Obama legitimizes the Muslim Brotherhood

Barry Rubin in a major article in Pajamas Media argues that Obama has disguised this embrace and says that far more than Israel will be upset by it.

ZOA Criticizes Obama For Recognizing & Legitimizing Islamist, Anti-Semitic, Anti-American Muslim Brotherhood

The Zionist Organization of America (ZOA) has criticized President Barack Obama for recognizing and legitimizing the Islamist, anti-Semitic, anti-American Muslim Brotherhood, which is currently a part of the interim Egyptian government. A U.S. official claimed as justification of this move that “The political landscape in Egypt has changed, and is changing… It is in our interests to engage with all of the parties that are competing for parliament or the presidency” (Tim Mak, ‘U.S. recognizes Muslim Brotherhood,’ Politico, June 30, 2011).

The Muslim Brotherhood – also known as The Ikhwan – was founded in 1929 by Hassan Al-Banna. Before and during World War Two, it collaborated with Nazi Germany. It was also the precursor of Al Qaeda and other Islamist terror movements. Its leading intellectual figure, Sayyid Qutb, is the source of the argument used by Islamists that governments not ruled by sharia are apostate and, therefore, legitimate targets of jihad. As Jayshree Bajoria of the Council on Foreign Relations has written, “Establishing an Islamic state based on sharia is at the center of the Muslim Brotherhood’s ideology, both in Egypt and among the group’s many offshoots abroad.” Middle East experts Robert S. Leiken and Steven Brooke have written that the Muslim Brotherhood “followed the path of toleration and eventually came to find democracy compatible with its notion of slow Islamization.” Shadi Hamid, a Middle East expert at the Brookings Institution’s Doha Center, has described it as “the mother of all Islamist movements.”

Last year, the Muslim Brotherhood leader, Muhammad Badi’, spoke
enthusiastically of jihad and called for a state based on Islamic law. He also spoke optimistically about the U.S. heading for a collapse. His second-in-command, Rashad Al-Bayoumi, emphasized earlier this year the objective of abrogating the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty. The Muslim Brotherhood platform, leaked in August 2007, calls for jihad, states that “Islam is the official state religion and Islamic sharia is the main source for legislation.” It also states that the president and legislative branch
will be advised by clerics, who must approve decisions and that non-Muslims will be barred from the presidency, which is also held to be unsuitable for women. The Brotherhood’s slogan is ‘Islam Is The Answer.’ Al Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood both seek a new Caliphate and their disagreement has been over tactics, not goals. Under repression in Egypt, the Brotherhood renounced violence domestically, but not globally and, in particular, not against Israel, against whom it calls for jihad. It has adopted slogans such as “Islam is the solution” and “jihad is our way.” The Palestinian branch of the Brotherhood, Hamas, is a blood-soaked terrorist organization which calls in its Charter for the destruction of Israel and the worldwide murder of Jews.

The Obama Administration has sought to engage with this bitterly
anti-Semitic, anti-Western anti-America organization even before this year’s political upheaval in Egypt. In June 2009, ahead delivering his speech to the Muslim world in Cairo, President Obama invited the Muslim Brotherhood leadership to attend, including Mohammed Saad el-Katatni, the head of its parliamentary bloc. Following the Obama Administration’s early and
ill-advised call for the Hosni Mubarak regime to go, then-White House press secretary Robert Gibbs called for “a host of non-secular actors” – a clear allusion to the Muslim Brotherhood – be part of a future government; Obama adviser Bruce Riedel argued that America “should not be afraid of the Muslim Brotherhood”; while Obama’s National Intelligence director James Clapper described the Brotherhood as being “largely secular” and not particularly extreme.

ZOA National President Morton A. Klein said, “From early in his
Administration, even before the current upheaval in Egypt arose, President Obama has gone out of his way to legitimize this vicious Islamist movement that has inspired jihadists all over the world. The Muslim Brotherhood seeks to eliminate Israel, Western democracy and indeed non-Muslim governments throughout the world. It is absurd to ignore this because the Brotherhood has found it tactically expedient not to publicly emphasize all its goals or because it believes it can ease its way slowly into power by using democratic processes that will come to an end as soon as it attains ultimate power.

“President Obama is legitimizing a fundamentally illegitimate movement. President Obama should be opposing and exposing the danger posed by the Muslim Brotherhood with all his might, not engaging it, now that it has benefited from his dangerous and ill-advised policy of supporting the removal of the Mubarak regime and calling for elections in Egypt at a time when clearly only extremist, Islamist elements can prevail.

“A 2007 University of Maryland survey shows that 67% of Egyptians favor all Arab countries untied as one Islamist state. A 2010 Pew poll indicates that 74% of Egyptians favoring the imposition of strict sharia (Islamic) law. The death penalty for those who convert out of Islam is supported by 84% of Egyptians. So a Muslim Brotherhood takeover is possible. It is the very antithesis of what the Obama Administration should be encouraging. It is stunning – and alarming – that the Obama Administration is facilitating the strengthening of a dangerous anti-Israel, anti-American group like the Muslim Brotherhood.

“A Muslim Brotherhood regime would take control of a massive Egyptian army, twice the size of Israel’s, trained by the U.S., possessing ballistic missiles, chemical weapons, hundreds of U.S.-made warplanes, thousands of tanks and dozens of ships, purchased with over $40 billion of U.S. military aid. The Muslim Brotherhood may not attain ultimate power in Egypt in the immediate future, but its path to such power is being laid today – and facilitated by President Obama.”

July 1, 2011 | 18 Comments »

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18 Comments / 18 Comments

  1. President Obama campaigned on hope and change. Hope is destroyed. The change Obama is determined to implement: rapidly Islamizing America, and aiding Muslim conquest of other countries, for example, Africa’s Ivory Coast where under very strong U.S. backing, French military and UN troops waged war against Ivory Coast Black African Christians and proudly won the jihad for Islam.

  2. “Of enducation and real information we cannot get too much. But of propaganda, which is tainted or perverted information, we cannot have too little.” Calvin Coolidge

  3. Catarin says:

    I bet he has never known a Muslim terrorist, but he has known many Muslims, some since childhood.

    They are all terrorists or potential terrorists or they are not true Muslims.

  4. Catarin says:
    July 2, 2011 at 8:25 pm

    If Obama doesn’t engage with these groups, how can he influence them? Peace contracts cannot be made with groups that we have no contact with. Remember Obama grew up among kids of various religious affiliations. I bet he has never known a Muslim terrorist, but he has known many Muslims, some since childhood.

    I don’t think the Muslim Brotherhood has a chance to take over Egypt. Egypt’s great wealth comes from its archaeological finds, and I don’t think Egyptians and the world would allow Muslims to rule over this.

    The Muslim Brotherhood has already taken over Egypt and the Army. Out of 85 million people over 50% are illiterate and the average yearly income for most Egyptians is less than $1000.00. You think most of these Egyptians care about ancient artifacts?

    Egyptian intelligentsia are also part of the MB or no less Muslim fundamentalist:

    An article in AL- AHRAM. Here, Dr. Lufti Abd al-Azim wrote unambiguously:

    The first thing that we have to make clear is that no distinction must be made between the Jew and the Israeli….The Jew is a Jew, through the millennia….in spurning all moral values, devouring the living and drinking his blood for the sake of a few coins. The Jew, the Merchant of Venice, does not differ from the killer of Deir Yasin or the killer of the camps. They are equal examples of human degradation. Let us therefore put aside such distinctions and talk about Jews.

    In a current Egyptian textbook of “Arab Islamic History” used widely in teacher training colleges (in a country “at peace” with Israel), similar sentiments are expressed:

    The Jews are always the same, every time and everywhere. They will not live save in darkness. They contrive their evils clandestinely. They fight only when they are hidden, because they are cowards….The Prophet enlightened us about the right way to treat them, and succeeded finally in crushing the plots that they had planned. We today must follow this way and purify Palestine from their filth.

  5. If Obama doesn’t engage with these groups, how can he influence them? Peace contracts cannot be made with groups that we have no contact with. Remember Obama grew up among kids of various religious affiliations. I bet he has never known a Muslim terrorist, but he has known many Muslims, some since childhood.

    I don’t think the Muslim Brotherhood has a chance to take over Egypt. Egypt’s great wealth comes from its archaeological finds, and I don’t think Egyptians and the world would allow Muslims to rule over this.

  6. “America does have interests in need of advancement and protection in the Middle East and that includes America’s interests that are tied to Egypt.”

    Well Narvey if, indeed, America has interests and need of advancement and PROTECTION in the Middle East, then it would be wise to pull out all stops in funding Israel to the hilt militarily so that the hostile Arab countries surrounding it would think five or ten times over of crossing US interests and would learn to sh-t a brick of remorse if they even attempted it. And that, my friend Narvey, to quote the former US president Teddy Roosevelt with a slight turn of words with apology, “The US should talk softly but carry a VERY BIG ISRAELI STICK” in the Middle East. Unfortunately, America is not wise, at this time at least, since it elected Barak (Insane) Obama.

  7. Ben Tzion, same question of you as to Yamit, what planet are you from? Another useful idiot for the irrational extreme right dropped in from the planet weirdo.

  8. Yes Narvey, and didn’t Chamberlain engage Hitler in that same wonderful manner as we can see by the results of that engagement. Yes Narvey, time to get your head out of your liberal, progressive, statist @SS and return to reality.

  9. Obama is wrongly damned for saying America’s interests are served by engaging both her friends and enemies as the premise for his outreach to the Muslim Brotherhood. That general propositional premise is plain common sense that every person and nation is guided by.

    Common sense like most generalized terms you use is much over used and seldom defined in any context. In our Orwellian world where words take on different meanings to different folks common sense might be defined as: foolishness, impracticality, insanity, unreasonableness.

    Your definition of common sense seems to be at odds with everyone else except Obama and the most radical liberals and Muslims.

    Obama has acquitted himself brilliantly as a master of mouthing common sense platitudes as regards both domestic and foreign affairs issues, but has a near perfect record of saying and doing the wrong thing in furtherance of those common sense platitudes.

    We knew you agreed with Obama’s stated goals and positions.

    Must hurt like hell Narvey to always be wrong. 😛

  10. Obama is wrongly damned for saying America’s interests are served by engaging both her friends and enemies as the premise for his outreach to the Muslim Brotherhood. That general propositional premise is plain common sense that every person and nation is guided by.

    America does have interests in need of advancement and protection in the Middle East and that includes America’s interests that are tied to Egypt.

    As things stand now, the MB has made itself very influential as regards Egypt’s interim ruling military government, if not the power behind that interim government. Since the MB has indicated it will not be providing a slate of candidates in the announced future election plans, it appears the MB for now intends to be the power behind the throne of whatever party is elected to lead Egypt, if Egypt does in fact proceed with such elections.

    The crucial issue however, is not the general common sense premise that nations must engage with enemies, but what form should that engagement take?

    Critics have weakened their denunciations of Obama, by conflating their criticisms of the form of engagement Obama has chosen regarding the MB, by saying Obama is a fool for engaging with the MB at all since it is a self declared mortal enemy of America, Israel and the West.

    Critics should stick with damning Obama’s outreach to the MB as being naive and delusional in suggesting the MB is not what it is and thus Obama’s form of engagement is the height of weakness and folly.

    Obama has acquitted himself brilliantly as a master of mouthing common sense platitudes as regards both domestic and foreign affairs issues, but has a near perfect record of saying and doing the wrong thing in furtherance of those common sense platitudes.

    America, Israel and the West are paying the price for Obama’s follies in furtherance of good old fashioned common sense.

  11. Everybody could see this coming as history has a habit of repeating itself especially when Jews or now Israel is concerned. Maybe America’s Jewish voters also will see this as well at the polls in November 2012. Somehow I doubt that, but then again miracles do happen from time to time.

  12. I believe that political analyst Mark Halperin did indeed deliver the succinct message characterizing our grand and glorious and imperial president Barack (Insane) Obama as “…being a dick”. Hope the leftist/liberal voting Jews, who seem to be joined at the hip with the Democrat party, remember all this in November 2012, or will they have amnesia again?.

    http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21134540/vp/43593809#43593809

  13. “A Muslim Brotherhood regime would take control of a massive Egyptian army, twice the size of Israel’s, trained by the U.S., possessing ballistic missiles, chemical weapons, hundreds of U.S.-made warplanes, thousands of tanks and dozens of ships, purchased with over $40 billion of U.S. military aid. The Muslim Brotherhood may not attain ultimate power in Egypt in the immediate future, but its path to such power is being laid today – and facilitated by President Obama.”

    Which is precisely the objective of the administration.