RUTHFULLY YOURS

How does Egypt differ from Saudi Arabia and Qatar? Two ways: (1) It was not invited to join President Obama’s ballyhooed “coalition” of Arab Muslim states fighting against ISIS, and (2) it is actually fighting against ISIS.

Obama, of course, has aligned himself with the anti-American, anti-Western and anti-Semitic Muslim Brotherhood, which, like ISIS, wants to impose sharia globally. Thus the State Department continues to host and consult with the Brotherhood about the future of Egypt, even though the Brotherhood has been outlawed as a terrorist organization – the government it dominated having been ousted from power after millions of Egyptians took to the streets to demand its removal.

Meanwhile, the new government of President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, who was elected by a wide margin after the Brotherhood was cashiered, is taking the fight to ISIS – including cooperating with Israel in the Sinai, where ISIS is working with Hamas (the Brotherhood’s Palestinian branch), as Caroline Glick detailed last week, here.

Moreover, the New York Times reports that Egypt is conducting airstrikes against ISIS’s new operations base in Libya (the country that Islamists have destabilized and largely overrun thanks to President Obama’s decision to help Islamists overthrow the Qaddafi regime). Unlike the former Brotherhood government that freed jihadist leaders and abetted the persecution of Coptic Christians, Sisi’s government is attacking the jihadists to avenge ISIS’s savage murder of Egyptian Christians. The Times’ David Kirkpatrick notes that:

The Egyptian military said on Monday that it had carried out two rounds of airstrikes in Libya in retaliation for the beheading of more than a dozen Egyptian Christians by a branch of the Islamic State extremist group there.

In a statement Monday morning, the Egyptian military said that it had conducted airstrikes at dawn against training camps and arms depots of the Islamic State group in Libya, but it did not provide further details. The Foreign Ministry said that Egyptian warplanes had struck Derna, a town in eastern Libya that is a hub of Islamist militancy.

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In a televised address late Sunday night, President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi of Egypt vowed that his country would take action to avenge the killings.

“Egypt preserves the right to respond, with the appropriate manner and timing, in order to carry out retribution on those killers and criminals who are stripped of the most basic of human values,” Mr. Sisi said.

The Egyptian military said in a statement issued around 8:30 a.m. that the dawn strikes were “retribution and response to the criminal acts of terrorist elements and organizations inside and outside the country.”

“We stress that revenge for the blood of Egyptians, and retribution from the killers and criminals, is a right we must dutifully enforce,” the statement said. Egyptian state television showed footage of F-16s taking off in the dark as the statement was read on the air.

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Egypt’s air assault came less than 12 hours after the main Islamic State group released a video online that appeared to show fighters from the group’s self-proclaimed Tripolitania Province beheading more than a dozen Egyptian Christians.

The Christians were among the thousands of Egyptians who routinely travel across the border to Libya to find work in its oil-rich economy, forging a deep connection between the two neighboring states. About 20 Egyptian Christians disappeared around the coastal city of Surt weeks ago, and last month the Tripolitania Province released a picture showing that it had captured them.

As Roger Simon and Ray Ibrahim have recounted, Sisi, a devout Muslim, began this year by admonishing Islam’s most influential scholars at al-Azhar University that Islam must reform – that it must, in his words, have a “religious revolution.” He was not simply making the fatuous but oft-repeated claims that Islam is innately peaceful and predominantly practiced in moderation. He was imploring sharia jurists to reject unambiguously both violent jihadism and, crucially, the scripturally-rooted ideology that fuels this terrorism:

It’s inconceivable that the thinking that we hold most sacred should cause the entire umma [Islamic world] to be a source of anxiety, danger, killing and destruction for the rest of the world.  Impossible!

That thinking—I am not saying “religion” but “thinking”—that corpus of texts and ideas that we have sacralized over the years, to the point that departing from them has become almost impossible, is antagonizing the entire world.

So here we have what American officials have always said we’ve desperately needed: A respected Muslim leader of a vitally important Muslim country who is courageously opposing – in word and deed – the jihadists and their ideology. And what is the president of the United States doing? He is denying them the support they need and driving them into the arms of Vladimir Putin.

Besides remaining miffed that Egypt has outlawed the Brotherhood, Obama is busy helping Iran become a nuclear power – even as Iran-backed terrorists seize Yemen and target Israel. So Russia has moved in, pledging to aid economically strapped Cairo in both fighting terrorists and building a nuclear power industry.

If President Obama did not have a disastrous foreign policy, he’d have no foreign policy. Our Islamic allies in combating “violent extremism” are not sharia-supremacists like the Muslim Brotherhood and the regimes in Saudi Arabia and Iran. Our ally is Egypt.

Update: PJ Media’s Patrick Poole catches al-Jazeera — the jihadist propaganda arm hosted by President Obama’s “coalition” partner, Qatar — recycling old pictures of dead children to make it look like they were killed by Egypt in the retaliatory strikes against ISIS.