Hillary Clinton Blesses The Islamic
Brotherhood
As Secretary of State Hillary Clinton
met with Egypt’s new Muslim Brotherhood president, Mohamed Morsi, demonstrators
gathered outside the U.S. Embassy in Cairo to protest the United States’
uncritical support for the new regime, which has promised
to impose Sharia upon Egypt.
In the days when the U.S. was the world’s foremost defender of freedom, such a
demonstration would have been unthinkable: protestors held signs reading
“Message to Hillary: Egypt will never be Pakistan”; “To Hillary: Hamas will
never rule Egypt” and “If you like the Ikhwan [Brotherhood], take them with
you!”
But instead of standing outside with those who were demonstrating for freedom
against a radically repressive ideology, the Secretary of State was inside,
having a friendly meeting with that repressive ideology’s foremost Egyptian
exponent.
It was a telling sign of how quickly America’s international stance has changed
during the regime of Barack Obama. “Things change (at) kind of warp speed,”
Clinton enthused to Morsi during their meeting. Indeed.
If Clinton had any comment on the demonstration, it was not recorded. During
her meeting with Morsi she mouthed platitudes about the new Muslim Brotherhood
government’s looming showdown with the Egyptian military, telling the President
condescendingly that reaching a mutually acceptable agreement “requires
dialogue and compromise, real politics.”
She also assured him that the U.S. would do everything within its power to
“support the democratically elected government and to help make it a success in delivering results
for the people of Egypt.”
It wasn’t immediately clear whether or not by “delivering results for the
people of Egypt,” Clinton was referring to freeing the Blind Sheikh, Omar Abdel
Rahman, mastermind of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and a man who had
plotted to murder Americans in the hundreds of thousands.
Soon after his election, Morsi announced his
determination to work for the Blind Sheikh’s freedom; Clinton was almost
certainly far too polite and determined to hew to the rules of realpolitik to
rebuke Morsi for this unmistakable insult to the United States.
To have done so would have been a completely unexpected reversal of the line
the U.S. has taken since the beginning of the “Arab Spring” uprisings that
paved the way for the Brotherhood to come to power in Egypt.
Nor is Clinton likely to have upbraided Morsi for the implied contravention of
the principles of democracy in his recent restatement before an enthusiastic
crowd of the founding principles of the Muslim Brotherhood:
“The Koran is our constitution, the Prophet is our leader, jihad is our path
and death in the name of Allah is our goal.”
But of course when Morsi finished nodding to Clinton’s platitudes, he no doubt
went back to working on how to begin not making Egypt more democratic, but
imposing Sharia upon it.
After all, recently a Salafi leader, Yasser Borhamy, declared that the Muslim
Brotherhood was planning to implement Sharia as the main source for Egyptian
law. Noting opposition to Sharia in Egypt, Borhamy said:
“What is disturbing in the Islamic Sharia law, is Sharia bothering anyone? We
do not say ‘our views on Sharia,’ but we say that we want the Sharia law
revealed by God. Would anyone be afraid of the Sharia that establishes justice,
[public] interestand wisdom? This is very strange. How is it said
that people are afraid of Sharia?”
By “Sharia law revealed by God,” Borhamy meant the Sharia that stones
adulterers, amputates thieves’ hands, mandates death for apostates from Islam,
and institutionalizes subjugation of women and non-Muslims.
Hardly democratic principles, but Clinton didn’t seem concerned during her
meeting with Morsi. And even the likelihood that Egypt, long a recipient of
American largesse, will become an enemy of America as it throws off the Camp
David Accords and goes to war with Israel is unlikely to shake the entrenched
core assumptions in Washington that got us into this fix.
The Obama Administration rejects, as a matter of repeatedly stated policy, the
idea that Islam has anything to do with terrorism, or warfare against
unbelievers, or the legal subjugation of non-Muslims. An Obama official who
opined that a Muslim Brotherhood regime in Egypt would likely be an enemy of
the United States because of Islam’s core doctrines regarding the evil of the
society of unbelievers would be reprimanded or fired outright for
“Islamophobia.”
And so it fell to the handful of protestors outside the U.S. Embassy, rather
than to Hillary Clinton, to state the obvious truths: that Egypt under the
Muslim Brotherhood regime of Mohamed Morsi will begin to resemble the Islamic
Republic of Pakistan, where Christians live in fear of being accused of
“blasphemy” and either tortured and killed by a raging Muslim mob or arrested
and imprisoned by a thoroughly Islamized law enforcement apparatus; or
Hamas-ruled Gaza, which encourages a culture of rage and hatred toward Israel
and glorifies the murderers of Israeli civilians as heroes.
Even Egyptian journalists have noted with alarm the looming Islamization of the
nation’s media, which would mean the end of the free press.
Israel, meanwhile, is taking necessary steps to defend itself from a country
that has maintained an imperfect but nonetheless real peace with it for thirty
years.
Egypt under the Muslim Brotherhood is virtually certain to be a darker,
bloodier, less hospitable place for women, non-Muslims, and anyone who dares to
stand for a vision of society other than that dictated by Islamic law.
But the only ones who were concerned about all that on Sunday were the
demonstrators outside the Embassy. Hillary Clinton certainly wasn’t.
