Egypt: The Realist Scenario
The image of the “democratic revolution” in Egypt, as constructed by the mainstream media in North America and Europe over the past two weeks, evokes the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe in 1989. The BBC World Service, NPR and other Western media outlets bring us young, articulate, lightly-accented demonstrators who talk of democracy, freedom, human rights and the rule of law. Hosni Mubarak is presented as a latter-day Erich Honecker, heading a corrupt and sclerotic regime on the wrong side of history.
The image is attractive but inaccurate. The unrest may be brought under control by Mubarak’s loyalists working in tandem with the military, or it may lead to one free election resulting in the establishment of an Islamic republic, but it will not produce a Western-style democracy. Political Islam, embodied in the Muslim Brotherhood, is the only well organized force capable of supplanting the regime and the only group with deep popular roots. The Brotherhood has let the secular reformists take the lead in the streets, confident that it will reap the benefits.
President Obama begs to differ. “The Egyptian people want freedom, they want free and fair elections, they want a representative government,” he told Bill O’Reilly in an interview just ahead of the Super Bowl. Downplaying concerns that the Brotherhood could take power and install a government hostile to U.S. interests, Obama described it as “one faction in Egypt” devoid of majority support:
[T]here are a whole bunch of secular folks in Egypt, there are a whole bunch of educators and civil society in Egypt that wants to come to the fore as well. And it’s important for us not the say that our only two options are either the Muslim Brotherhood or a suppressed Egyptian people… What I want a representative government in Egypt. And I have confidence that if Egypt moves in an orderly transition process, that we will have a government in Egypt that we can work with together as a partner.
This statement practically guarantees that the U.S. Administration will continue to mismanage the crisis. Obama’s wishful thinking suits the current strategy of the Brotherhood, which is based on a well established precedent: in 1979 Khomeini’s followers forged a tactical alliance with the reformist opponents of the Shah, only to eliminate them once the job was done. The process was completed in 1981 when Khomeini’s former ally, Iran’s first president Abolhassan Bani Sadr, was impeached and had to flee the country.
The oft-repeated media claim that the Muslim Brotherhood is “moderate,” or likely to become so when burdened with the responsibility of power, is absurd. It is a hard-line group based on a simple credo: Allah is our objective. The Prophet is our leader. Qur’an is our law. Jihad is our way. Dying in the way of Allah is our highest hope. It was founded in 1928 by Hasan al-Banna, an Egyptian school teacher nurtured on Wahhabism, as a revivalist movement explicitly opposed to the ascendancy of secular reformism. It started performing terrorist acts in Egypt, which led to a ban on its activities. An Ikhwani tried to assassinate Egyptian President Nasser in 1954 and four others succeeded in killing his successor Anwar al-Sadat in September 1981. Today the Brotherhood has branches in every traditionally Muslim country and all over the world, including the United States. Some minor regional differences notwithstanding, they all share the same long-term goal: the establishment of a world-wide Islamic state. Its strength was manifested when its candidates were allowed to field candidates as individuals in the 2005 legislative elections. They were able to compete for one-fifth of the seats, and won all of them.
Obama’s implicit treatment of Egypt’s current government as a spent force is short-sighted and detrimental to a stable solution. The regime of Hosni Mubarak has been very good to America. For almost three decades it has honored the peace treaty with Israel signed in 1979 by Mubarak’s slain predecessor Anwar al Sadat. On many occasions, and notably during the Second Intifada, it ignored the pressure of “the Street” and rejected the lure of pan-Arabism. The U.S. Navy has enjoyed privileged access to the Suez Canal—a key consideration in Washington’s overall Middle Eastern strategy—and the Pentagon was free to stage elaborate war games in Egypt’s deserts. Egypt was an active participant in the first Iraqi war in 1991 and a silent American partner in its 2003 sequel. It has provided non-lethal support to the “Allied” effort in Afghanistan. It has shared anti-terrorist intelligence with U.S. agencies at all levels of classification. Unlike Saudi Arabia it was a true “American ally,” one of the few in the Arab world and the most important one of them all.
Mubarak’s Egypt was comparable to Turkey during the Cold War. The regime believed in a firmly guided democracy, mistrustful of “the people’s” ability to decide what was good for them. It was nevertheless eminently liberal in comparison to Saudi Arabia or Libya, as a visitor to Tripoli or Riyadh could attest while recovering from the ordeal at Cairo’s Mena House poolside. It was corrupt—all Arab governments are—but not more so than most. Providing the longest period of relative stability in Egypt’s post-medieval history, the Mubarak regime was unloved but respected at home, and regarded abroad as a key factor of regional stability.
Mubarak faced a formidable challenge of demographics: one-half of Egypt’s 85 million people are under 25, and one-half of young adults are unemployed. Yet steady liberalization of the economic system over the past decade has created millions of real, non-state jobs. Further up the social scale it has produced an entrepreneurial class that now offers more attractive career paths to middle-class youths than the traditional venues of the Army or the civil service. As he turned 80 two years ago, Mubarak thought he could look forward to another term in office after which he’d pass the torch to his son Gamal (47), declare that all’s well, and leave for his favorite foreign country, Germany, for another protracted medical cure.
It was not to be. In January 2009 Barack Obama was inaugurated. One of his major early foreign policy initiatives was to come to Cairo, in June 2009, to deliver a major “speech to the Muslim world.” The Egyptian government was presented with a destabilizing fait accompli. Obama’s address was a strange performance, full of misrepresentations and liberal platitudes on the nature of Islam, on America’s relationship with the Muslim world, and on Islam’s alleged compatibility with Western-style democracy. More significantly for Egypt’s domestic political scene, a dozen members of the Muslim Brotherhood were invited to attend the speech. This happened at the insistence of the U.S. State Department, on the President’s explicit orders, and in spite of the host government’s misgivings. The remarkable spectacle was taken by the Western media as “a clear sign that the Obama administration is willing to publicly challenge Egypt’s commitment to parliamentary democracy.” Mubarak was horrified.
Reminiscent of Jimmy Carter’s public challenge of the Shah 30 years earlier, Obama’s gesture produced similar results. The Brotherhood took it as a signal that Washington was ready to ditch its old ally. As I wrote at the time, Barack Obama, like George W. Bush before him, wanted a democratic transformation of the Middle East regardless of the consequences for the American interest: “the end result would be detrimental to U.S. security: in Egypt and everywhere else in the region. [Mubarak] would be swept from power and the Muslim Brotherhood would turn Egypt into an Islamic Republic, without ever thanking Obama for the favor.”
The unrest in Egypt has already given heart to the upholders of Islamic radicalism all over the region. The decision makers in Teheran and Ankara are pleased, albeit for somewhat different reasons. Iran has long regarded Mubarak’s Egypt as a major obstacle to the establishment of its hegemony in the region, and welcomes its debilitating internal crisis regardless of outcome. Turkey’s ruling Islamists rightly see Mubarak’s regime as a local equivalent of the Kemalist old guard that they have successfully neutralized over the past nine years. Last but not least, Hamas—a Brotherhood branch long hostile to Mubarak—now looks forward to the lifting of the blockade on Gaza’s western border. If this happens Israel will retrench ever more deeply behind its fortified boundaries. “The peace process,” always elusive and currently non-existent, will become impossible.
For the greater part of the 20th century Cairo had led the way in the intellectual quest for an authentically Arab response to the challenge of modernity. Vice President Omar Suleiman should be given a chance to continue that quest by incremental reforms within the framework of a firmly guided democracy. If he fails the Brotherhood will win, and duly condemn as rebellion against Allah’s supremacy the submission to any form of law other than the Shari’a. It is to be hoped that Egypt’s political class and military officers will prevent that outcome regardless of Obama’s expectations and advice.
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Some interesting photos of Egypt's move away from secularism and towards Islamicism at:
http://www.newsrealblog.com/2011/02/01/am-i-the-only-one-troubled-by-cairo-street-scenes/
Of course, these may not be representative of the population as a whole, but still...
"unrest may be brought under control by Mubarak’s loyalists working in tandem with the military, or it may lead to one free election resulting in the establishment of an Islamic republic, but it will not produce a Western-style democracy." Srdja Trifkovic Feb. 2011
"Neoconservatism in foreign policy is best described as unilateral bellicosity cloaked in the utopian rhetoric of freedom and democracy." Joe Klien
"Just be thankful we're not getting all the government we're paying for." Will Rogers
I think the tone of the media, even NPR, has changed - until recently it was a foregone conclusion that Mubarak would resign. I guess the Israeli lobby is doing everything it can, and then some more, to keep Mubarak in power.
Was I the only person sick and tired of reporters' main concern being: are the demonstrators using Facebook or Twitter?
I wonder if it will be a problem that the American administration at the moment is a super-liberal one. by which I mean the White House assumes that liberalism is the truth written in the stars (which was not true of the Clinton WH aside from the Hillary clique), and Obama and Co. are presumably clueless as to the fact that democracy and liberalism are two different things--and that non-liberal democracy is in certain respects superior to liberal democracy--I'm thinking of Singapore. What if the Clueless Ones push Egypt in a liberal direction and end up capsizing democracy there as well?
While trying not to watch the halftime show during the Super Bowl, I was thinking "I hope the Egyptians aren't watching this."
Ah but Madame Clinton assures us that technological innovation has irreversibly propelled Egypt in the direction of democracy. It would be quite amusing if, after pretending to back Mubarak and then dumping him, the administration would find itself on the losing side. And, KDZ, what else do those tech-savy progressive kids want if not a big screen TV on which to watch the Superbowl?
Indeed - among the most pathetic of the Wikileaks was the one entitled "David Letterman: Agent of Influence". It recounted a meeting at a Starbucks in Jeddah, in which the participants discussed how our glorious American popular culture makes the Saudi youth "want to be like us".
I recall one of Dr. Fleming's columns from last year: "Far better they remain Muslims than the secularized ex-Muslims the State Department wishes to create."
Serious question: I've noted that secularism is often promoted even by otherwise right thinking people in Muslim countries, but we decry the same for own countries.
Yet I trust in the judgment of those more learned than I, but is Islam so terrible that the Masonic nationalism of Ataturk or racial nationalism of Naser really the best we can hope for the Muslim world (short of conversion to Christianity)?
Why do I get the nauseating feeling that Washington's solution will be shovelling ever larger amounts of cash into the mid-east rathole?
It may well be the Muslim Brotherhood is well organized to take power in Egypt in any election. But I don't think its correct to believe the ordinary Egyptian is out in the streets because he or she believes President Obama wants them out there protesting for democracy. The Administration itself can't even make up its mind whether Mubarak is dictator or not. I think its a mistake to give too much power or credit to a President of United States, even this President, to make one believe the situation in Egypt is of their choosing (No doubt people in the Bush II Administration belived this too). Rather, I feel the Administration is about as helpless as Gorbachev was in watching the quisling governments of Eastern Europe fall one by one in 1989 because there was nothing they could do about it. If a crackdown came, it would wreck any chance of Gorbachev's planned reforms succeeding, so the Soviets did nothing. Little did they realize by sanctioning these revolutions the same thing was going to happen to them. Likewise, a bloody crackdown in Egypt would only further weaken the U.S given that people know where the tear gas is made and who is paying for the bullets. If it leads to an Egypt which doesn't say "how high?" when the U.S says jump but still minds its own business, who loses other than those who interest it is to see Egypt a military dictatorship (Israel) or an Islamic State (necons, Iran) looking to destroy each other for their own selfish reasons.
Empires crumble and the U.S. empire of foreign aid subsidized satraps in the Middle East is crumbling. The weakening of the U.S. position vis a vie the so-called War on Terror and the economic crisis was bound to have a negative effect on those regimes which based their authority on U.S. prestige and money. It was bound to happen and add on to this a regime led by an old man whose country has millions who are unemployed or underemployed (what better fuel for a revolution than lots of young people with nothing better to do?)with rising food prices and stifling bureaucracy which, like many Third World nations, nickles and dimes the poor and middle classes with its petty tyranny, and you have a situation ripe for revolution.
At the same time, I don't see the demonstrators carrying signs saying they want their womenfolk in burquas or they want all the men to wear beards and they want the kissing police out in force in Cairo's parks. Iranians may not have wanted such things either back in 1979 but we have to remember the clergy in Shiite Islam have always played a governmental role than Sunni ones do and the clergy in Iran had already formulated a vision of an Islamic Republic long before they took power. It was this vision which clashed with the Shah's vision of a modern, westernized state and utlimately led to the power struggle which was called "The Iranian Revolution". It was though Thomas a Becket defeated Henry II. A Muslim Brotherhood government may well be radical but it doesn't means this is the course Egypt wishes to follows, especially the military which has its own interests and perogatives it wishes to defend. It may well be Khomeni fooled the Iranian people (he certainly fooled the technocrats that's for sure) or maybe not. Maybe the Iranian people were searching for that elusive "third way" between capitalism and communism and saw it in Islam. Maybe they saw the Islamic Republic being more beneficial to the poor than the Shah's discos. Or perhaps the superstitious Shiia believed the revolution was preordained by Allah and decided to follow along to bend to his will (which the clergy no doubt exploited). Who knows? Certainly they saw Khomeni as a nationalistic figure determined to free Iran from what they believed was a foreign-backed puppet, especially after Iraq attacked Iran and gave the Islamic Republic which defended the nation the legitimacy it may not have had before then.
Iran is not Egypt and Egypt is not Iran and the Islamic Republic already has a notorious track record it didn't have in 1979. A radicalized Egyptian populace should have been filled Al Qaeda recruits giving their lives for Osama bin Laden and conducting terrorist attacks across the country the past decade and across the Middle East. Some of this has happened but only a few out of a nation of 80 million have answered the call and they have been dealt with. The rest of Al Qaeda has generally turned out to be the spoiled brats of the Arabian Peninsula. If anything has damaged Al Qaeda it's these demonstrations showing Egyptians wanting a future for themselves and their nation rather than a "martyrdom" which takes it away.
This has a way to go and the outcome may surprise. Some useful observations. The protests against the Shah built on progressive "martyrdom" rallies. So far the Egyptian army hasn't fallen into that cycle. There was much more of an "anti-Western" and "anti-Israel" backlash in Iran. The Egyptians do not like Mubarak's perceived alliance with Israel but he hasn't been selling oil and militarily cooperating with them during times of war as the Shah did(1967, 1973). I also get the sense(for what its worth) the Egyptians are more comfortable with foreign influence which would be in line with the histories of the two different nations and cultures. Even the highly nationalistic Nasser brought the Soviets completely in; the Iranian/Persians are much more likely to really repel foreign influence. Educated guess:whatever finally emerges is not going to completely "throw out" the West or at least powerful foreign patrons.To be blunt, starvation trumps the revolutionary fervor in Egypt.Finally, no one is bothering to report what is happening in rural Egypt because it is apparently boring. I'd like to know more about the situation than one square in Cairo. It was the turn of Iran's poor and rural that is the most forgotten aspect of the "Iranian Revolution" and it is their yet loyalty to the current regime that keeps it in power. Until we know how or if the Egyptian villages are going,I'd be a bit reserved on predictions. The only subject this President needs to be loud and clear on is the continued access of the Suez Canal to American shipping no matter who rules in Cairo. But I've given up on his acceptance of the job of President.
Dr. Trifkovic, in an earlier piece you had referred to Hani Shukrullah's "J'accuse", and I remember that editorial pointed out that Wahabbism was "not a part of Egypt's national culture" and was a "Saudi import".
You point out that Wahhabism has been there in Egypt since the 1928 creation of the Muslim Brotherhood. If it has always been there for that long, how can it be, as an Egyptian local says, a foreign import?
Guess my trip to Egypt is canceled.
@ 9 sean scallon wrote:
<<>>
The demonstrators may not be carrying signs wanting their women in burquas or the men wearing beards, but the media would never show such signs. The bow of prayer taking place in Tahrir Square is telling enough.
<<<>>>
The Muslim Brotherhood could care less about the wishes of the Egyptian people. They only care about expanding and filling the vacuum of a starving, jobless, and meek population in order to institute a Theocracy. The Egyptian Constitution strictly states that NO organization is allowed to run for office on the premise of any religion. Given that the Muslim Brotherhood gained (I believe it was 80 Parlimentary seats) in the last election, why should they care about a Constitution or will of the people? So much for an American President advocating the rule of law by personally meeting with them. Nice.
Iran is no different. They are already working behind the scenes (quiet is their nature) to undermine any Western efforts (technically, Iran doesn't have to even break a sweat here), and assist the Muslim Brotherhood. Lebanon is a perfect example of what will transpire. Iran filled the vacuum by proxy (Hezbollah) to deliver food, water, medical care, and education to a destitute population. They were deemed the savior. Egypt will be no different. The longer the people starve; the better chance for an Islamic Republic.
@10 L. Howard
Peace, water, food, and safe surroundings are the characteristics of rural Egypt, which is exactly why it is “boring” to the media.
Over the past several weeks, I’ve listened to self-professed expert commentators claim that the Muslims and Christians are arm-in-arm against this regime and want change. They can come down from la-la land anytime. After a horrendous battle, my neighbor just returned from Cairo. Took him four hours to get from his Cairo home to the airport. While traveling from his home to the airport, he was CHARGED to move from block-to-block by guess who? Muslims! All because he was Christian. His family is stuck in a house without enough food and water. Even if food was available, their family members can’t eat because of nerves. The men of the family camp outside (in shifts) with pipes to protect their wives and little ones from the scum walking the streets.
Besides family residing in Cairo (a complete mess), they also have family about an hour outside of Cairo (relatively peaceful), and in Alexandria (mess . . . an average of $200! for a Christian to walk from block-to-block in Alexandria).
*Divine intervention* is the only thing that will save Egypt. Best guess: They know that the probability of seeing their family in the future is slim, moreover, void.
The media and our government aid and abet these terrorists and they can go pound salt in hell for eternity.
(Sorry about the previous post; posting again. I think I typed a character to distort html).
Guess my trip to Egypt is canceled.
@ 9 sean scallon wrote:
**The demonstrators may not be carrying signs wanting their women in burquas or the men wearing beards, but the media would never show such signs. The bow of prayer taking place in Tahrir Square is telling enough.**
The Muslim Brotherhood could care less about the wishes of the Egyptian people. They only care about expanding and filling the vacuum of a starving, jobless, and meek population in order to institute a Theocracy. The Egyptian Constitution strictly states that NO organization is allowed to run for office on the premise of any religion. Given that the Muslim Brotherhood gained (I believe it was 80 Parlimentary seats) in the last election, why should they care about a Constitution or will of the people? So much for an American President advocating the rule of law by personally meeting with them. Nice.
Iran is no different. They are already working behind the scenes (quiet is their nature) to undermine any Western efforts (technically, Iran doesn’t have to even break a sweat here), and assist the Muslim Brotherhood. Lebanon is a perfect example of what will transpire. Iran filled the vacuum by proxy (Hezbollah) to deliver food, water, medical care, and education to a destitute population. They were deemed the savior. Egypt will be no different. The longer the people starve; the better chance for an Islamic Republic.
@10 L. Howard
Peace, water, food, and safe surroundings are the characteristics of rural Egypt, which is exactly why it is “boring” to the media.
Over the past several weeks, I’ve listened to self-professed expert commentators claim that the Muslims and Christians are arm-in-arm against this regime and want change. They can come down from la-la land anytime. After a horrendous battle, my neighbor just returned from Cairo. Took him four hours to get from his Cairo home to the airport. While traveling from his home to the airport, he was CHARGED to move from block-to-block by guess who? Muslims! All because he was Christian. His family is stuck in a house without enough food and water. Even if food was available, their family members can’t eat because of nerves. The men of the family camp outside (in shifts) with pipes to protect their wives and little ones from the scum walking the streets.
Besides family residing in Cairo (a complete mess), they also have family about an hour outside of Cairo (relatively peaceful), and in Alexandria (mess . . . an average of $200! for a Christian to walk from block-to-block in Alexandria).
*Divine intervention* is the only thing that will save Egypt. Best guess: They know that the probability of seeing their family in the future is slim, moreover, void.
The media and our government aid and abet these terrorists and they can go pound salt in hell for eternity.
Only 80 years ago one of our own reflective historians wrote;
"The story must not be neglected by any modern, who may think in error that the East has finally fallen before the West, that Islam is now enslaved — to our political and economic power at any rate if not to our philosophy. It is not so. Islam essentially survives, and Islam would not have survived had the Crusade made good its hold upon the essential point of Damascus. Islam survives. Its religion is intact; therefore its material strength may return. Our religion is in peril, and who can be confident in the continued skill, let alone the continued obedience, of those who make and work our machines? There is with us a complete chaos in religious doctrine We worship ourselves, we worship the nation; or we worship a particular economic arrangement believed to be the satisfaction of social justice Islam has not suffered this spiritual decline; and in the contrast between [our religious chaos and Islam's] religious certitudes still strong throughout the Mohammedan world lies our peril. That Mohammedan culture happens to have fallen back in material applications; there is no reason whatever why it should not learn its new lesson and become our equal in all those temporal things which now alone give us our superiority over it — whereas in Faith we have fallen inferior to it."
My guess Robert #14 that you are quoting a passage of one of Hilaire Belloc writings.
My old classics professor would often hand out poems without the name of the authors so that students would look for the truth of the matter instead of the prejudice or pre-judgement of the critic.
What T.S. Elliot observed in
"For I have known them all already, known them all:—
Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons, 50
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;
I know the voices dying with a dying fall
Beneath the music from a farther room.
So how should I presume?
And I have known the eyes already, known them all— 55
The eyes that fix you
When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall,
Then how should I begin
To spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways? 60
And how should I presume?
Or as Ben Hogan once said to an aspiring young golfer who wanted the secrets of a "good swing" --- " Dig it out of the dirt like I did!" Or when Frost told the aspiring young poet who wanted to know how to become a "great poet" --- " Get up and make your bed every morning!" Life is meant to be lived and reflected upon and contemplated not:
"in a formulated phrase,
And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin."
Find it yourself, my friend.
Re. MB & Wahhabism: Banna was upset by the 1927 the Treaty of Jeddah and the House of Saud's readiness to do business with the West, esp. after the discovery of oil in the region. While undeniably inspired by Wahhabism he nevertheless distrusted the Saudi royal kleptocrats and sought to give the MB a distinct local flavor. Cf.
http://www.southasiaanalysis.org/%5Cpapers36%5Cpaper3571.html
@5 Dr.Fleming said: Ah but Madame Clinton assures us that technological innovation has irreversibly propelled Egypt in the direction of democracy.
Recently a would-be female suicide bomber in Russia was propelled to Paradise when her vest exploded prematurely. The cause? The cell phone used to trigger the device answered a spam text. Seems they are not savvy enough to know about the no-call list.
Dr. Trifkovic,
It was nice to watch you interpret (at times between more than two languages):
http://www.rtrs.tv/av/player.php?id=2138&x=1
Shome mishtake shurely...
Sorry folks, but if the Egyptians want an Islamic Republic, I say good for them. Let's get real for a change. The West is spiritually bankrupt, nothing more than a dead husk or Potemkin Village of its former self. The Muslims are winning not because they are trying to bury us, but because we are burying ourselves with our own embrace of secularism and the hypocrisy that goes along with it. Christianity nowadays is nothing more than a quasi form of New Age religion that focuses on feeling good by abusing the whole grace concept, meaning there isn't much need to repent. Someone once said a religion without vices is a dead religion, well I give you Christianity. The only religion in the world that seems to actually stand for something is Islam. Not saying I am going to convert to Islam anytime soon, but for the most part Christianity no longer exists in the form that the Lord had intended. In both East and West, Christians have been caught in the vice of the two pincers of secularism: Corporatism in the West and Communism in the East. Now it is morphing into just plain corporatism with some socialist leanings. What I am saying in essence is that you can't blame Islam for trying to fill a spiritual void that is happening with the spiritual suicide of Christianity.
If Christianity dies, it will be more due to the state of the relgion itself more than anything Islam could do on its own. Besides, all you have to do is beam MTV, etc, long enough to get the kids wanting sex, drugs, and rock n roll. It seems to have worked for the most part with Iranian youth, why not with the rest of the kids in the ME. In 20 years time I predict that the people in the ME will be just as secular and jaded as we in the West, if not sooner.
Mr. Bruce makes a series of unverified assumptions, e.g., that the Egyptian people want an Islamic republic, that Muslims constitute no threat to us because we are already destroying ourselves, that Christianity is committing suicide and does not need to fear Islam, and that western pop culture will destroy Islamic cultures as it has destroyed the West. It would be nice to be able to believe that such sweeping generals were a form of "getting real," but they are the opposite. A man may be dying a slow death from lung cancer but still resent a bullet in the brain; a religion may suffer from corruption without being dead; and counter-movements may break out in the midst of revolutions without necessarily stopping the revolution. Getting real should involve some recognition of the simple reality that Islam and its leaders have regarded Christianity and the Christian West as an enemy to be destroyed or subjugated. It would also require an abandonment of democratic fantasies about "the people" and what the people wants; and, finally, it would push us in the direction of a foreign policy rooted in the twin principles of justice and national interest. What those interests are in Egypt is a subject worthy of debate, but it is foolish to pretend that we have no interests in the Middle East.
For some indication of Egyptians' attitudes, check out
http://washingtonexaminer.com/politics/2011/01/egypts-conflicting-views-democracy-and-religion
Well, 84 percent favor the death penalty for Muslims who leave their religion, but in another survey Pew found that 90 percent say they believe in “freedom of religion.” The problem is evidently in the definition of “freedom.” For a Muslim it is a variant of Marx’s definition of freedom as “the consciousness of necessity.”
In the same vein, a majority of Egyptians think democracy is “preferable to any other kind of government,” but when asked whether they prefer modernizers or Islamic fundamentalists, 59 percent chose the fundamentalists, and fewer than one-half of that number, 27 percent, picked the modernizers.
54 percent support legally mandating segregation of men and women in the workplace.
54 percent believe suicide bombing is justified under certain conditions.
82 percent supported stoning for those who commit adultery.
The Pew 2010 report found that 82 percent of Egyptians hold an unfavorable view of the United States. That's higher than in Pakistan or Jordan.
Since Pat Buchanan's observation, it is difficult to fight a great religion with no religion, our experiment in the ME, seems to prove his thesis. As Dr'Fleming notes religion may suffer from corruption without being dead; and counter-movements may break out in the midst of revolutions, '
The theology that is keeping us in the game at this time is the Christian obligation to Israel and her Chosen people.One can debate the truth or falsity of this obligation,real and imagined. BUT, without this perception, I doubt we would be doing much with Moslem countries besides purchasing their oil and trying to make a buck off their corrupt leaders.
#24
I have started wondering what a "moderate" Muslim really is.
Oh, I don't doubt they exist. I don't doubt they dislike some of the demanding and harsh tenets of their faith. But that probably does not mean they don't harbour the same prejudices and bigotry that other Muslims or other people in general are capable of harbouring.
Supposedly, a moderate Muslim may dislike a few mullahs, but he may dislike Christians, Jews, and other ethnicities just as much or even more. Some Egyptian commentators have said so about their fellow moderate Muslim friends. Various Pakistani journalists keep highlighting that moderate Muslims in Pakistan are still dangerous in their own right.
Dr. Trifkovic, perhaps you know this - the slain Salman Taseer of Pakistan since youth belonged to the Pakistan People's Party, which currently claims to be secular, but was the very first party to install blasphemy laws in Pakistan in the 1960s LONG before Zia Ul Haq? Many lifelong members of PPP claim to be secular even now, but it was these very people who 40 years ago began the first Islamisation of Pakistan.
Mr. Bruce, it is not only Christianity that faces the threat of spreading Islam. You may consider the West to be spiritually broken but millions of others, who find themselves in the path of Islam, would probably beg to differ. Recently Christians in Pakistan, Afganistan, Iran, Indonesia, Thailand, and even Java face death for their belief. Not to mention pious Buddists, Hindus, Sikhs, Bahai's et.al., who are also in the sights of expansionist Islam. If there is a vacuum that will be filled by belligerent Muslims among these groups it not because they are lacking in belief.
SB,
Just to be clear: the Copts don't like Mubarak. This revolution might have been a mistake, but Mubarak wasn't liked by them.
Dr. Fleming or Dr. Trifkovic,
would the US state likely act in your interests on this matter? I'm inclined to think that even if the US gov wanted to promote something in "our" interests, the US gov would botch it up.
@ 28 frank2
Let's be clear that I never made that claim. In fact, they despise Mubarek as much as the M.B. The Copts lose no matter what may transpire.
SB,
I didn't intentionally misrepresent you, but you said: "Over the past several weeks, I’ve listened to self-professed expert commentators claim that the Muslims and Christians are arm-in-arm against this regime and want change."
And yet Christians are involved in the protests, even if discriminated against still.
They lose either way, but at least going by the US Copts website, some have chosen to risk going against Mubarek. I've got nothing more than a website to go on; and if I'd learned from history, I'd suspect it was owned and managed by neocons...
It sounds like you have some real knowledge on matters there though.