s] to change society and the individual in the name of a totalitarian ideology. They have waited 80 years to seize power, while their worldview was forged in the Arabian desert 1,300 years ago. To become a “Brother,” an Ikhwan, one must pass through eight years of training. It’s like joining Heinrich Himmler’s SS. And like the Hitlerist special forces that were at war with Judaism, cosmopolitism, communism and democracy, the Islamic Brothers are at war with individualism, modernism, consumerism, materialism, tolerance, subjectivism, rationalism, paganism, Judaism and Christianity.…
Islamists will take into account tourism and jobs. But on top of their agenda is the Koran, not Egypt’s gross national product. They want to build a haven for Muslim bearded men, which will turn out to be a hell for women, Jews, Christians, unbelievers, atheists, converts and all the free men and women. More and more Copts will leave the country, walking in the streets of Cairo will become increasingly dangerous and the border with Israel will be open to rockets.…
One year ago the Muslim Brotherhood’s supreme guide, Mohammed Badie, proclaimed: “We will continue on the path of Qutb.” Few “experts” understood the deep meaning of this statement. The stories about the suffering of Qutb in Egyptian prisons are a kind of dark mythology of Islamism.… Badie was his cellmate. Qutb managed to get his manifesto, “Milestones,” smuggled out of jail. It’s the “Mein Kampf of Islamism.…”
Qutb vilified the Jews as “slayers of the prophets” and as “perfidious,” double-dealing and “evil.…” Qutb wrote that the only way to get rid of “corruption” is the imposition of a “just rule” at war with modernity, human rights, promiscuity, materialism and Zionism.… Like Hitler’s Aryanism, Qutb heralded the notion that Islam is superior. Like Hitler, Qutb saw the existence of the Hebrew people as the measure of the world’s moral bankruptcy.
After six decades of Arab kleptocracy, the Middle East is going to be engineered according to Qutb’s nightmare. Symbols help to understand the mindset. That of the Muslim Brotherhood is a Koran and two sharp swords. In 2005 they published a map of the world. In the center is a green area, the color of Islam. In a lower panel it said: “One hundred years from now.…”
The Nazis called it “Lebensraum.” The Islamists call it “Caliphate.”
REMNANTS OF A JEWISH PAST
Jake Meth
Egypt Independent, June 28, 2012
A taxi pulls up to the Shaar Hashamayim Synagogue on Adly Street in downtown Cairo. The driver has to wait for the manic traffic to calm down before he can unload a wheelchair from his trunk, unfold it, and help a frail, elderly woman into its seat.
The occasion is the Jewish holiday of Passover, and the woman is one the few remaining Egyptian Jews. The driver wheels the woman past some 20 security guards stationed in front of the synagogue. Entrants, with some exceptions, need to be on a list before being allowed into the seder, the ritual dinner that celebrates the holiday. According to two of the seder’s opening lines: “All who are hungry, let them enter and eat. All who are in need, let them come celebrate Passover with us.” But here, security concerns appear to take precedence.
The seder is held in a multipurpose room adjacent to the synagogue’s impressive, high-walled central courtyard. Almost all of the Egyptian Jews present are elderly women, sitting at two small, round tables at the back of the room. A long, white-clothed table runs down the center, at the head of which sits Rabbi Mark El Fassi, the president of Les Enfants d’Abraham (the Children of Abraham) organization in France, who has been imported to lead the seder.…
The primary force behind this seder, and the continued relevance of Egypt’s Jewish community, is the woman seated to Fassi’s left, Carmen Weinstein. As president of the Egyptian Jewish community, Weinstein has presided over the restoration of the Bassatine Cemetery—the second oldest Jewish cemetery in the world—and the synagogue at which the seder is held, among other projects. She maintains a website, Bassatine News, which bills itself as “the only Jewish newsletter reporting directly from Egypt.” That United States Ambassador to Egypt Anne Patterson attends the seder is a further testament to Weinstein’s clout.
But Weinstein’s efforts have only put off an inevitable reality: Egypt’s Jewish community—some 80,000 strong in the early twentieth century and now consisting of a few dozen elderly women—is dying out. “There’s not much of a community,” says Joel Beinin, a professor of Middle East history at Stanford University who wrote The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry. “I mean we’re talking about a few people here.…” As Beinin puts it in his book, “Between 1919 and 1956, the entire Egyptian Jewish community…was transformed from a national asset into a fifth column.” Most of Egypt’s remaining Jews left after the 1967 Arab-Israeli War.…
Websites and organizations run by expatriate Egyptian Jews, such as Jews Indigenous to the Middle East and North Africa (JIMENA), Justice for Jews from Arab Countries, Harif (Association of Jews from the Middle East and North Africa) and the blog “Point of no return,” highlight what they describe as a history of Jewish persecution in the region. The sites exhaustively compile media stories and other reports documenting Jewish expulsions and continued expressions of anti-Semitism. They emphasize that Middle Eastern and North African Jews were made refugees.… Joseph Wahed, JIMENA’s founder and an Egyptian Jew, says Egypt’s Jews were “all ethnically cleansed between 1948 and 1970.…”
The voices of the remaining Egyptian Jews remain silent on the issue of their dwindling community.… Speaking in a telephone interview, Beinin says that the community today has found itself in a complicated position, which is why its members are reluctant to speak to the media. “There’s nothing they can say that can be safe for them,” he says. “They are under the intense scrutiny of the Egyptian government and Egyptian intelligentsia.…”
Despite the difficulties inherent to the task, Weinstein appears set on maintaining the Egyptian Jewish community.… “There is a very long history of Jewish life in Egypt; it goes all the way back to Abraham and Joseph, and permanent settlement as old as Jeremiah,” says Beinin. “So if someone is actually thinking about the past and future of this community, you don’t so easily say it’s done.…”
