RACHEL EHRENFELD: ISLAMISTS POLITICAL POWER IN THE UNITED STATES AND THE U.K.
Tony Blair got it right. When asked about the consequences of the West’s intervention in Afghanistan and Iraq, Britain’s former Prime Minister, once again reiterated “the reason it was tough in Iraq and tough in Afghanistan is the reason it is tough today…. It’s tough because terrorism is deep-rooted and it’s got very strong causes within the religion of Islam,” he is quoted saying. Earlier this year, Blair pointed out that radical Islam destabilizes “communities and even nations. It is undermining the possibility of peaceful co-existence”. And Blair does not only refer to the Sunni ISIS, or the Taliban, but also warns against allowing Iran the capability to produce nuclear weapons.
Blair is being mocked by the British and American leftist media which has been very careful not to blame Islam for violence and terrorism. Even the Royal family’s love affair with Saudi royals and Gulf Emirs, matched until recently only by the British Foreign Office, is being undermined by the Muslim Brotherhood. The Saudis, who first banned the Brotherhood and later designated it as terrorist, have, like many others, underestimated the organization’s real influence and were surprised when Sir John Jenkins, a former British ambassador to Riyadh, concluded last September that the special commission he headed found no indication that the Muslim Brotherhood was involved in terrorism.
The same thing happened last week, when Barack H. Obama dismissed hundreds of thousands of American petitioners to designate the Brotherhood. Instead, the White House issued this statement: “We have not seen credible evidence that the Muslim Brotherhood has renounced its decades-long commitment to non-violence.”
“No evidence”?
Apparently, no one at the White House has seen on live television the Muslim Brothers leading the violence in Cairo and elsewhere, or newspaper headlines and pictures taken in Tahrir Square (or in London, or in Paris) of Muslim Brothers holding signs calling for the killing of the offenders of Islam.
Egyptian president Abdul Fattah al-Sisi could provide the White House with evidence used in the trials of hundreds of Muslim Brotherhood “community organizers” who oversaw the attacks last year on the Egyptian people, their property, and law enforcement personnel.
The American ambassador to Cairo could also have asked for the evidence that the fact finding committee regarding the violence that erupted after Mohamed Morsi’s ousting used last month to recommend the banning of all religious political parties, which have been inspired by the Muslim Brotherhood’s credo “Political Islam.” The Egyptian committee, as Blair has, has recognized that “the interaction between religion and politics that is not compatible with pluralistic, liberal, open-minded societies.”
Moreover, the White House could have asked the Saudi and the United Arab Emirates’ authorities for the evidence that led to their decision to designate the Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist organization. There was no interest in looking into the evidence that led Interpol to issue a high alert for arrest of International Union of Muslim chief ideologue Sheikh Yusuf Al-Qaradawi, who found shelter and support in Doha, or designating his host country, Qatar, for supporting Hamas, the Morsi government and other Muslim Brotherhood affiliated terrorist groups, as a terror-sponsoring state.
Clearly, the White House did not want to be bothered with such evidence. Instead, the U.S. did not object to the election of Qatar, to the U.N. Human Rights Council two months ago.
While Blair hopes that “At some point, people will understand that it’s not because of something we’ve done,” but because of Islam’s inherent violence, the U.S. and most Western nations seem to suffer from the Stockholm Syndrome, accepting most Islamists’ real and imagined social and economic grievances against the West. The Islamists perfected their role as victims of oppression to justify extreme violence whenever they feel offended. Yet, Western nations fail to admit there is something wrong with the backward, death-striving religion that drives the Islamist movement. Instead, they cave in to new demands to “adjust” to Islamic values and laws and slowly impose sharia on their populations, including many Muslim immigrants who came to the West seeking refuge from the brutality of Islamic rule.
The Administration’s lack of attention to the Muslim Brotherhood’s ongoing subversive activities and events to teach Americans how to skirt the anti-terror financing laws as they contribute money to restore and reinforce Hamas, the Brotherhood’s branch in Gaza, This, while Hamas test-firing missiles into the sea and into Israel’s territory goes unnoticed. Instead, the White House leaked its intentions to sanction Israel, for having the audacity to build new homes on its territory.
What lead the U.S. down this path? The Obama administration’s confused attitude towards the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood and Islamists in the Middle East and beyond, goes basck to an assessment of the Muslim Brotherhood in 2010 and 2011, beginning even before the events known as the “Arab Spring” erupted in Tunisia and in Egypt. The President personally issued Presidential Study Directive 11 (PSD-11) in 2010, ordering an assessment of the Muslim Brotherhood and other “political Islamist” movements, including the ruling AKP in Turkey, ultimately concluding that the United States should shift from its longstanding policy of supporting “stability” in the Middle East and North Africa (that is, support for “stable regimes” even if they were authoritarian), to a policy of backing “moderate” Islamic political movements (emphasis in bold added throughout).
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