This craven gesture is not only an affront to freedom of speech, and to freedom of thought itself, but it is also shamefully muddle-headed: Islam is of course not a “race”, but is rather an infectious package of ideas and ideology capable of taking any human brain, of any race whatsoever, as a host and vector.

While we busy ourselves confiscating toothpaste and strip-searching incontinent great-grandmothers, the real jihad — the non-violent conquest of the West — proceeds apace. And we’re glad to lend a hand.

Even though Egypt’s newly elected political leaders have now consolidated their parliamentary power in the wake of last year’s exhilarating “Facebook revolution”, their chief ideologist Yusuf al-Qaradawi (last mentioned in these pages here and here) realizes nevertheless that the long-overdue reforms his homeland yearns for will take time to implement, and must be phased in gradually.

Patience! It may be several years, for example, before there can be any chopping off of hands.

Learn more here.

The ‘crux of the biscuit’ is this question: Do Western normative principles appeal to universal longings, and are therefore universally applicable across all peoples and cultures? Both liberal muticulturalists and neoconservative nation-builders seem to agree that they are.

Our commenter ‘The One-Eyed Man’ summed up with this:

…I do think that the principles in the Declaration of Independence are universal, applying to Muslims equally to Christians and everyone else.

This is a commonly held view, but with particular regard to Islam, it’s a fundamental error, of critical importance. I’ll try to explain.

As much as it may be fashionable (especially among unbelievers like me) to downplay the significance of religion in America’s founding, the Declaration of Independence explicitly expresses a Judeo-Christian understanding of the nature of God, and of God’s relationship with human beings. It clearly declares this understanding in its most famous passage:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights…

The central argument of the Declaration of Independence is that the Crown, having repeatedly infringed on the rights of its American colonists, has voided its claim to sovereignty over them. So: what does it mean for men to possess inalienable rights granted to them by God, and how is this belief distinctly Judeo-Christian?

First, this assertion reflects the belief that a loving God grants these rights as part of His covenant with mankind — a covenant made first with the Jews, and then extended to the rest of humanity by Jesus Christ. Central to both is the idea of a loving God who, loving all men as individuals, directly grants each of them the assurance of His protection. The Declaration explicitly places this direct, individual assurance from God above any earthly institution’s power to abrogate.

But the idea of a loving Creator with whom mere humans may enter into this sort of personal covenant is directly at odds with the Islamic concept of God. The Islamic God Allah is perfect, transcendent, and aloof; the idea of Allah deigning to “love” a mere human is absurd, and indeed the thought is offensive to God’s majesty. The great Islamic theologian and philosopher Abu Hāmed Mohammad ibn Mohammad al-Ghazzālī, who died in 1111 but remains probably the most influential Islamic theorist of all time, argued against this by pointing out that love implies a need, an incompleteness, on the part of the lover that can only be fulfilled by the beloved. But God is perfect, continued Ghazzali, and complete unto Himself — so the idea that He might have a longing that can only be fulfilled by reciprocal love with mortal men is an abomination, as is the notion that He would enter into an equal partnership with anyone or anything at all.

This brings us to a second point: the very idea of an irrevocable covenant, as implicit in the concept of inalienable rights, necessarily implies a limitation of God’s sovereignty: for God to make an unbreakable promise necessarily limits God’s freedom of action. But the divine Will and infinite potency of God obviously can permit no such limitation — again, the very idea is an offense and an abomination.

Furthermore, the Declaration of Independence is a product of the philosophy of the Enlightenment, which in turn has at its foundation the idea of a lawful natural world. This concept also reflects the Judeo-Christian assumption of a loving God: one who, having endowed Man with the gift of reason, provided a world that operated without caprice, and that was subject to reliable regularities that human reason could comprehend. But again, this idea of a lawful Cosmos necessarily limits the freedom and sovereignty of God. Indeed al-Ghazali went so far as to say that because God’s power is infinite, His moment-by-moment attention to the world’s every minutest detail is what maintains the world’s seeming regularities, and the appearance of lawful connections between observed causes and effects is merely an illusion. If drinking water seems to alleviate thirst, it is only because God, on each occasion, has chosen to follow our drinking of water with the relief of thirst. But to imply that God’s choice in the workings of His creation is constrained by natural laws is again to suggest that God’s sovereignty is limited, and is again an abomination.

Finally, there is the Islamic concept of tawhid, or the unity of God. This idea was developed extensively by Taqi al-Din Ibn Taymiyya, a medieval Salafist whose teachings still exert great influence. In his widely read paper A Genealogy of Radical Islam, Quintan Wiktorowicz explained (emphasis mine):

One of Ibn Taymiyya’s most important contributions to Salafi thought is his elaboration of the concept of tawhid — the unity of God. He divided the unity of God into two categories: the unity of lordship and the unity of worship. The former refers to belief in God as the sole sovereign and creator of the universe. All Muslims readily accept this. The second is affirmation of God as the only object of worship and obedience. Ibn Taymiyya reasoned that this latter component of divine unity necessitates following God’s laws. The use of human-made laws is tantamount to obeying or worshipping other than God and thus apostasy. [20th-century Muslim theologian Mawlana Abul A’la] Mawdudi adopted this position and drew a sharp bifurcation between the “party of God” and the “party of Satan,” which included Muslims who adhered to human-made law.

This idea, which is very much a part of mainstream Islamic thought throughout the world, raises an impassable barrier between Islam and the Judeo-Christian tradition of a distinction between divine and worldly law — the root of America’s founding principle of a separation of Church and state.

There is much more I could say about all of this, but it’s late, and this post is already long enough. I hope, however, that I have shown that it is a mistake, and betrays a dangerously superficial acquaintance with core Islamic doctrine, to imagine that bedrock American principles — in particular those Enlightenment principles expressed by Jefferson in our Declaration of Independence — apply as aptly to serious Muslims as they do to those of us raised in the Western religious and cultural tradition.

The Muslim Brotherhood (or “Ikhwan”) differs from militant Islamist factions like al-Qaeda not in its goals, which are more or less the same, but only in its strategy: it has no moral or philosophical aversion to violent jihad, but considers it unnecessarily provocative, and therefore counterproductive. As such, it can make an ostentatious public display of distancing itself from terrorism, and so it is embraced by gullible Westerners — for whom the only imaginable threat from Islam is terrorist violence — as a “moderate” Muslim organization to be supported and embraced. This suits the Ikwhan, whose avowed strategy is to sabotage secular democratic societies from within, just fine.

The Obama administration, however, which has made “outreach” to the Muslim world a priority (even going so far as to make NASA’s “foremost” mission helping Muslims “feel good about their historic contribution to science and math and engineering”) clearly feels the the Muslim Brotherhood is an outfit it can do business with. We should not be surprised to see — in fact we should be astonished not to see — the Ikwhan seizing the opportunity now taking shape in Cairo, for which it has worked and waited so long. We should also not be surprised to learn that they will do so with the overt or covert support of the United States: so broad is the Brotherhood’s influence in Egypt that it is almost unimaginable that they will not take the reins, and you can be sure that Foggy Bottom and the Oval Office have already made the appropriate calculations.

For my trouble, I was berated in the comment thread for having made, under the bewitchment of “confirmation bias”, an assertion that was “unsupported by fact” and unable to “withstand even the slightest amount of scrutiny”.

A lively eleven months have passed since then, and we have yet to see any flowering of secular Jeffersonian democracy in the region, despite the lavish and effervescent optimism with which the initial disturbances were greeted by most observers here in the West. As was suggested at the time by those of us who have rather less faith in the universal appeal of Western ways, and a more sober understanding of the history of the area and its people, the likeliest outcome of these populist upheavals would be a transition to Islamic governance, with a concomitant erosion of Western interests in the region, and deepening existential peril for Israel.

Now, as Andrew McCarthy notes here, The Hindu reports that the Obama administration has turned to none other than Yusuf al-Qaradawi — the Muslim Brotherhood’s principal ideological theorist and dawa-jihad strategist — to negotiate the terms of our accommodation with the Taliban.

More confirmation bias, no doubt (after all, it’s just the Hindu, not the New York Times). We’ll just have to see.

Her crime, if you haven’t followed the case, was to comment disapprovingly on Mohammed’s deflowering of his nine-year-old wife Aisha.

Well, tolerance is paramount in a decent society, I guess.

Meanwhile, Christmas masses have been canceled in Iraq due to fears of anti-Christian violence.

First: you may have heard about the kerfuffle that arose recently when the home-improvement chain Lowe’s decided to yank its sponsorship of the “anti-Islamophobic” television series All-American-Muslim. (Dozens of other sponsors soon joined them; all are now predictably being tarred as “racists” by the ummah‘s useful idiots on the Left, although opposition to the spread of Islam in the West has nothing whatsoever to do with race, and everything to do with a perfectly sensible wariness toward a totalitarian, intolerant, and virulent ideology.) Robert Spencer comments here.

Also: what with the recent persecutions of Geert Wilders, Elisabeth Sabaditch-Wolff, and Lars Hedegaard, the witch-hunt for “instigators” following the Anders Breivik rampage (which has made the Norwegian writer Fjordman’s life a living hell), the imprisonment of (the admittedly loutish) Emma West, and the stifling effect of Europe’s incremental dhimmitude on free speech in general, it should be no surprise that the OIC, the global organizing body for dawa jihad, is feeling its oats these days — and has its eye on that last bastion of free expression, the United States.

With that in mind, Clare Lopez at American Thinker has had her eye on a meeting, now presumably concluded, between OIC and our Secretary of State. Read her substantial article here.

Early Results in Egypt Show a Mandate for Islamists

Seems to me there was somebody who saw this coming almost a year ago, even before the Times started writing things like “We can think of no better rebuttal to Osama bin Laden and other extremists.” Back around January 28th, I think it was. Wish I could remember.

The older I get, the more it amazes me how persistently people expect things to go well, even when there are other people involved.

It’s a substantive exchange, and worth your time. While I agree in principle with Mr. McCarthy’s point — that there are certainly, particularly here in the West, many self-professed Muslims who are not politically “Islamist”, and therefore the term is a useful one — the fact remains that a supremacist interpretation of Islam flows coherently, naturally, and persuasively from Muslim scripture and tradition, has been the “mainstream” interpretation throughout history, and continues to be so now. Wherever Islam goes, there will be “Islamism”.

Read the McCarthy piece here, then Robert Spencer’s reply here.

Note: I realize, of course, that to some of you this exchange will just seem like two black-hearted xenophobes arguing about how many jihadis can dance on the head of a pin. Feel free not to comment.

[A] throng of seething Islamists stripped, beat, paraded, and finally shot Qaddafi execution-style, all the while screaming the signature “Allahu Akbar!” battle cry with a fervor that would have made Mohamed Atta blush. They then shoved the despot’s corpse into a refrigerator — to maintain it for further triumphant display before thousands of gawking spectators. Too bad there was no official from the Obama administration’s Islamic Thought Police on hand to remind the mob of the Koran’s oft-quoted (but oftener ignored) teaching that to slay a single person is to slay all of mankind.

The murder was facilitated by NATO forces operating under false pretenses: Claiming they were merely protecting civilians, they set about hunting down Qaddafi, only to help usher in a new era of Islamist governance. The bill for NATO’s services was willfully footed by the Obama administration — which had previously funded the Libyan regime on the oft-repeated grounds that Qaddafi was a valuable counterterrorism ally, but which then initiated a war against Qaddafi in the absence of any provocation or American national-security interests. NATO’s war of aggression is already inuring to the benefit of America’s Islamist enemies. What’s not to celebrate?

More here.

It would be interesting to get Mr. McCarthy in a room with James Taranto, who a couple of days ago wrote this:

Writing on Commentary’s website, Max Boot has a useful corrective to some of the distraught commentary you’ve probably been hearing of late about the rise of Shariah in North Africa in the wake of the Arab Spring:

“Saying a country’s legal system will be based on sharia law is about as descriptive as saying it will be based on the Ten Commandants [sic] or the teachings of Christ. Like Christianity, Judaism or any other religion, Islam is subject to countless interpretations. Sharia law has meant many different things in many different countries across the ages. Even Islamic fundamentalists are not all alike. Wahhabis rule in both Saudi Arabia and Bahrain, yet liquor is readily available in the latter but not the former.
Islamist parties do not necessarily take their inspiration from the Taliban, Hamas, or the Iranian mullahs. In fact, the failure of all three of those Islamist regimes–in Afghanistan, Gaza and Iran–to deliver economic or social progress has done much to discredit them in the Muslim world. That doesn’t mean most Muslims are ready to embrace a strictly secular regime; but then even in Europe, Christian Democratic parties are common, and in the United States many political candidates claim to take their marching orders from the Almighty.”

It’s also worth noting that a regime can be “strictly secular” and also horrifically oppressive, as Justice Antonin Scalia noted earlier this month in testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee:

” “I ask [law students], “Why do you think America is such a free country? What is it in our Constitution that makes us what we are?” And I guarantee you that the response I will get–and you will get this from almost any American . . . the answer would be: freedom of speech; freedom of the press; no unreasonable searches and seizures; no quartering of troops in homes . . . those marvelous provisions of the Bill of Rights.
But then I tell them, “If you think a bill of rights is what sets us apart, you’re crazy.” Every banana republic in the world has a bill of rights. Every president for life has a bill of rights. The bill of rights of the former evil empire, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, was much better than ours. I mean it. Literally, it was much better. We guarantee freedom of speech and of the press. Big deal. They guaranteed freedom of speech, of the press, of street demonstrations and protests, and anyone who is caught trying to suppress criticism of the government will be called to account. Whoa, that is wonderful stuff!
Of course, it’s just words on paper, what our Framers would have called a “parchment guarantee.” “

We are far from confident that the democratic experiment in the Arab world is going to work out well. But if you start telling us that Libya is sure to be worse off than it was under Moammar Gadhafi, merely because he was “secular,” we will take you about as seriously as we took people who said the same about Iraq and Saddam Hussein.

While I certainly share Mr. Taranto’s lack of confidence that the democratic experiment in the Arab world is going to work out well, he misses the point here, I think. First, nobody is suggesting that secular regimes can’t be authoritarian. This is a non sequitur; of course they can. (I wonder also exactly what argument he seeks to advance by citing Justice Scalia’s remarks, which seem clearly to say that a nation’s freedom depends on the nature and temperament of its people — certainly true, but the precedent in the Maghreb, then, is not encouraging.) The point is that there is every reason to worry that a new Islamist regime in Libya will be a far worse problem for Western interests in the region (and, in particular, for Israel) than the continuation of a Qaddafi regime would have been. Mr. Qaddafi was despicable, and in his day fought actively against us, but in recent years he had been brought to heel, and had been given our assurances that as long as he behaved, he needn’t worry about U.S. interference.

As for Mr. Boot, the same applies: that he can buy a drink in Bahrain is no cause for optimism about the emerging Islamist powers in the area. They have replaced durable autocracies with whom we had stable working relationships, are tied to al-Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood, and will almost certainly become hothouses for all manner of anti-Western, anti-Israeli perfidy. Already Libyan weapons are flooding toward Israel through Egypt (where their safe passage is possible once again thanks to the ouster of Hosni Mubarak, also with U.S. support). It isn’t necessary for Islamist regimes to “take their inspiration from the Taliban, Hamas, or the Iranian mullahs” to be antipathetic to our interests in the region and the world, though some of the new ones likely will. For them to take their inspiration from the core traditions and historical example of Islam itself, and from the prevailing sentiments of the regional ummah, will be amply sufficient.

People tell me I’m too pessimistic about all of this. I hope they’re right. We’ll soon see.

Vlad Tepes has a video clip, with translated subtitles, here.

I often criticize president Obama, but I’ll gladly give him praise and credit for this, and for having steadfastly maintained the pressure on al-Qaeda throughout his term in office. The same also, of course, to the CIA and the other forces involved.

Many will cavil at the killing of an American citizen in this way (although even the ACLU gave up on this one). I think it provides an opportunity to reflect on the difference between being a citizen of a state, and membership in a nation.

Story here.

Afghanistan: Special comment: The details of the five-hour complex attack in Kabul have been reported all day. An extremely knowledgeable, well-informed and brilliant Reader provided feedback that most of the news coverage is factually wrong, but NightWatch will provide more details as its sources clarify them.

Particularly misleading among the media comments are those that posit that the Taliban sent a signal or that the attack is part of the propaganda struggle. Those comments trivialize the Taliban achievement of destroying the security bubble associated with the most sensitive Coalition buildings in Kabul.

The media comments are comparable to describing the 1968 Tet offensive in South Vietnam as a tactical failure. That statement is accurate, but it is simply irrelevant. The Tet offensive in South Vietnam won the political and psychological war. It was a strategic victory, enabled by the military sacrifices..

Three major Taliban attacks have taken place in Kabul this summer. To characterize them as part of a public relations contest or signal-sending is to miss the point entirely. One such attack is a perhaps good fortune. A second might have been a coincidence, but three is a strategic trend.

Violent instability is always centripetal – it seeks the center of power. The images of the Coalition and Afghan forces fighting to defend themselves in Kabul mean the insurgency has reached the center of power. The small casualty count only means that the Taliban cannot yet seize power in Kabul. But if the Coalition were winning, these attacks should never have taken place at all. Kabul of all places should be kept secure, if the lessons of Tet 1968 had been learned.

The attacks signify that the Taliban have crossed a strategic threshold. The Afghans know the Coalition cannot guarantee their protection because the Coalition cannot be confident of its ability to protect its own soldiers and complexes. It does no lasting good to keep Helmand Province secure for a while, but repeatedly suffer these kinds of attacks in Kabul.

On that black day ten years ago, Nina and I stood on the roof of our Brooklyn home and watched the towers burn, and fall. Our daughter, now in her twenties, was in school at Stuyvesant High, just a couple of blocks from the doomed buildings; we didn’t know until that evening whether she was alive or dead. Our city was shattered, stricken, numb with grief and horror. I lost no family members or close friends, but everybody — everybody — knew someone who had. The awful shock jolted me, as it did so many others, from a comfortable complacence about the security of Western civilization to acute concern, and led me to a decade-long study of Islam, and of the history of the ancient conflict of which this was just the latest engagement.

9/11 was, I think, the most significant historical event of my lifetime. But given the Niagara of commentary leading up to this anniversary — the airwaves and print media have occupied themselves with little else for weeks now, it seems — I haven’t much to add. I will, however, direct you to a retrospective analysis, by STRATFOR’s George Friedman, of the past ten years of the resulting “War On Terror”.

Friedman notes that the security challenge facing the US after 9/11 was of a new kind, and that no traditional framework existed for coping with it:

This particular war — the one that began on 9/11 and swept into Afghanistan, Iraq and other countries — is hard to second-guess because there are those who do not think it is a war. Some people, including President George W. Bush, seem to regard it as a criminal conspiracy. When Bush started talking about bringing al Qaeda to justice, he was talking about bringing them before the bar of justice. Imagine trying to arrest British sailors for burning Washington. War is not about bringing people to justice. It is about destroying their ability to wage war. The contemporary confusion between warfare and criminality creates profound confusion about the rules under which you operate. There are the rules of war as set forth in the Geneva Conventions, and there are criminal actions. The former are designed to facilitate the defense of national interests and involve killing people because of the uniform they wear. The latter is about punishing people for prior action. I have never sorted through what it was that the Bush administration thought it was doing.

This entire matter is made more complex by the fact that al Qaeda doesn’t wear a uniform. Under the Geneva Conventions, there is no protection for those who do not openly carry weapons or wear uniforms or at least armbands. They are regarded as violating the rules of war. If they are not protected by the rules of war then they must fall under criminal law by default. But criminal law is not really focused on preventing acts so much as it is on punishing them. And as satisfying as it is to capture someone who did something, the real point of the U.S. response to 9/11 was to prevent anyone else from doing something — killing and capturing people who have not done anything yet but who might.

The problem is that international law has simply failed to address the question of how a nation-state deals with forces that wage war through terrorism but are not part of any nation-state. Neither criminal law nor the laws of war apply. One of the real travesties of 9/11 was the manner in which the international legal community — the United Nations and its legal structures, the professors of international law who discuss such matters and the American legal community — could not come to grips with the tensions underlying the resulting war. There was an unpleasant and fairly smug view that the United States had violated both the rules of war and domestic legal processes, but very little attempt was made to craft a rule of warfare designed to cope with a group like al Qaeda — organized, covert, effective — that attacked a nation-state.

As U.S. President Barack Obama has discovered, the failure of the international legal community to rapidly evolve new rules of war placed him at odds with his erstwhile supporters. The ease with which the international legal community found U.S. decision makers’ attempts to craft a lawful and effective path “illegal and immoral” (an oft-repeated cliche of critics of post-9/11 policy) created an insoluble dilemma for the United States. The mission of the U.S. government was to prevent further attacks on the homeland. The Geneva Conventions, for the most part, didn’t apply. Criminal law is not about prevention. The inability of the law to deal with reality generated an image of American lawlessness.

The primary mission as of September 12th was to prevent further attacks on American soil. This mission, at least, we have accomplished. But the mission became far less clear after that, and after we embarked on an enormously controversial war in Iraq, and an open-ended campaign in Afghanistan:

Heavy fighting continues in Afghanistan, Iraq is not quite done and new theaters for covert operations are constantly opening and closing. It is the first U.S. campaign — Afghanistan — that actually poses the most vexing problem, one that is simple to express: When is the war over? That, of course, depends on the goal. What is the United States trying to achieve there?

The initial goal of the invasion was to dislodge al Qaeda, overthrow the government that had supported it and defeat the Taliban. The first two goals were accomplished quickly. The third goal has not been accomplished to this day, nor is it likely that the United States will ever accomplish it. Other powers have tried to subdue Afghanistan, but few have succeeded. The Taliban are optimized for the battlefield they fight on, have superior intelligence and have penetrated and are able to subvert government institutions, including the Afghan military. They have the implicit support of elements in a neighboring major nation — Pakistan — that are well beyond American means to intimidate. The United States has no port from which to supply its forces except the one controlled by Pakistan and only complex and difficult supply routes through other countries.

On the other hand, the Taliban cannot defeat the United States, which can stay in Afghanistan indefinitely. But the major U.S. mission in Afghanistan is concluded. Al Qaeda has not used Afghanistan as a primary base since 2002. Al Qaeda in Pakistan, according to the United States, has been crippled. The Taliban, products of Afghanistan for the most part, have no international ambitions. Al Qaeda has relocated to other countries like Yemen and Somalia.

Given this, continued combat in Afghanistan cannot be linked to al Qaeda. It could be said that the reason to go to war in Afghanistan was to prevent al Qaeda’s return. But the fact is that it doesn’t need Afghanistan, and if it did return to Afghanistan, it would be no more dangerous to the United States than it currently is with its bases elsewhere.

In wars, and especially in counterinsurgencies, the mission tends to creep upward. In Afghanistan, the goal is now the transformation of Afghan society into one that is democratic, no longer corrupt by American standards and able to defend itself against the Taliban. This goal does not seem attainable given the relative forces and interests in the country.

Therefore, this war will go on until the United States decides to end it or there is a political evolution in Kabul in which the government orders us out. The point is that the goal has become disengaged from the original intent and is unattainable. Unlike other wars, counterinsurgencies rarely end in victory. They usually end when the foreign forces decide to leave.

Where do we go from here? Obviously we are still confronted by an implacable foe, the same relentless enemy the Christian world has grappled with since the seventh century. Its ideological foundation is no weaker now, and no less inimical to our own, than it was at Poitiers or Vienna. Can we, though, realistically imagine “victory”?

Most likely not:

There is talk of a long war against radical Islam. It had better not be. The Islamic world is more than a billion people and radical Islam is embedded in many places. The idea that the United States has the power to wage an interminable war in the Islamic world is fantasy. This is not a matter of ideology or willpower or any other measures. It is a matter of available forces, competing international interests and American interests.

Ultimately, there are three lessons of the last decade that I think are important. The first is the tremendous success the United States has had in achieving its primary goal — blocking attacks on the homeland. The second is that campaigns of dubious worth are inevitable in war, and particularly in one as ambiguous as this war has been. Finally, all wars end, and the idea of an interminable war dominating American foreign policy and pushing all other considerations to the side is not what is going to happen. The United States must have a sense of proportion, of what can be done, what is worth doing and what is too dangerous to do. An unlimited strategic commitment is the definitive opposite of strategy.

The United States has done as well as can be expected. Over the coming years there will be other terrorist attacks. As it wages war in response, the United States will be condemned for violating international laws that are insensate to reality. At this point, for all its mistakes and errors — common to all wars — the United States has achieved its primary mission. There have been no more concerted terrorist attacks against the United States. Now it is time to resume history.

The article is here.

Nature abhors a vacuum, and although the newspapers have so far reported that religious groups appear not to have played much part in the uprising, anyone who has paid any attention to Egypt’s modern history will know that the principal opponent of the secular Egyptian dictatorship is, and has always been, the Muslim Brotherhood — the patient, hydra-headed global Islamist organization (its front groups include Hamas in Gaza, and CAIR in the US) that has been awaiting its chance in Egypt for decades (and which of course has never forgotten the execution of its chief political theorist, Sayyid Qutb, by Nasser in 1966).

The Muslim Brotherhood (or “Ikhwan”) differs from militant Islamist factions like al-Qaeda not in its goals, which are more or less the same, but only in its strategy: it has no moral or philosophical aversion to violent jihad, but considers it unnecessarily provocative, and therefore counterproductive. As such, it can make an ostentatious public display of distancing itself from terrorism, and so it is embraced by gullible Westerners — for whom the only imaginable threat from Islam is terrorist violence — as a “moderate” Muslim organization to be supported and embraced. This suits the Ikwhan, whose avowed strategy is to sabotage secular democratic societies from within, just fine.

The Obama administration, however, which has made “outreach” to the Muslim world a priority (even going so far as to make NASA’s “foremost” mission helping Muslims “feel good about their historic contribution to science and math and engineering”) clearly feels the the Muslim Brotherhood is an outfit it can do business with. We should not be surprised to see — in fact we should be astonished not to see — the Ikwhan seizing the opportunity now taking shape in Cairo, for which it has worked and waited so long. We should also not be surprised to learn that they will do so with the overt or covert support of the United States: so broad is the Brotherhood’s influence in Egypt that it is almost unimaginable that they will not take the reins, and you can be sure that Foggy Bottom and the Oval Office have already made the appropriate calculations.

At the time, this aroused skeptical indignation in some of our readers. However, five months having passed, we note this item in today’s news:

U.S. recognizes Muslim Brotherhood

As Philip K. Dick said: “Reality is what doesn’t go away when you stop believing in it.”

Here.

Although it’s too soon to fully understand what they mean, there are important developments in Egypt today in the run-up to this fall’s election. First, a major coalition of parties has formed that includes not only the Muslim Brotherhood, but two key liberal parties, Wafd and Ghad. The coalition also includes a left leaning Nasserist (Arab nationalist) party, Karama, and the socialist Tagammu party. At the same time, a there is talk of yet another coalition of liberal and socialist parties forming to oppose the first coalition, given that it seems to be dominated by the Muslim Brotherhood.

What is going on here? We can only speculate at this point, but it looks as though the strength of the Muslim Brotherhood has allowed it to coopt the core of its opposition. This assures weak non-Islamist parties of some representation, while also providing the Brotherhood with protection against backlash from the military or the United States, should it dominate the coming election. Yet the new coalition likely puts the Brotherhood in position to control an only nominally diverse parliament.

Many of the most prominent leftist and Nasserist parties are already in the Brotherhood-dominated coalition. That would leave a second, more purely secular coalition weak. On the other hand, if non-Islamist Egyptians are alarmed by the Brotherhood’s rising power, they could turn a possible counter-coalition into a significant force.

For now, however, it seems as though the Muslim Brotherhood has moved to coopt its opposition, and therefore has an excellent chance of exercising de facto control over the new parliament, with appropriate cover. The one thing that brings together Egypt’s liberals, leftists, and Islamists is foreign policy. So expect a Brotherhood-dominated coalition to be less than entirely friendly to the United States and Israel.

One of the only positive developments here is that the start of actual party maneuvering may force the Western press to start talking openly about socialist and Arab-nationalist parties. The media’s current characterization of nearly all non-Islamist groups as “secular liberals” is deeply misleading.

And here’s another perspicacious observer, writing as the Egyptian “revolution” unfolded, back on January 28th:

The implosion of the senescent Mubarak dictatorship will create a power vacuum in the region’s most populous (and overwhelmingly Sunni Muslim) nation. The US, seeing that Mubarak is no longer the “strong horse”, has now conspicuously withdrawn its support for him, and has made public statements asserting the “universal human rights” of the protestors now rioting in the streets, and expressing its optimism about democracy in general — despite what democracy can be expected to lead to in situations like this.

Nature abhors a vacuum, and although the newspapers have so far reported that religious groups appear not to have played much part in the uprising, anyone who has paid any attention to Egypt’s modern history will know that the principal opponent of the secular Egyptian dictatorship is, and has always been, the Muslim Brotherhood — the patient, hydra-headed global Islamist organization (its front groups include Hamas in Gaza, and CAIR in the US) that has been awaiting its chance in Egypt for decades (and which of course has never forgotten the execution of its chief political theorist, Sayyid Qutb, by Nasser in 1966).

The Muslim Brotherhood (or “Ikhwan”) differs from militant Islamist factions like al-Qaeda not in its goals, which are more or less the same, but only in its strategy: it has no moral or philosophical aversion to violent jihad, but considers it unnecessarily provocative, and therefore counterproductive. As such, it can make an ostentatious public display of distancing itself from terrorism, and so it is embraced by gullible Westerners — for whom the only imaginable threat from Islam is terrorist violence — as a “moderate” Muslim organization to be supported and embraced. This suits the Ikwhan, whose avowed strategy is to sabotage secular democratic societies from within, just fine.

… We should not be surprised to see — in fact we should be astonished not to see — the Ikwhan seizing the opportunity now taking shape in Cairo, for which it has worked and waited so long.

…“Democracy” there may be, briefly, in the wake of Mubarak’s fall; but anything resembling a secular, West-friendly democracy will be short-lived indeed, if it comes to pass at all.

I haven’t had time yet to read it through myself, but I’m sure it will be of interest to some of you, at least.

Here.

This will sharpen everything. Osama bin Laden has been such a potent symbol of American impotence that his death will be a jolt of electricity. We’ll see far-reaching effects, I think, quite out of proportion to any tactical, or even strategic, effect his death will have.

The political effect will be powerfully unifying, however briefly, and it can’t help but mute criticism of the administration. (I’d gladly give Mr. Obama a high-five myself — or fist bump, or whatever.) Crowds are gathering at the White House and Ground Zero, cheering and singing. Don’t be surprised to see the stock markets pop tomorrow.

I’m glad it isn’t October, 2012. (I’m sure there were those who were tempted to wait. Credit to them for not doing so.)

It’s late, and I haven’t combed the Internet yet to find out what I can about this, but I am very curious about Pakistan’s role here. Given the enormous compound Osama was living in, the ISI had to know where he was. Did they sell him out? That will be hard to keep secret, and when it gets out it will get hot in the streets over there. Did they not sell him out? Were they hiding him from us? That will get interesting too.

Now Osama is a martyr. Will that fan the flames of jihad? Have we poked a stick in the hornets’ nest?

I don’t think so: my feeling is that there’s little that could fan those flames any higher; at this point they’re pretty much self-fanning anyway. On the other hand, this could be a bracing tonic for the West, for a little while at least.

Should be an interesting few days.