The precedents are fresh and obvious. Yet the US government seems intent on
ignoring them.
In Iran in 1979, leftist and other secular forces, central
to the rising pressure that ousted the Shah, were duped and then outflanked by
Islamist supporters of Ayatollah Khomeini, who took power and have cemented it
for 32 years since. The Islamists achieved this despite having constituted only
the most marginal of forces just a couple of years earlier.
RELATED:Muslim Brotherhood: ‘We are against Zionism’Muslim Brotherhood: With Israel, no agreement is eternalIn the
Palestinian territories in 2006, the US insisted on pressing ahead with
elections that, in part because of Fatah’s corruption and disorganization, saw
the underestimated Islamist Hamas terror group gain a parliamentary majority,
which it then exploited to violently take over the Gaza Strip a year
later.
In Lebanon over the past few weeks, the Iranian-inspired,
controlled and financed Hizbullah out-maneuvered the hapless prime minister Sa'ad
Hariri, to complete what amounts to a gradual, highly sophisticated takeover of
the country.
In Turkey in recent years, confidence that such secular
bulwarks as the army and the judiciary would prevent growing Islamic domination
of the national agenda has proved increasingly misplaced, again via the subtle
and protracted marginalization of these former establishment pillars. Turkey,
champion of Hamas, nemesis of Israel, is now drifting inexorably out of the
western orbit.
Washington’s apparent disinclination, as it now tries to
influence the process of Hosni Mubarak’s replacement, to internalize the dangers
highlighted by the Iran, Gaza, Lebanon and Turkey disasters, and thus do
everything in its power to prevent the Muslim Brotherhood presiding over a
similar process in Egypt, is incomprehensible.
And it could prove
immensely threatening for Israel.
For all President Barack Obama’s
declared intent to usher in a new partnership between the US and the Muslim
world, what he termed “a new beginning” in his 2009 speech in Cairo, his
diplomats did not deliver significant diplomatic pressure on Mubarak to reform
his regime in the past two years. This was most starkly confirmed by December’s
vigorously fraudulent parliamentary elections, which featured mass arrests of
opposition supporters and the firm muzzling of critical media, and in which the
Muslim Brotherhood’s 88-seat share of the previous 454-member parliament descended to zero because of the regime’s
machinations.
Washington evidently failed to foresee that embittered
Egyptians might then resort to the massed protests of the past two weeks, and it
abandoned Mubarak with alacrity as it scrambled to avoid being caught on the
wrong side of a largely spontaneous people’s push for freedom and
democracy.
But however one gauges the realpolitik involved in that
dramatic recoil from a 30-year ally, the White House’s subsequent reported moves
to legitimate Egypt’s Islamists – whose outlook conflicts utterly with the
democratic agenda – make no sense, and suggest a frighteningly superficial
understanding of the Muslim Brotherhood’s intentions and potential
achievements.
Far from learning the lessons of the Islamists’ skilled
subversion of other pro-democracy movements, working with potential leaders of
an Egyptian transition to minimize the risk of such a process recurring, and
making publicly plain that there will be no ongoing American alliance with an
Egypt in which an unreformed Islamist movement has even a marginal role in
government, the White House seems to be actively encouraging a transitional
outreach to the Muslim Brotherhood.
National Security Council official
Dan Shapiro told Jewish leaders on a conference call Wednesday that the
administration would not deal with the Brotherhood. But White House spokesman
Robert Gibbs had two days earlier urged the inclusion of “important non-secular
actors” in a more democratic Egypt – a statement that was widely seen as
relating to the Muslim Brotherhood. And the Administration’s proposal for the
immediate transfer of power calls for the transitional government to include the
Muslim Brotherhood, the
New York Times reported Friday.
As things stand,
of course, the longer Mubarak hangs on, the greater the instability and the
anger, and the more for the Islamists to build upon.
But why would the US
assist them? The administration may in part be motivated by the president’s
seeming conviction, as David Ignatius wrote in the
Washington Post last week,
“that change is a matter for Egyptians, not Americans, and that too heavy an
American hand would be counterproductive.”
In addition, numerous
“experts” in both the US print and electronic media over the past week have been
concertedly representing the Muslim Brotherhood as benign, hapless, not
particularly popular, or all three of the above.
Far from benign, the
Brotherhood is committed to death-cult jihad in the cause of widened Islamist
rule, was the progenitor of Hamas and central to Islamist radicalization among
the Palestinians. And its popularity was evident in that impressive 2005
parliamentary performance, achieved, it should be stressed, despite the
Mubarak-orchestrated unfavorable circumstances.
Yet readers of the
New
York Times on Thursday, for instance, were treated to a page-leading op-ed
article headlined “Egypt’s Bumbling Brotherhood,” which depicted the Islamists
as a veritable Keystone Kops rabble of incompetents who have “botched every
opportunity” for 83 years to revive Islamic power. Their purported 20-30 percent
support, according to author Scott Atran, “is less a matter of true attachment
than an accident of circumstances.”
Tony Blair’s warning that the
Islamists could take the unfolding Egyptian revolution in the wrong direction
was blithely dismissed by the author with the assertion that the Brotherhood’s
“failure to support the initial uprising… has made it marginal to the spirit of
revolt now spreading through the Arab world.”
On CNN that same day,
scholars Michele Dunne and Robert Kagan, while not entirely deriding the notion
of Islamist influence, nevertheless scathingly marginalized the threat, with
Dunne, senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace,
citing the centrality and dependability of the secular Egyptian military and
judiciary as though Turkey’s seismic shift had not been unfolding before our
very eyes in recent years.
Some commentators made much of the fact that
the Brotherhood kept a low profile early in the uprising, interpreting this as
evidence of disorganization and/or a lack of ambition. But the restraints have
come off since then: Islamist rhetoric has become more prominent, and
Brotherhood spokesmen are now ubiquitous in the media.
Experiences
elsewhere have demonstrated the patience that Islamist organizations can
exercise, building and gaining power and influence over years, over decades. Yet
the absence of the Brotherhood from the protest frontlines for a matter of mere
days – an astute tactic to ensure the watching world was not alienated and to
maximize domestic support for the uprising – was apparently widely misread as
proof of its irrelevance.
A much-cited – though not always accurately –
Pew Research Center of Muslim attitudes, published only two months ago,
indicates how frighteningly fertile the ground is for the Islamists in Egypt:
82% of Egyptian Muslims favor stoning people who commit adultery; 77% favor
whipping/ cutting off of hands for theft and robbery; and 84% favor the death
penalty for people who leave the Muslim religion, it found. By way of
comparison, the comparable percentages in Turkey, even as it submits to growing
Islamist influence, were just 16%, 13% and 5% respectively.
The same
survey found that among Egyptian Muslims who see a struggle between those who
want to modernize their country and Islamic fundamentalists, a striking 59% side
with the fundamentalists and only 27% with the modernizers.
Pew also
found that 54% of Egyptian Muslims believe suicide bombings can be justified
often (8%), sometimes (12%) or rarely (34%), as against 46% who said they could
never be justified.
The Pew poll did not ask a follow-up question about
precisely when such bombings could be justified, but a Muslim Brotherhood
spokesman from Cairo, also interviewed on CNN, offered an insight in this
context.
Mohamed Morsy, who in the course of the conversation on Thursday
refused to commit his movement to maintenance of the Israel-Egypt peace treaty
or to recognition of Israel, and stressed its opposition to Zionism, insisted
that the Muslim Brotherhood opposed the use of violence. Without missing a beat,
however, he went on to say that what was going on in Palestine was “resistance.”
And “resistance,” he said, “is acceptable by all mankind. It is the right of
people to resist imperialism.”
In the
New York Times “Bumbling
Brotherhood” op-ed, another such spokesman, Dr. Essam el-Erian, was quoted as
saying, “Israel must know that it is not welcome by the people in this region.”
And writer Atran acknowledged that the Brotherhood “wants power,” and allowed
that “its positions, notably its stance against Israel, are problematic for
American interests.”
The current regional uprising has reemphasized
Israel’s unique centrality to America as the region’s only truly dependable
ally, because the partnership is not tactical or even strategic, but a function
of shared interests and values that genuinely resonate throughout society. Why,
then, Israel’s leaders must surely be asking their American counterparts in
their current frantic consultations, would the US government help legitimate, on
yet another of our newly unstable frontiers, a bleak, benighted movement that
can be guaranteed to use any influence it accrues to undermine those shared
interests and values?