RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/273642/max-boot-israel-and-foreign-leaders-control-trump-daniel-greenfield

Max Boot’s entire pathetic career proves the old saw about patriotism being the last refuge of a scoundrel.

His latest column in the Washington Post, a paper that has practically outsourced its coverage of the Middle East to Qatar and the Muslim Brotherhood is an attack on, what else, the idea of naming the Muslim Brotherhood a terrorist group.

Let’s start by flashing back to just how ignorant Boot was about the region during the Arab Spring in this exchange on the Hugh Hewitt Show.

HH: This afternoon, Max Boot, the official news agency of the Emirates announced that it was providing, that the United Arab Emirates was providing Egypt with a billion dollar grant, and a two billion dollar interest-free loan. And Reuters reported the Saudis are approving a package totaling five billion. One of the crises has been, of course, the soaring cost of fuel in the country. So the neighboring, conservative, stable regimes are doing what they can. Doesn’t that show the United States that the region wants a non-Brotherhood-dominated government?

MB: Well, you know, regimes like the ones in Qatar or the United Arab Emirates or Saudi Arabia, of course they want a non-Muslim Brotherhood government. But they also want a non-democratic government. I mean, their preference is for strongmen autocratic types, but that’s not necessarily our preference, because we’ve seen throughout the Muslim world for decades, they’ve been rules by autocrats, and the result of that has been a backlash among their people, which has led to the creation of groups like al Qaeda, which was founded by Ayman al-Zawahiri, along with Osama bin Laden. And Zawahiri, of course, the current leader, is an Egyptian. Sayyid Qutb was an Egyptian, the father of modern Islamism. This is really where a lot of the venom and the hatred that drives forward terrorism, this is where it comes from. And so we can’t just afford to follow the advice of the Saudis or Qataris and say oh, hey, we’d like to see the military in power for another 50 years. There has to be a better way here.

Max Boot actually thought that Qatar was in favor of removing Morsi. Maybe he should have watched a little Al Jazeera.

Qatar was and is the Muslim Brotherhood’s main backer.

After this, no one should have ever listened to Max Boot on anything involving the Muslim Brotherhood or the Middle East again. Aside from being wrong, he’s also hopelessly ignorant.

But here he is complaining that…

1. Trump listens to too many foreign dictators and leaders

2. If he lists the Muslim Brotherhood, it’ll offend Turkey and Qatar

The Muslim Brotherhood is a diffuse organization that has branches all over the Middle East. Some of the Brotherhood offshoots, such as Hamas, are clearly terrorist organizations and are already treated as such by the United States. But many others are peaceful political parties that are represented in the parliaments (and even the ruling coalitions) of U.S. allies such as Jordan, Tunisia, Morocco and Kuwait. Turkey and Qatar, both important U.S. allies, support the Brotherhood.

Also it’ll offend the important U.S. allies in Al Qaeda.

And if Boot thinks that Jordan’s Muslim Brotherhood is peaceful, he hasn’t been paying much attention. But then he never does.

The Muslim Brotherhood has renounced violence, at least in theory. While the Brotherhood’s commitment to democracy remains uncertain, there is a good case to be made that it’s better to co-opt relatively moderate Islamists rather than push them into the arms of terrorists. That is, in fact, the argument that Post contributor Jamal Khashoggi made before he was murdered by the Saudi regime. “There can be no political reform and democracy in any Arab country without accepting that political Islam is a part of it,” he wrote.

Khashoggi was likely Brotherhood. His columns were put together by Qatar. That’s the Brotherhood’s biggest backer.

Max Boot is so incomprehensibly stupid and ignorant that he’s actually citing the Brotherhood’s backer as an argument for co-opting the Brotherhood.

Who exactly is co-opting whom?

But then Boot decides to wrap himself in the flag and put up a cartoon of Trump being led around by a Zionist dog.

 Trump does listen to one democratic leader: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who persuaded him to exit the Iranian nuclear deal, move the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem and recognize Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights. But it’s hard to see how most of those decisions advance U.S. interests, either. The irony is that the “America First” president, far more than the “globalist” presidents he reviles, is a tool of foreign leaders who don’t have America’s best interests at heart.

Whose interests did sending Iranian terrorists billions of dollars, enabling their nuclear program, subsidizing the Islamic terrorists of the Palestinian Authority, and demanding that Israel turn over its capital to the PLO and the Golan Heights to Assad, serve?

Oh right. Iran and Qatar.

Whom does Boot write for? A paper that ran Qatari propaganda and participated in that terror state’s regime change operation.

As during the Cold War, it can be hard to tell the useful idiots from the fellow travelers.