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The political equivalent of Egypt's MB has form, as Michael Totten notes: (http://www.worldaffairsjournal.org/b...lse-moderation)
As Paul Berman writes on the MB (http://www.tnr.com/article/books/mag...ech?page=0,0):
A further article on the MB by Eric Trager:
The Muslim Brotherood is the party that Press Secretary Jay Carney says the Administration will judge according to its "actions" rather than its "religion." I guess Jay Carney defines clitoral mutilation, rampant racism, sexual harassment, war on Israel and war on the United States as simply aspects of Islamic culture everyone has to respect in the name of multiculturalism. These apologists for totalitarians remind one of Jimmy Carter's period of playing nice with the Soviets, where Americans had magically overcome their (to use his own infamous words), "inordinate fear of Communism." Obama and Carter are of a piece. They are disgraces to the Western tradition.
As Carney put it:
Question: Can I ask you a question on the meeting with the Muslim Brotherhood that took place here? According to our sources, the parliamentarian of the Muslim Brotherhood met with Steve Simon and Samantha Power here...
Carney: Our policy is clear and is the same, which is that in the aftermath of Egypt’s revolution, we have broadened our engagement to include new and emerging political parties and actors — because it’s a fact that Egypt’s political landscape has changed and the actors have become more diverse, and our engagement reflects that. The point is that we will judge Egypt’s political actors by how they act, not by their religious affiliation.
Transcript here:http://gretawire.foxnewsinsider.com/...ng-gender-gap/
Samantha Power is the same fine woman who called on the United States to invade Israel to protect the Palestinians.
Everyone should read Paul Berman's most recent essay in The New Republic about how Islamist radicals are using the supposed crime of “blasphemy” to terrorize people in the Middle East and beyond [link:
In it he mentions Rached Ghannouchi, the leader of Tunisia's “moderate” Islamist party Ennahda.
"By now everyone has noticed the fog of euphemism that has crept over the word “moderate” when applied to Islamist movements and leaders. A “moderate” is someone such as Rachid Ghannouchi, the Islamist leader in Tunisia, basking for the last few months in his October 2011 triumph at the polls—who has spoken at length over the years about “Jewish Masonic Zionist atheistic gangs” and the “Talmudic satanic project” to create a “new Jewish world order on the ruins of the American Western world order,” about the mothers of suicide terrorists as “a new model of woman,” and more generally about “the extinction of Israel” or, more recently and hygienically, “the germ of Israel,” which he has come to think will, like polio, shortly be eradicated. Ghannouchi is one of the leading champions around the world of Hamas—a leading champion because Hamas itself has never been well-endowed with intellectuals, but Ghannouchi is an educated philosopher. Then again, Ghannouchi promises to respect democratic norms within Tunisia itself. Measured by Islamist standards, he is indeed a “moderate.” No one but satanic Masonic Zionist germs need fear extermination, if Rachid Ghannouchi has his way. At least, not for the moment! Yet how can it be that Islamist standards have ended up accepted in the mainstream Western press, such that, for months now, barely a day goes by when we do not read encomia to the “moderation” of Rachid Ghannouchi?"
Since I'm still in Tunisia, Berman emailed me and asked if I thought he got Ghannouchi right or if he's overreacting. He is not overreacting. He got Ghannouchi right. The leader of Tunisia's Islamists really did say those things. Ghannouchi also says moderate things, but look: sophisticated extremists will sometimes lie in order to come across as more reasonable than they really are. Genuine moderates, on the other hand, have no reason to lie and pretend they're extremists when they are not.
Ghannouchi pretends to be moderate for two reasons. First, most Tunisians are moderates who are frightened by violent radical Islam. If Ghannouchi's party is to succeed, he can't go around telling people he wants their mothers, daughters, and sisters to strap on suicide vests.
He also has to stop talking like that if he doesn't want to be treated as a pariah by the civilized world.
I met a few Ennahda people in Tunis. They do come across as moderates compared with their counterparts in Egypt. They do this not because they want to, but because they have to. That's a good enough reason for guarded optimism, but let us not kid ourselves.
In it he mentions Rached Ghannouchi, the leader of Tunisia's “moderate” Islamist party Ennahda.
"By now everyone has noticed the fog of euphemism that has crept over the word “moderate” when applied to Islamist movements and leaders. A “moderate” is someone such as Rachid Ghannouchi, the Islamist leader in Tunisia, basking for the last few months in his October 2011 triumph at the polls—who has spoken at length over the years about “Jewish Masonic Zionist atheistic gangs” and the “Talmudic satanic project” to create a “new Jewish world order on the ruins of the American Western world order,” about the mothers of suicide terrorists as “a new model of woman,” and more generally about “the extinction of Israel” or, more recently and hygienically, “the germ of Israel,” which he has come to think will, like polio, shortly be eradicated. Ghannouchi is one of the leading champions around the world of Hamas—a leading champion because Hamas itself has never been well-endowed with intellectuals, but Ghannouchi is an educated philosopher. Then again, Ghannouchi promises to respect democratic norms within Tunisia itself. Measured by Islamist standards, he is indeed a “moderate.” No one but satanic Masonic Zionist germs need fear extermination, if Rachid Ghannouchi has his way. At least, not for the moment! Yet how can it be that Islamist standards have ended up accepted in the mainstream Western press, such that, for months now, barely a day goes by when we do not read encomia to the “moderation” of Rachid Ghannouchi?"
Since I'm still in Tunisia, Berman emailed me and asked if I thought he got Ghannouchi right or if he's overreacting. He is not overreacting. He got Ghannouchi right. The leader of Tunisia's Islamists really did say those things. Ghannouchi also says moderate things, but look: sophisticated extremists will sometimes lie in order to come across as more reasonable than they really are. Genuine moderates, on the other hand, have no reason to lie and pretend they're extremists when they are not.
Ghannouchi pretends to be moderate for two reasons. First, most Tunisians are moderates who are frightened by violent radical Islam. If Ghannouchi's party is to succeed, he can't go around telling people he wants their mothers, daughters, and sisters to strap on suicide vests.
He also has to stop talking like that if he doesn't want to be treated as a pariah by the civilized world.
I met a few Ennahda people in Tunis. They do come across as moderates compared with their counterparts in Egypt. They do this not because they want to, but because they have to. That's a good enough reason for guarded optimism, but let us not kid ourselves.
As Paul Berman writes on the MB (http://www.tnr.com/article/books/mag...ech?page=0,0):
MARSHALL AND SHEA devote very little attention to superstitions about the Jews, and this makes sense from a narrow point of view. A human-rights report should chronicle acts of persecution, and during the last several decades nearly the entire Jewish population of the Muslim world successfully fled to Israel and other places—which means that, unlike the oppressed Ismailis, Ahmadis, Baha’is, Muslim liberals, Christians, and other unhappy minorities, the Jews of the Middle East are right now capable of defending themselves con fuoco, even con troppo fuoco. The only substantial exception can be found in Iran, where a rump population of the ancient Jewish community has stubbornly remained in place. But Marshall and Shea report that Iran’s Jews, having declined to flee, also decline to raise even the tiniest of wan complaints about their circumstances, which may suggest a high degree of intimidation. There are twenty thousand of these people.
Seen from an angle broader than human rights persecution, though, the belief in supernatural Jewish evil might seem worthy of commentary. It is often supposed that, when the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt first acquired a mass popularity, beginning in 1936, its appeal rested on a nationalist loathing for the British. But the campaign that in fact attracted hundreds of thousands of Egyptians into the Brotherhood ranks was anti-Zionist, in solidarity with the Arab Uprising in Palestine—with Zionism defined in the more-than-human manner that could be understood by studying The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, just then taking their prominent place in the Islamist literature. That was ages ago. But does anyone really suppose that supernaturalist anti-Zionism has somehow receded more recently to the margins of the Islamist imagination?
I urge any of my more optimistic readers to look up the various YouTube videos of a sermon delivered by Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi in Tahrir Square, Cairo, in February 2011, to an enormous crowd. His sermon was one of the turning points of the Arab Spring—the moment at which the Muslim Brotherhood finally decided to ripple its muscles in front of a broad public. Qaradawi is the most widely known and admired Sunni cleric in the world, owing to his al-Jazeera televangelism, even apart from his status as the Brotherhood’s leading theologian. He devoted most of his sermon to celebrating the early moments of the new revolution. He urged the Egyptian people onward. But the sermon also rose to a climax that turned away from Egypt altogether in order to touch on Palestinian issues. He prayed to God to be allowed “to witness the conquest of the Al-Aqsa mosque,” in Jerusalem—though, in another translation, “conquest” is rendered as “opening.” His meaning was clear, either way.
Qaradawi is famous for having bestowed clerical blessings upon suicide terror and the policies of Hamas. He resembles Rachid Ghannouchi in this respect, his fellow member of the European Council for Fatwa and Research, except that Qaradawi is the senior figure. The jaunty title “mufti of martyrdom operations” is something Qaradawi assigned to himself, in a fit of televised ghoulish humor. The prayed-for “conquest” or “opening” of the Al-Aqsa mosque at the climax of his sermon at Tahrir Square could only mean the triumph of Hamas’s jihad. There are people who claim not to know what this would involve. But Qaradawi himself has offered a few hints. Hamas’s jihad means the completion of what Hitler, as the agent of God, long ago began—another element of Qaradawi’s thinking that, together with his overall condemnation of the peace process, he has announced to his gigantic television audience.
But what strikes me about Qaradawi’s Cairo sermon was the crowd’s reaction to those final, climactic invocations. The reaction was oceanic. On some of those videos a giant wave appears to lift up the vast city square. Here was the revolutionary emotion—not for every last Egyptian, to be sure, but evidently for a great many people who have just now voted for one or another of the Islamist parties. Here was the revolutionary goal, openly announced. It was not merely the overthrow of Pharaoh. It was the liberation of Jerusalem. The crowd at Tahrir Square erupted in emotion because huge numbers of people look upon Qaradawi’s goal as a transcendental aspiration—the jihad that is spiritual and material at the same time.
And yet Qaradawi, too, is typically described as a “moderate.” Even his Tahrir Square sermon has been described and applauded more than once as “moderate,” without the slightest reference to its concluding section. How can this be, almost seventy years after the defeat of Nazism—the presentation of such a person as a “moderate,” amid the discreet overlooking of his rantings on Jewish themes? The omissions tend to be systematic, too. The scholar Samuel Helfont has commented on this magazine’s website about a recent American scholarly biography of Qaradawi that likewise manages to overlook or underestimate the rantings. A similar distortion can be seen in historical scholarship on Qaradawi’s predecessor as grand theoretician, Sayyid Qutb. The most recent of the scholarly Qutb biographies duly takes up his theories about satanic Jewish conspiracies, but somehow the conspiracy theories merit only a handful of pages, which will scarcely seem appropriate to anyone who has actually read Qutb’s enormous Koranic commentaries, not to mention his pamphlet on the Jews. Martin Kramer has made the same point in regard to an Oxford University Press book about Ghannouchi. Silenced is the name of Marshall and Shea’s human-rights report, and Self-Silenced ought to be the title of a round-up analysis of some recent Western academic scholarship.
Seen from an angle broader than human rights persecution, though, the belief in supernatural Jewish evil might seem worthy of commentary. It is often supposed that, when the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt first acquired a mass popularity, beginning in 1936, its appeal rested on a nationalist loathing for the British. But the campaign that in fact attracted hundreds of thousands of Egyptians into the Brotherhood ranks was anti-Zionist, in solidarity with the Arab Uprising in Palestine—with Zionism defined in the more-than-human manner that could be understood by studying The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, just then taking their prominent place in the Islamist literature. That was ages ago. But does anyone really suppose that supernaturalist anti-Zionism has somehow receded more recently to the margins of the Islamist imagination?
I urge any of my more optimistic readers to look up the various YouTube videos of a sermon delivered by Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi in Tahrir Square, Cairo, in February 2011, to an enormous crowd. His sermon was one of the turning points of the Arab Spring—the moment at which the Muslim Brotherhood finally decided to ripple its muscles in front of a broad public. Qaradawi is the most widely known and admired Sunni cleric in the world, owing to his al-Jazeera televangelism, even apart from his status as the Brotherhood’s leading theologian. He devoted most of his sermon to celebrating the early moments of the new revolution. He urged the Egyptian people onward. But the sermon also rose to a climax that turned away from Egypt altogether in order to touch on Palestinian issues. He prayed to God to be allowed “to witness the conquest of the Al-Aqsa mosque,” in Jerusalem—though, in another translation, “conquest” is rendered as “opening.” His meaning was clear, either way.
Qaradawi is famous for having bestowed clerical blessings upon suicide terror and the policies of Hamas. He resembles Rachid Ghannouchi in this respect, his fellow member of the European Council for Fatwa and Research, except that Qaradawi is the senior figure. The jaunty title “mufti of martyrdom operations” is something Qaradawi assigned to himself, in a fit of televised ghoulish humor. The prayed-for “conquest” or “opening” of the Al-Aqsa mosque at the climax of his sermon at Tahrir Square could only mean the triumph of Hamas’s jihad. There are people who claim not to know what this would involve. But Qaradawi himself has offered a few hints. Hamas’s jihad means the completion of what Hitler, as the agent of God, long ago began—another element of Qaradawi’s thinking that, together with his overall condemnation of the peace process, he has announced to his gigantic television audience.
But what strikes me about Qaradawi’s Cairo sermon was the crowd’s reaction to those final, climactic invocations. The reaction was oceanic. On some of those videos a giant wave appears to lift up the vast city square. Here was the revolutionary emotion—not for every last Egyptian, to be sure, but evidently for a great many people who have just now voted for one or another of the Islamist parties. Here was the revolutionary goal, openly announced. It was not merely the overthrow of Pharaoh. It was the liberation of Jerusalem. The crowd at Tahrir Square erupted in emotion because huge numbers of people look upon Qaradawi’s goal as a transcendental aspiration—the jihad that is spiritual and material at the same time.
And yet Qaradawi, too, is typically described as a “moderate.” Even his Tahrir Square sermon has been described and applauded more than once as “moderate,” without the slightest reference to its concluding section. How can this be, almost seventy years after the defeat of Nazism—the presentation of such a person as a “moderate,” amid the discreet overlooking of his rantings on Jewish themes? The omissions tend to be systematic, too. The scholar Samuel Helfont has commented on this magazine’s website about a recent American scholarly biography of Qaradawi that likewise manages to overlook or underestimate the rantings. A similar distortion can be seen in historical scholarship on Qaradawi’s predecessor as grand theoretician, Sayyid Qutb. The most recent of the scholarly Qutb biographies duly takes up his theories about satanic Jewish conspiracies, but somehow the conspiracy theories merit only a handful of pages, which will scarcely seem appropriate to anyone who has actually read Qutb’s enormous Koranic commentaries, not to mention his pamphlet on the Jews. Martin Kramer has made the same point in regard to an Oxford University Press book about Ghannouchi. Silenced is the name of Marshall and Shea’s human-rights report, and Self-Silenced ought to be the title of a round-up analysis of some recent Western academic scholarship.
A further article on the MB by Eric Trager:
Yet the Brotherhood came to Washington with an agenda of its own: selling itself as a “moderate” organization to a highly skeptical American public. And it did so using one of the oldest sales tricks: It completely misrepresented itself.
In a certain sense, the Muslim Brotherhood’s representatives had no other choice. If they admitted, for example, that they intend to repeal the law that criminalizes sexual harassment—as one of their female parliamentarians declared earlier last week—they would have killed their chances at winning over an American public that embraces gender equality. Similarly, if the Brotherhood’s representatives used their time in Washington to reiterate their leaders’ calls for banning beach tourism, it would have destroyed any hopes of an American taxpayer-aided bailout for the nearly bankrupt Egyptian economy. And if they’d repeated their leaders’ 9/11 conspiracy theories, they would have been on the first plane back to Cairo, rather than invited for meetings at the White House and State Department.
Thus, the Brotherhood presented a version of its politics very different from the one that would be familiar to Egyptians. For instance, when asked about the organization’s plan to sink Egypt’s peace treaty with Israel by putting it to a referendum—which multiple Brotherhood officials have called for quite publicly—Brotherhood-affiliated Freedom and Justice Party MP Abdel Mawgoud al-Dardery simply denied it. “No referendum at all concerning international obligations,” he told Ben Birnbaum of The Washington Times. “All our international agreements are respected by the Freedom and Justice Party, including Camp David.” Sondos Asem, editor of the English-language Brotherhood website Ikhwanweb, was only slightly less misleading. “We’ve reiterated our position towards both the treaty with Israel and all the treaties that have been signed by previous governments,” she said on CNN. “We are not willing to change any of these treaties unless if there is a massive popular will to change that.” Asem’s “unless” qualification seemingly went unnoticed, neatly buried under her pro-peace platitudes.
...
Of course, the Brotherhood’s representatives also used their time in America to deny their theocratic aims. “As our name indicates, we are the Freedom and Justice Party,” said Asem, the Brotherhood website editor, on CNN. “And what we would like to achieve in Egypt is actually a civil democratic state that is based on the rule of law.” But the Brotherhood’s presidential candidate, Khairat al-Shater, recently promised to give clerics a legislative role—an undemocratic structure if there ever was one.
Later, when pressed on the role of women at Georgetown by a liberal Egyptian activist, Asem said, “We are … working to improve the situation of women in society, getting to the root causes of the problem of the marginalization of women.” It remains unclear, though, how the Muslim Brotherhood’s longtime opposition to legislation banning female genital mutilation, which a Brotherhood parliamentarian recently reiterated, plays into the Brotherhood’s supposed concerns for women’s social role. And when CNN’s Brianna Keilar pressed al-Dardery on the Brotherhood’s clitorectomy stance, the parliamentarian suddenly got defensive. “The Egyptian people will decide for themselves what is good for them,” I overheard him telling Keilar. “It is not acceptable for anyone to tell the Egyptian people how to think this way or the other way.” Al-Dardery’s insistence on Egypt’s sovereign right to circumcise women was, perhaps, his most honest remark of the trip.
In a certain sense, the Muslim Brotherhood’s representatives had no other choice. If they admitted, for example, that they intend to repeal the law that criminalizes sexual harassment—as one of their female parliamentarians declared earlier last week—they would have killed their chances at winning over an American public that embraces gender equality. Similarly, if the Brotherhood’s representatives used their time in Washington to reiterate their leaders’ calls for banning beach tourism, it would have destroyed any hopes of an American taxpayer-aided bailout for the nearly bankrupt Egyptian economy. And if they’d repeated their leaders’ 9/11 conspiracy theories, they would have been on the first plane back to Cairo, rather than invited for meetings at the White House and State Department.
Thus, the Brotherhood presented a version of its politics very different from the one that would be familiar to Egyptians. For instance, when asked about the organization’s plan to sink Egypt’s peace treaty with Israel by putting it to a referendum—which multiple Brotherhood officials have called for quite publicly—Brotherhood-affiliated Freedom and Justice Party MP Abdel Mawgoud al-Dardery simply denied it. “No referendum at all concerning international obligations,” he told Ben Birnbaum of The Washington Times. “All our international agreements are respected by the Freedom and Justice Party, including Camp David.” Sondos Asem, editor of the English-language Brotherhood website Ikhwanweb, was only slightly less misleading. “We’ve reiterated our position towards both the treaty with Israel and all the treaties that have been signed by previous governments,” she said on CNN. “We are not willing to change any of these treaties unless if there is a massive popular will to change that.” Asem’s “unless” qualification seemingly went unnoticed, neatly buried under her pro-peace platitudes.
...
Of course, the Brotherhood’s representatives also used their time in America to deny their theocratic aims. “As our name indicates, we are the Freedom and Justice Party,” said Asem, the Brotherhood website editor, on CNN. “And what we would like to achieve in Egypt is actually a civil democratic state that is based on the rule of law.” But the Brotherhood’s presidential candidate, Khairat al-Shater, recently promised to give clerics a legislative role—an undemocratic structure if there ever was one.
Later, when pressed on the role of women at Georgetown by a liberal Egyptian activist, Asem said, “We are … working to improve the situation of women in society, getting to the root causes of the problem of the marginalization of women.” It remains unclear, though, how the Muslim Brotherhood’s longtime opposition to legislation banning female genital mutilation, which a Brotherhood parliamentarian recently reiterated, plays into the Brotherhood’s supposed concerns for women’s social role. And when CNN’s Brianna Keilar pressed al-Dardery on the Brotherhood’s clitorectomy stance, the parliamentarian suddenly got defensive. “The Egyptian people will decide for themselves what is good for them,” I overheard him telling Keilar. “It is not acceptable for anyone to tell the Egyptian people how to think this way or the other way.” Al-Dardery’s insistence on Egypt’s sovereign right to circumcise women was, perhaps, his most honest remark of the trip.
The Muslim Brotherood is the party that Press Secretary Jay Carney says the Administration will judge according to its "actions" rather than its "religion." I guess Jay Carney defines clitoral mutilation, rampant racism, sexual harassment, war on Israel and war on the United States as simply aspects of Islamic culture everyone has to respect in the name of multiculturalism. These apologists for totalitarians remind one of Jimmy Carter's period of playing nice with the Soviets, where Americans had magically overcome their (to use his own infamous words), "inordinate fear of Communism." Obama and Carter are of a piece. They are disgraces to the Western tradition.
As Carney put it:
Question: Can I ask you a question on the meeting with the Muslim Brotherhood that took place here? According to our sources, the parliamentarian of the Muslim Brotherhood met with Steve Simon and Samantha Power here...
Carney: Our policy is clear and is the same, which is that in the aftermath of Egypt’s revolution, we have broadened our engagement to include new and emerging political parties and actors — because it’s a fact that Egypt’s political landscape has changed and the actors have become more diverse, and our engagement reflects that. The point is that we will judge Egypt’s political actors by how they act, not by their religious affiliation.
Transcript here:http://gretawire.foxnewsinsider.com/...ng-gender-gap/
Samantha Power is the same fine woman who called on the United States to invade Israel to protect the Palestinians.
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