About that Muslim Brotherhood...

[Shagly]

*Waiting for Saudi-Arabia to turn inside out*.

 

[KingOrfeo]

"The Muslim Brotherhood in Transition," Stephen Glain, The Nation:

The Muslim Brotherhood, the Cairo-based Islamist group that consumes the minds of American neoconservatives but rates hardly a second thought in Egypt, is in many ways like an ancient papyrus roll displayed in an airtight case lest it crumble when exposed to the elements.

The oxygen and light now leavening Egyptian politics is apparently doing just that. On Monday, the Financial Times reported that the Muslim Brotherhood’s youth branch was appealing to group elders for “an affiliated political party based on the values of the Muslim Brotherhood but not strictly religious.” Forming such a group, one youth leader told the FT, “would prove that we are peaceful, want to work in an institutional framework and are seeking to reform society in all its aspects.”

The fragmentation of Egypt’s largest and most influential Islamist movement should surprise no one who has spent time listening to its members. Far from being a monolith, the Muslim Brotherhood, or Ikhwan, as it is known in Arabic, is well scored by demographic and ideological fault lines. Its diversified ranks—young and old, blue-collar and bourgeoisie, worldly and parochial—shared above all else a hatred of the despot who tormented it. Assuming Egypt will reap the bounty of its democratic revolution—and there are indications that the military authority that now controls the nation may obstruct such a harvest—the elimination of Hosni Mubarak could mean the end of the Ikhwan as we know it.

Well before Mohammed Akef, who in spring 2009 became the first of the Ikhwan’s Supreme Guides to step down from office rather than seek another term, the group was showing signs of strain. (Unlike most political institutions in the Arab world, the Brotherhood holds regular ballots, and 80 percent of its leadership body is directly elected.) Pragmatists like Akef had urged Ikhwan members to participate in provincial and national campaigns, and in a 2005 contest they emerged with an impressive 20 percent share of seats in Parliament. In response, Mubarak cracked down bloodily on the group, vindicating the Ikhwan’s conservative Salafi movement, which was appealing for a withdrawal to the mosque.

The election in January 2010 of Akef’s successor, a relative unknown conservative named Mohammed Badie, was regarded as a victory for Akef’s detractors and a setback for the Brotherhood’s youth wing, which the outgoing Supreme Guide had promoted. A year before Badie’s election, a young Ikhwan member named Mohammed Adel told me that his co-generationalists were seizing the initiative, collaborating with secular opposition groups in defiance of the old guard. “You have a lot of young people who want to be in the leadership, but none of them are in the senior ranks,” he said. “We want to take things to the street.”

So they did. It was the participation of the Brotherhood’s young cadres that lent critical mass to the demonstrations that toppled Mubarak. Conspicuously absent in the confrontation was the Ikhwan’s conservative wing, now a static player in a profoundly ecumenical movement radiating across the Arab world.

Ahmed Salah is a young dissident and secularist who has spent years in Egypt’s political opposition. (In the revolution’s formative hours in Tahrir Square, he was arrested by security agents, beaten and released back into the crowd, only to take a rubber bullet it the head three days later.) On Thursday, he told me by phone that the Muslim Brotherhood had been a marginal player in the upheaval except for its young leaders, who were exploiting a leadership vacuum for the sake of aggrandizing power. The real menace to the revolution, he said, was the military council that has installed itself as a provisional government. Rather than convening talks with a wide array of opposition leaders, Salah told me, it is soft-stalling secularists’ demand for constitutional reform while “negotiating” with an inchoate opposition that includes members of the Ikhwan’s youth branch. (The Financial Times seemed to corroborate Salah’s account, reporting in its Wednesday edition that some thirty human rights groups have criticized the military for excluding secular groups from the constitutional reform panel, which they said was dominated “either by Islamists or legal experts who had helped draw up laws that restricted democracy under Hosni Mubarak.”)

The implication is that Brotherhood upstarts will barter away the soul of the revolution in return for a slice of power in the new regime, in which the generals preserve de facto, if not de jure, control of the country. Such a deal would be similar to the one their fathers kept with Mubarak—accommodation for the sake of autonomy, suggesting what may be a cross-generational fear of having to compete with secularists in a free marketplace of ideas.

“This is a crucial and worrisome time for the movement,” Salah said.

Ambition, guile and low cunning are intrinsic to all political insurgencies. If the peaceful revolt that saw off one dictatorship in Egypt is to be subverted by a new one, the Muslim Brotherhood, with a new generation at the helm, will adapt and survive. If, however, the Egyptian people prevail and the generals are turfed out to the barracks, that same cadre of young Ikhwan leaders will joust for power as one political constituency among many. Either way, Egypt’s most powerful Islamist group has vacated its display case.

 

[off2bed]

You dismissing the MB as "nothing" has about as much significance as dismissing the KKK or the CPUSA as nothing.

The KKK and CPUSA may wield no actual power today, but you would have to agree that anyone associated with either one is automatically stigmatized and totally discredited.

 

[Shagly]

You dismissing the MB as "nothing" has about as much significance as dismissing the KKK or the CPUSA as nothing.

The KKK and CPUSA may wield no actual power today, but you would have to agree that anyone associated with either one is automatically stigmatized and totally discredited.

Shocking.

 

[eyer]

"All these pundits trying to fig-leaf the Muslim Brotherhood need to talk to the FBI. They'll tell you virtually every terror case [in the U.S.] points back to the radical Brotherhood. And virtually every major Muslim group is a front group for the Muslim Brotherhood."

- Paul Sperry, Hoover Institution media fellow and author

 

[phrodeau]

"All these pundits trying to fig-leaf the Muslim Brotherhood need to talk to the FBI. They'll tell you virtually every terror case [in the U.S.] points back to the radical Brotherhood. And virtually every major Muslim group is a front group for the Muslim Brotherhood."

- Paul Sperry, Hoover Institution media fellow and author

Gee, do you suppose they fixed Keith Ellison's election, or was that ACORN?

 

[Frisco_Slug_Esq]

HEY! LANCECASTOR AND your fellow erudites...

Just a Peaceful Organization, which has renounced violence, on the order of Hamas and H'zbollah...

Right up there with the Peace Corp, the Red Cross and the Red Crescent (which never EVER uses its vehicles to transport arms and fighters, NEVER! *nods*):

DOHA (AFP) – Influential Muslim cleric Yusuf al-Qaradawi issued a fatwa on Monday that any Libyan soldier who can shoot dead embattled leader Moamer Kadhafi should do so "to rid Libya of him."

"Whoever in the Libyan army is able to shoot a bullet at Mr Kadhafi should do so," Qaradawi, an Egyptian-born cleric who is usually based in Qatar, told Al-Jazeera television.

He also told Libyan soldiers "not to obey orders to strike at your own people," and urged Libyan ambassadors around the world to dissociate themselves from Kadhafi's regime.

Famous in the Middle East for his at times controversial fatwas, or religious edicts, the octogenarian Qaradawi has celebrity status in the Arab world thanks to his religious broadcasts on Al-Jazeera.

He has in the past defended "violence carried out by certain Muslims."

The West accuses the cleric of supporting "terrorism" because he sanctioned Palestinian suicide attacks in Israel. Britain and the United States have refused to grant him entry visas.

The cleric, spiritual leader of Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood and longtime resident of Qatar, heads the International Union for Muslim Scholars.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20110221/wl_mideast_afp/libyapoliticsunrestfatwa_20110221212046

We just "need" and "enemy" to create fear for political gain and the illegal war machine of GW Bush and Sarah Palin...

*nods*

 

[Frisco_Slug_Esq]

Laughable, really how they seem to work some people up....




Just happy-go-lucky community organizers...




A rag-tag group of no consequence...




*nods*

 

[Frisco_Slug_Esq]

Is that the fearful angry rhetoric that makes Nancy Pelosi cry?





Or is it just Sarah Palin "crosshairs?"

 

[Frisco_Slug_Esq]

Weekend Update about our happy-go-lucky Community Organizers in the Middle East...

The Organization of the Islamic Conference is the closest thing in the modern world to a caliphate. It is composed of 57 members (56 sovereign states and the Palestinian Authority), joining voices and political heft to pursue the unitary interests of the ummah, the world’s 1.4 billion Muslims. Not surprisingly, the OIC works cooperatively with the Muslim Brotherhood, the world’s most extensive and important Islamist organization, and one that sees itself as the vanguard of a vast, grass-roots movement — what the Brotherhood itself calls a “civilizational” movement.

Muslims are taught to think of themselves as a community, a single Muslim Nation. “I say let this land burn. I say let this land go up in smoke,” Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini famously said of his own country in 1980, even as he consolidated his power there, even as he made Iran the point of his revolutionary spear. “We do not worship Iran, we worship Allah.” Muslims were not interested in maintaining the Westphalian system of nation states. According to Khomeini, who was then regarded by East and West as Islam’s most consequential voice, any country, including his own, could be sacrificed in service of the doctrinal imperative that “Islam emerges triumphant in the rest of the world.”

Because of that doctrinal imperative, the caliphate retains its powerful allure for believers. Nevertheless, though Islamists are on the march, it has somehow become fashionable to denigrate the notion that the global Islamic caliphate endures as a mainstream Islamic goal.

It was only a week ago that close to 2 million Muslims jammed Tahrir Square to celebrate the triumphant return to Egypt of Sheikh Yusuf Qaradawi, a Khomeini-esque firebrand who pulls no punches about Islam’s goal to “conquer America” and “conquer Europe.” Yet, to take these threats seriously is now to be dismissed as a fringe lunatic, a Luddite too benighted to grasp that American principles reflect universally held truths — truths to which the ummah, deep down, is (so we are told) every bit as committed as we are.

The caliphate is an institution of imperial Islamic rule under sharia, Muslim law. Not content with empire, Islam anticipates global hegemony. Indeed, mainstream Islamic ideology declares that such hegemony is inevitable, holding to that belief every bit as sincerely as the End of History crowd holds to its conviction that its values are everyone’s values (and the Muslims are only slightly less willing to brook dissent). For Muslims, the failure of Allah’s creation to submit to the system He has prescribed is a blasphemy that cannot stand.

The caliphate is an ideal now, much like the competing ideal of a freedom said to be the yearning of every human heart. Unlike the latter ideal, the caliphate had, for centuries, a concrete existence. It was formally dissolved in 1924, a signal step in Kemal Atatürk’s purge of Islam from public life in Turkey. Atatürk, too, thought he had an early line on the End of History. One wonders what he’d make of Erdogan’s rising Islamist Turkey.

What really dissolved the Ottoman caliphate was not anything so contemporary as a “freedom agenda,” or a “battle for hearts and minds.” It was one of those quaint military wars, waged under the evidently outdated notion that Islamic enemies were not friends waiting to happen — that they had to be defeated, since they were not apt to be persuaded.

It was, I suppose, our misfortune in earlier times not to have had the keen minds up to the task of vanquishing “violent extremism” by winning a “war of ideas.” We had to make do with dullards like Winston Churchill, who actually thought — get this — that there was a difference worth observing between Islamic believers and Islamic doctrine.

“Individual Muslims,” Churchill wrote at the turn of the century, demonstrated many “splendid qualities.” That, however, did not mean Islam was splendid or that its principles were consonant with Western principles. To the contrary, Churchill opined, “No stronger retrograde force exists in the world.” Boxed in by rigid sharia, Islam could only “paralyse the social development of those who follow it.” Reason had evolved the West, but Islam had revoked reason’s license in the tenth century, closing its “gates of ijtihad” — its short-lived tradition of introspection. Yet, sharia’s rigidity did not render Islam “moribund.” Churchill recognized the power of the caliphate, of the hegemonic vision. “Mohammedanism,” he concluded, remained “a militant and proselytising faith.”

Andrew McCarthy
NRO

 

[Frisco_Slug_Esq]

The Declaration makes abundantly clear that this civilization is to be attained by adherence to sharia. “All rights and freedoms” recognized by Islam “are subject to the Islamic Shari’ah,” which “is the only source of reference for [their] explanation or clarification.” Though men and women are said by the Declaration to be equal in “human dignity,” sharia elucidates their very different rights and obligations — their basic inequality. Sharia expressly controls freedom of movement and claims of asylum. The Declaration further states that “there shall be no crime or punishment except as provided for in Shari’ah” — a blatant reaffirmation of penalties deemed cruel and unusual in the West. And the right to free expression is permitted only insofar as it “would not be contrary to the principles of Shari’ah” — meaning that Islam may not be critically examined, nor will the ummah abide any dissemination of “information” that would “violate sanctities and the dignity of Prophets, undermine moral and ethical Values, or disintegrate, corrupt or harm society, or weaken its faith.”

Americans were once proud to declare that their unalienable rights came from their Creator, the God of Judeo-Christian scripture. Today we sometimes seem embarrassed by this fundamental conceit of our founding. We prefer to trace our conceptions of liberty, equality, free will, freedom of conscience, due process, privacy, and proportional punishment to a humanist tradition, haughty enough to believe we can transcend the transcendent and arrive at a common humanity. But regardless of which source the West claims, the ummah rejects it and claims its own very different principles — including, to this day, the principle that it is the destiny of Islam not to coexist but to dominate.

We won’t have an effective strategy for dealing with the ummah, and for securing ourselves from its excesses, until we commit to understanding what it is rather than imagining what it could be.

Andrew C. McCarthy

 

[eyer]

"Israeli security officials believe the Muslim Brotherhood is deeply tied to the riots in Syria.

"The Brotherhood, the most organized opposition group in Egypt, wants to create an Islamic caliphate. Both al-Qaida and Hamas are Brotherhood offshoots.

"Indeed, a source close to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told WND the Israeli leader believes Assad's presidency is better for the Jewish state's interests than any regime that would replace him.

"Netanyahu believes an Islamist entity tied to the Muslim Brotherhood would rise to power in Syria in the place of Assad, the source said.

"Netanyahu recently expressed this opinion in meetings with Russian leaders, said the source.

"The sources said Netanyahu told Russia that even if Assad coordinated with Iran, the Syrian president is still more desirable than dealing with a Muslim Brotherhood entity."

http://www.wnd.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=281717

 

[Frisco_Slug_Esq]

Assad, the Reformer

Like the Shah, Mubarek, and Momar...

 

[unregistered]

 

[Frisco_Slug_Esq]

The Ivory Coast is screaming for some kinetic military action...


http://www.foxnews.com/world/2011/04/02/ivory-coast-fighting-continues-presidency/?test=latestnews

 

[unregistered]

 

[Frisco_Slug_Esq]

It must be the light sweet crude.





BP has extensive operations there. Were they not a huge contributor to our beloved President Obama?
__________________
"It turns out, by the way, that oil rigs today generally don't cause spills. They are technologically very advanced. Even during Katrina, the spills didn't come from the oil rigs, they came from the refineries onshore."
Barack Hussein Obama

"Then why the hell did this president, what was it, two weeks after the spill started, signed another waiver for exactly this kind of deep sea drilling, another waiver for the exact same company!"
Don Imus

 

[unregistered]

 

[Frisco_Slug_Esq]

Steyn is brilliant:

APRIL 2, 2011 4:00 A.M.
Obama’s Missionless War
If you don’t have a mission, it’s hard to know when it’s accomplished.

If I recall correctly, we went into Libya — or, at any rate, over Libya — to stop the brutal Qaddafi dictatorship killing the Libyan people. And thanks to our efforts a whole new mass movement of freedom-loving democrats now has the opportunity to kill the Libyan people. As the Los Angeles Times reported from Benghazi, these democrats are roaming the city “rousting Libyan blacks and immigrants from sub-Saharan Africa from their homes and holding them for interrogation as suspected mercenaries or government spies.” According to the New York Times, “Members of the NATO alliance have sternly warned the rebels in Libya not to attack civilians as they push against the regime of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi.” We dropped bombs on Qaddafi’s crowd for attacking civilians, and we’re prepared to do the same to you! “The coalition has told the rebels that the fog of war will not shield them from possible bombardment by NATO planes and missiles, just as the regime’s forces have been punished.”

So, having agreed to be the Libyan Liberation Movement Air Force, we’re also happy to serve as the Qaddafi Last-Stand Air Force. Say what you like about Barack Obama, but it’s rare to find a leader so impeccably multilateralist he’s willing to participate in both sides of a war. It doesn’t exactly do much for holding it under budget, but it does ensure that for once we’ve got a sporting chance of coming out on the winning side. If a coalition plane bombing Qaddafi’s forces runs into a coalition plane bombing the rebel forces, are they allowed to open fire on each other? Or would that exceed the U.N. resolution?

Who are these rebels we’re simultaneously arming and bombing? Don’t worry, the CIA is “gathering intelligence” on them. They should have a clear of who our allies are round about the time Mohammed bin Jihad is firing his Kalashnikov and shouting “Death to the Great Satan!” from the balcony of the presidential palace. But America’s commander-in-chief thinks they’re pretty sound chaps. “The people that we’ve met with have been fully vetted,” says President Obama. “So we have a clear sense of who they are. And so far they’re saying the right things. And most of them are professionals, lawyers, doctors — people who appear to be credible.”

Credible people with credentials — just like the president! Lawyers, doctors, just like Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri, al-Qaeda’s No. 2. Maybe among their impeccably credentialed ranks is a credible professional eye doctor like Bashar Assad, the London ophthalmologist who made a successful mid-life career change to dictator of Syria. Hillary Rodham Clinton calls young Bashar a “reformer,” by which she means presumably that he hasn’t (yet) slaughtered as many civilians as his late dad. Assad Sr. killed some 20,000 Syrians at Hama and is said to have pumped hydrogen cyanide through the town: There wasn’t a dry eye in the house, as the ophthalmologists say. Baby Assad hasn’t done that (yet), so he’s a reformer, and we’re in favor of those, so we’re not arming his rebels.

Let's not forget the doctors that tried to bomb the Scottish airport and the Shrink who shot up Fort hood...

 

[Frisco_Slug_Esq]

Mark's not finished:

Meanwhile, the same CIA currently “gathering intelligence” on these jihadist lawyers, doctors, and other allies has apparently been in Libya for some time arming them, according to a top-secret memo on their eyes-only clandestine operation simultaneously leaked by no fewer than four administration officials to the press. A reader suggested to me that they’d misheard the Warren Zevon song “Send Lawyers, Guns And Money,” and were sending guns and money to lawyers. And, if some of the guns and money end up in the hands of “al-Qaeda elements,” I’m sure Janet Napolitano can have it re-classified as an overseas stimulus bill. In the old days, simpletons like President Bush used to say, “You’re either with us or you’re with the terrorists.” This time round, we’re with us and we’re with the terrorists, and you can’t say fairer than that.

So this isn’t your father’s war. It’s a war with a U.N. resolution and French jets and a Canadian general and the good wishes of the Arab League. It’s a war with everything it needs, except a mission. And, if you don’t have a mission, it’s hard to know when it’s accomplished. Secretary Gates insists that regime change is not a goal; President Sarkozy says it is; President Obama’s position, insofar as one can pin it down, seems to be that he’s not in favor of Qaddafi remaining in power but he isn’t necessarily going to do anything to remove him therefrom. According to NBC, Qaddafi was said to be down in the dumps about his prospects until he saw Obama’s speech, after which he concluded the guy wasn’t serious about getting rid of him, and he perked up. He’s certainly not planning on going anywhere. There is an old rule of war that one should always offer an enemy an escape route. Instead, David Cameron, the British prime minister, demanded that Qaddafi be put on trial. So the Colonel is unlikely to trust any offers of exile, and has nothing to lose by staying to the bitter end and killing as many people as possible.

Meanwhile, the turbulence in the Middle East has spread to Syria, Kuwait, Yemen, Jordan, and beyond. In Egypt, an entirely predictable alliance between the army and the Muslim Brotherhood seems to be emerging. The “Arab Spring” turns out to be a bit more complicated than it looks on CNN, and a CIA that failed to see the bankruptcy of its own pension plan looming is unlikely to be a very useful guide to the various forces in play. For the Western powers to be bogged down in the least consequential Arab dictatorship’s low-grade civil war desultorily providing air support to incompetent al-Qaeda sympathizers may be an artful if expensive piece of misdirection.

NRO

 

[Frisco_Slug_Esq]

Where would we be without Firespin's beloved RINOs?

John McCain, Joseph Lieberman, and Lindsey Graham are the Senate’s most energetic proponents of sinking the nation ever deeper into the Libyan morass. In a joint interview on Fox last weekend, Senators McCain (R., Ariz.) and Lieberman (I., Conn.) were breathless in their rendering of the “freedom fighters” and the “Arab Spring” of spontaneous “democracy.” Friday they upped the ante with a Wall Street Journal op-ed, rehearsing yet again what an incorrigible thug Qaddafi is and how “we cannot allow [him] to consolidate his grip” on parts of Libya that he still controls.

For his part, Senator Graham (R., S.C.) told CNN Wednesday that he would like President Obama to designate Qaddafi an “unlawful enemy combatant” with an eye toward legitimizing the strongman’s assassination. He and Wolf Blitzer discussed whether the hit could be pulled off by the covert intelligence operatives President Obama has inserted in Libya. The next day, in his plaintive questioning of Defense Secretary Robert Gates at a Senate hearing, Senator Graham wondered why American air power could not just “drop a bomb on him, to end this thing.”

As a matter of law, Graham’s proposal is ludicrous — no small thanks to federal law that Graham himself helped write, about which more in an upcoming column. What was especially striking about the hearing was the tone of righteous indignation Senators Graham and McCain took in whipping the Obama administration over government blundering.

But what about their own blundering? The senators most strident about the purported need to oust Qaddafi, to crush his armed forces, and to kill him if that’s what it takes to empower the rebels, are the very senators who helped fortify Qaddafi’s military and tighten the despotic grip of which they now despair.

It was only a short time ago, in mid-August 2009, that Senators McCain, Lieberman, and Graham, along with another transnational progressive moderate, Sen. Susan Collins (R., Maine), paid a visit to Qaddafi’s Tripoli compound. If they seem to have amnesia about it now, perhaps that’s because the main item on the agenda was their support for the Obama administration’s offer of military aid to the same thug the senators now want gone yesterday.

A government cable (leaked by Wikileaks) memorializes the excruciating details of meetings between the Senate delegation and Qaddafi, along with his son Mutassim, Libya’s “national security adviser.” We find McCain and Graham promising to use their influence to push along Libya’s requests for C-130 military aircraft, among other armaments, and civilian nuclear assistance. And there’s Lieberman gushing, “We never would have guessed ten years ago that we would be sitting in Tripoli, being welcomed by a son of Muammar al-Qadhafi.” That’s before he opined that Libya had become “an important ally in the war on terrorism,” and that “common enemies sometimes make better friends.”

On and on it goes, made all the more nauseating by the reality that nobody was under any illusion that Qaddafi had truly reformed. McCain made a point of telling the press that “the status of human rights and political reform in Libya will remain a chief element of concern.” Note the gentle diplomatic understatement: Qaddafi is — and was, as McCain well knew — a savage autocrat. Yet this brute fact was softened into “an element of concern” regarding “the status of human rights and political reform.” Pretty sharp contrast from the senator’s sardonic grilling of the U.S. defense secretary on Thursday. The McCain who was face-to-face with Qaddafi was very different from the McCain who today rails about Qaddafi. Back in the tent, none of his concern would dampen the cozy mood. The Arizonan swooned over “the many ways in which the United States and Libya can work together as partners.”

Andrew McCarthy
NRO

 

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Into the Libyan Labyrinth
By Victor Davis Hanson
Posted on April 01, 2011 10:15 AM

We should watch for some very strange things in Libya in the days ahead: (a) Euros bet on the wrong rebel horse, and if Qaddafi survives, he will surely “renegotiate” his massive oil exports to Europe, or perhaps prefer to deal with the Chinese. So Britain, Italy, and France will become increasing panicky and want us to ratchet things up. (b) Expect to hear less and less about the UN and the Arab League as Obama, to win, needs more and more to ignore their restrictions on using American ground troops and direct bombing of Libya’s assets. (c) Expect the Left to get increasingly antsy as it weighs the viability of Obama’s progressive domestic agenda versus their own humiliation at having to keep still and support a preemptive bombing campaign against a Muslim, Arab, oil-exporting nation, without congressional approval, that was not a national-security threat to the U.S. The Left is going to have to accept Obama’s rendering inoperative the UN and Arab League restrictions when he inserts some ground troops or orders some Milosevic-like bombing. His supporters also will have to endure the fact that Obama’s prior pledges of “turning over” and “toning down” a war that we would supposedly fight neither on the ground nor by sustained aerial bombardment are simply untrue — and this on top of everything from the now jim-dandy Guantanamo and A-OK renditions. (d) We are quickly evolving beyond the choices of both a Mogadishu- or Beirut-like clean skedaddle and a 12-year-Iraq-like-no-fly-zone humanitarian mission, and most likely are considering either bombing Qaddafi like crazy or sending in some troops or both.

 

[Frisco_Slug_Esq]

*chuckle*

As I watch television coverage of the Libyan rebels, I want to smack myself for thinking of them and the Continental Army in the same breath. Who are these high spirited fools on my television? I think that if the Libyans were serious about their rebellion, they could learn a lot from American rebellions. We wrote the book on rebelling.

If the Libyans fired as many rounds toward the Loyalists as they fired into the air, they'd have won by now. Seriously, how does this behavior help? Based upon my pre-deployment training for my own tours in Iraq, I am aware that this "celebratory" firing into the air is chalked up to cultural norms; it's supposedly a show of strength. I think this is ridiculous excuse making. It's a regional bad habit. It's a foolish display of bad discipline and a failure to realize that what goes up must also come down. The Kalashnikov rifle was introduced 64 years ago. I'd have thought it would take longer to create a deep cultural norm, especially since I doubt most Libyans have ever had the freedom to hold a rifle. Americans have had firearms (in private ownership, no less!) for the entire history of our nation, and we never developed any such absurd behaviors. The various rebel armies of America had the sense to save their ammunition for the enemy and enough discipline to fight professional armies face to face. Incidentally, the regular Libyan Army was never well trained due to Gaddafi's fear of creating a threat to his power. This is to the rebel's advantage.

Cultural norms will not supply the rebels more ammunition for their AK-47s or rounds for the anti-aircraft cannon which appear to be their most numerous heavy weapon. While the Third World may have no shortage of ammunition for weapons of Soviet origin, it would seem prudent to husband a finite resource. While these citizen soldiers are by definition amateurs, amateurish behavior like this will be no foundation for defeating the Loyalist Libyans.

J. Kowalski
The American Thinker

 

[Frisco_Slug_Esq]

Coming to a rebellion near your oil...

HRW's analysis documents extensively the enforcement of Islamic law vis-à-vis women's rights in Chechnya, as part of Chechen President Ramzan Akhmadovich Kadyrov's "Campaign for Female Virtue." In fact, Kadyrov, who was first appointed president of the Chechen Republic by the Kremlin in February 2007, has never disguised his advocacy for Shari'a. Soon after becoming president, he defended polygamy as part of Chechen tradition, and in 2009, he praised the male relatives of seven young women, whom they shot in the head and dumped by a roadside as part of a series of honor killings. Speaking to journalists on a Friday afternoon outside a mosque in Grozny, the capital of the Chechen Republic, Kadyrov said that the women had "loose morals," thereby deserving death, and that "no one can tell us not to be Muslims." Even so, polygamy and honor killings are unambiguously prohibited according to Article 14 of the third chapter of the Family Code of the Russian Federation.

A key aspect of Kadyrov's drive towards Shair'a has been forcing women to wear the hijab. By the autumn of 2007, the Chechen president had publicly stated on television that all women working for state institutions had to wear headscarves, and that such an unwritten law should be implemented immediately. The results were soon evident as female television anchors, government officials, teachers and staff-members of the ombudsman's office began wearing headscarves to work by the end of that year. In schools and universities, where the hijab was introduced under Kadyrov as part of mandated uniforms in 2007, students who refused to wear the hijab were simply denied entry to their respective offices and academic institutions, even though no legal basis existed for this new requirement.

Aymenn Jawad Al-Tamimi
The American Thinker

 

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There is always great intrigue in Barack Obama’s speeches. Not much heft, mind you, but substance is not the point. In this Chicago-style presidency, what is said is often less telling than who is invited to hear what is said. That’s where you find out who is in and who is out.

Count Rep. Paul Ryan among the outs. The GOP budget guru got a coveted invitation to hear the president outline his new vision for escaping the economic catastrophe wrought by his current vision. The speech was much anticipated, because it was Ryan’s own ambitious plan to slash trillions in spending that roused Obama from his customary crouch in the tall grass.

Ryan was reeled in by the suggestion that the invitation was an olive branch, a White House concession that he had grappled responsibly with a monstrous problem and that a gracious, cooperative presidential response was in order. But it was a setup. The Chicago mob strategically seated Ryan a few paces from the lectern, whence the don went Al Capone on him. The congressman was made into a prop, Exhibit A in a presidential tirade that mocked his plan and his party as scourges of the elderly, the destitute, and the chronically ill.

It wasn’t that way in Cairo in June 2009. That was when al-Azhar University — the font of Sunni theology and training ground for the virulently anti-American clerics who green-light jihadist terror — sponsored his eagerly awaited oration on U.S. relations with the Muslim world. As usual, the speech was specious: a whitewash of the legacy of Islamic savagery, the expurgation of violent injunctions from Islamic scripture, historical ignorance of the Jewish claim to Israel, and even the adoption of “resistance” as the euphemism for Palestinian terrorism — a touch that must have brought a smile to the faces of Hamas and the president’s pal Rashid Khalidi, the former PLO mouthpiece turned Columbia professor.

More interesting than the speech, though, was the guest list. The Obama administration made a point of inviting prominent members of the Muslim Brotherhood. And they didn’t get the Paul Ryan treatment. This really was an olive branch, more like the Corleones having the Tartaglias over for a sit-down. The ramifications rumbled through both Egypt and the United States.

The Mubarak regime fulminated. The Brotherhood was at that time a banned organization — having attempted to murder one of Mubarak’s predecessors and succeeded in offing the other. Now, of course, after more than two years of what passes for Obama’s foreign policy, gone is Mubarak — a despot to be sure, but a staunch American ally against terrorism, and one who kept the peace with Israel for 30 years. Poised to fill the power void is the Brotherhood, anti-American Islamists who seek to disappear Israel (for starters) but who lull progressive elites by smearing the catnip of democratic rhetoric over their pursuit of a sharia state.

Still, we don’t control Egypt. We have to take it as we find it, and that means taking it as a predominantly fundamentalist Arab Muslim society where, unavoidably, the Brotherhood enjoys a strong following. Our own country is quite something else. It is in the management of domestic affairs that Obama administration’s Brotherhood outreach is veering from the outrageous to the downright scandalous.

In 2008, not long before Obama’s Cairo speech, the Brotherhood was proved to be the prime mover in the biggest terrorism-financing conspiracy ever prosecuted by the Justice Department — specifically, by the Bush-era U.S. attorney’s office in Dallas. Five defendants were convicted in the Holy Land Foundation (HLF) case of routing tens of millions of dollars to Hamas during the intifada. As its charter attests, Hamas is the Muslim Brotherhood’s Palestinian branch. Since its creation in the late 1980s, Hamas’s sustenance has been the top priority of the Brotherhood’s U.S. operatives, including Mousa abu Marzook, who actually ran Hamas from his Virginia home in the early 1990s.

Using documents seized by the FBI from a Brotherhood leader, prosecutors proved that the organization considers itself to be engaged in a “grand jihad” (the title of my book on the subject). The goal, in the Brotherhood’s own words, is to destroy Western civilization from within by sabotage. The Brothers seek to accomplish this through companion organizations they’ve embedded in the West, groups like the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), the North American Islamic Trust (NAIT), and CAIR (the Council on American Islamic Relations).

That is why prosecutors designated those groups, along with some of their members, as unindicted coconspirators in the HLF case. As the evidence showed, HLF, ostensibly an Islamic charity, was a piggy bank for Hamas. Not only was it run out of the office space jointly shared by ISNA and NAIT, money for Palestinian jihadists was routed through an HLF account that ISNA and NAIT maintained. Moreover, CAIR was created in the mid-1990s largely because changes in U.S. counterterrorism law made life difficult for groups already on record as Hamas sympathizers. With a clean slate and camouflaged as a civil-rights organization, CAIR would use media savvy to promote the Islamist agenda.

All of this information about the Brotherhood and its American tentacles was very fresh when Obama spoke in Cairo. It was not rumor, innuendo, or “Islamophobia.” It was evidence that had convinced a jury to convict several members of a terror-financing conspiracy. Yet, once the Obama administration took the helm, not only was there no further action taken against the unindicted coconspirators; Obama’s outreach to the Brotherhood in Egypt was coupled by similar outreach to the Brotherhood’s American accomplices. Indeed, in July 2009, just a month after the Cairo speech, the White House dispatched Valerie Jarrett, Obama’s old Chicago friend and close political confidant, to be the keynoter at ISNA’s annual convention.

Among the most disturbing lines in Obama’s Cairo speech had been the absurd assertion that “in the United States, rules on charitable giving have made it harder for Muslims to fulfill their religious obligation” of zakat — loosely translated as “charitable giving.” As I explained at the time, American law actually places no restrictions on Muslim charitable giving. What is prohibited is material support to terrorism. It is well known that many purported Islamic charities are, like the HLF, fronts for financing terrorism. Unfortunately, it is not as well known in the United States that, in Islamist ideology, one of the eight legitimate categories of zakat is funding for those fighting in Allah’s cause — e.g., jihadists such as Hamas. (I told you it was loosely translated.) That is, using charities to finance terrorism is not a scam that pulls the wool over contributors’ eyes; it is mainstream Islam — a fact we would know if the government hadn’t spent the last 20 years insisting that terrorism has nothing to do with Islam.

Obviously, there is only one way to ease what the president disingenuously portrayed as U.S. legal restrictions on Muslim charitable giving: The Justice Department would have to suspend material-support prosecutions against Islamists who use Muslim charities as conduits for terror financing. In other words, DOJ would have to stop bringing cases such as the HLF prosecution.

Have you noticed any cases like that in the last two years? Me neither.

And now, just in case you were wondering whether that’s a coincidence, we have even more reason to know it is not. At Pajamas Media on Thursday, terrorism researcher Patrick Poole broke the news that the Obama Justice Department has put the kibosh on the Dallas U.S. attorney’s plan to bring follow-up terror-financing cases against some of the unindicted coconspirators from the HLF case.

Relying on “a high-ranking source within the Department of Justice,” Poole reports that a top CAIR official and several other HLF accomplices have been spared from indictment thanks to the intercession of attorney general Eric Holder’s minions. There is said to be a mountain of evidence collected over the course of a decade, but the political decision not to prosecute means it may never see the light of day — and these Islamist organizations and their operatives will be able to continue passing themselves off as moderate Muslim champions of social justice, just like the Brotherhood.

Poole asked why his source was coming forward at this point. The answer was chilling:

Until we act decisively to cut off the financial pipeline to these terrorist groups by putting more of these people in prison, they are going to continue to raise money that will go into the hands of killers. And until Congress starts grilling the people inside DOJ and the FBI who are giving these groups cover, that is not going to change. My biggest fear is that Americans are going to die and it will be the very Muslim leaders we are working with who will be directly or indirectly responsible.

As the Obama administration’s rough treatment of Representative Ryan shows, it’s not a comfortable time to be a member of Congress who starts asking a lot of questions this president doesn’t want to hear. Fortunately for the economy, it appears that Ryan is not backing down. For the sake of our security, though, somebody up on the Hill better step up. It is past time to ask: What on earth is this administration’s infatuation with the Muslim Brotherhood?

Andrew C. McCarthy
NRO