Death of Democracy in Egypt — and Silence in Washington
Just over a week ago, Egyptian president Mohamed Morsi effectively precipitated a palace coup. He sacked his top intelligence chief, the country’s military leadership, and other key members of the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) in the space of five days. A constitutional document limiting his powers was largely scrapped. Meanwhile, the Obama administration deliberately ignores the unfolding debacle, a monster of its own creation, and forges ahead with a policy completely contrary to American security interests. “We had expected President Morsi at some point to co-ordinate changes in the military leadership, to name a new team,” said George Little, the Pentagon press secretary. “The United States…look[s] forward to continuing a very close relationship with the SCAF.”
The ostensible basis of that very close relationship was initially illuminated by the Washington’s Post’s David Igantius, who contended that one of the reasons Obama administration officials “appear to have confidence” in what has occurred is because Egypt’s newly appointed defense minister, Gen. Abdel Fattah al-Sissi, had “extensive contact with United States in his previous post as head of military intelligence,” and because “he spent a year of professional training in the United States.”
National Review’s Andrew McCarthy reveals the nonsense behind such an assessment, noting that even the Wall Street Journal, which he describes as “stuck on the democracy project dogma,” was forced to admit that al-Sissi “has a broad reputation within military circles as a Muslim Brotherhood sympathizer.” The same WSJ article encapsulates the administration’s dogmatic thinking as well, noting that “U.S. officials expressed confidence that Gen. Sissi will maintain close ties with the U.S., which provides Egypt with $1.3 billion a year in military aid, and uphold Egypt’s peace deal with Israel.”
Al-Sissi is hardly an anomaly. As the New York Times discovered (no doubt, much to their chagrin), the Egyptian military’s new chief of staff, Gen. Sedky Sobhi, wrote a paper seven years ago, while attending the United States Army War College in Pennsylvania as a student. In it he argued that the United States’s presence in the Middle East, along with its “one sided” support of Israel, was fueling hatred and miring the U.S. in an “unwinnable global war” with Islamist militants. Sobhi further contended that it was wrong to characterize Al Qaeda and other militant groups as merely “irrational terrorist organizations.” “I recommend that the permanent withdrawal of United States military forces from the Middle East and the Gulf should be a goal of U.S. strategy in this region,” he wrote, adding that the United States should pursue its objectives through “socioeconomic means and the impartial application of international law.”
An unnamed Obama administration official, speaking anonymously so as not to upset American/Egyptian relations, blithely dismissed Sobhi’s writings. “A lot of academic theses offer up interesting ideas that don’t go very far, and often end up as shelf ware,” he said. “This isn’t exactly causing concern. We believe we will work well with the new Egyptian military leaders.”
The Times reiterated the administration’s contention that “American officials said their confidence in Egypt was unshaken”–even as they noted that Samer Shehata, a professor of Arab politics at Georgetown University, considers it “naive” for American officials to think that positions held by Mr. Morsi and the Brotherhood represent “fringe thinking.” Shehata further insisted that the Brotherhood’s ideology is tantamount to “the Egyptian Kansas,” in that its foreign policy positions “reflect rather than oppose what the Egyptian center is thinking.”
The cold reality of that so-called centrist thinking was revealed late last week by Jewish newspaper Algemeiner, which reported that Muslim Brotherhood supporters terrorized secular media members, including several Arabic websites, such as Arab News, Al Khabar News, Dostor Watany, and Egypt Now, because they all reported that people opposed to the Morsi regime were being “crucified.” A translated excerpt of the violence reads as follows:
A Sky News Arabic correspondent in Cairo confirmed that protestors belonging to the Muslim Brotherhood crucified those opposing Egyptian President Muhammad Morsi naked on trees in front of the presidential palace while abusing others. Likewise, Muslim Brotherhood supporters locked the doors of the media production facilities of 6-October [a major media region in Cairo], where they proceeded to attack several popular journalists.Muslim cleric Hashem Islam Ali Islam, one of Egypt’s top religious leaders, not only refused to apologize for these atrocities, he endorsed them. Characterizing a protest against the regime scheduled to take place on August 24th as an “apostasy against democracy and freedom,” he issued a fatwa urging the Egyptian people to confront these people, and “if they fight you fight them.” He continued: “If some of you are killed by them, you will go to Paradise, and if you kill them, no ‘blood money’ will be warranted, because their killing is permissible.” Hashem Islam’s advocation of violence is nothing new. In a statement virtually ignored by Western media, he also called Islamic martyrdom against Jews “a religious duty.”
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