Home » What does the Muslim Brotherhood want? And why do some discount it?

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What does the Muslim Brotherhood want? And why do some discount it? — 27 Comments

  1. Where do we want to do this? Over here, or over there? Seems like those are the two questions coming up. The vacuum is going to suck in a lot of nations.

  2. What the Muslim Brotherhood wants: The return of the caliphate and a planet ruled by sharia.

    Why do some discount it? Wishful thinking, a pressing need to feel guilty about the colonial era, listened to John Lennon’s Imagine too many times, or __________ ? Take your pick.

    When it all comes down to dust, it really doesn’t matter why an ostrich sticks its head in the ground. All the ostrich knows is that it doesn’t see anything scary. Nothing but dirt here folks, move along everybody.

  3. Stockholm Syndrome.
    Years ago, the late Sen. Moynihan talked about taking his then quite young children and some friends to see some kids’ adventure movie. Swiss Family Robinson, possibly. At some point, a huge snake is menacing an oblivious character. Ominousity builds. One of the kids blurts out, “That snake likes me.”
    The opposite is too terrifying to contemplate.

  4. We swim in a sea of bullsheet, entirely self-generated. GWB’s annual trips to the mosque, and his declarations of “islam is a religion of peace” come to mind.

  5. Richard Aubrey: I will have to remember that.

    I’ll call it “the snake likes me” syndrome.

  6. “Some elements of Sharia law”. That reminds me of the classic definition of rape. Need I repeat it?

    Somehow the cat always escapes the bag. This time with a statement that was intended to sound completely innocuous.

    Need we even bother to ask which elements of Sharia would be acceptable to any rational society?

  7. The Muslim Brotherhood declared war on the USA, October, 2010. What does that say about Zacharia? Fellow Traveler or useful idiot?

  8. Hmmm… Zacharia claims their goals do not include political power. Yet at the same time, people wishing to put a moderate face on the Egyptian street protests go out of their way to assure the West that the Muslim Brotherhood isn’t involved.

    :-/

    Let’s be honest: We’ve learned from watching the Palestinian radicals, the Iranian ones, and the Afghani ones that what the radical Islamicists tell the west never reflects the actions they actually take. But what they tell each other and preach to those they wish to bring into the fold does. Too many westerners have trouble learning that lesson.

    We suffer under the illusion that a murderer will never broadcast their intentions in advance; neither will a bully, or a thief. Unfortunately, all we’ve seen, from University of Texas shooter Charles Whitman’s confessions to his psychiatrist, through Virginia Tech killer Seung-Hui Cho’s warning of wanting to “repeat Columbine”, to Jared Loughner today show us that they in fact do announce their intentions well ahead of the fact.

    And at risk of Godwining this topic, there’s a very notable example that highlights this: Adolf Hitler.

    Malicious folks are indeed well predisposed to threaten ahead of time. It’s fair to work at determining whether any specific threat is genuine or hot air, but it’s ignorant to ignore the threats they make. And it’s abysmally ignorant to make excuses for them.

  9. An advice from Spengler:
    “The best thing the United States could do at the moment would be to offer massive emergency food aid to Egypt out of its own stocks, with the understanding that President Mubarak would offer effusive public thanks for American generosity. This is a stopgap, to be sure, but it would pre-empt the likely alternative. Otherwise, the Muslim Brotherhood will preach Islamist socialism to a hungry audience. That also explains why Mubarak just might survive. Even Islamists have to eat. The Iranian Islamists who took power in 1979 had oil wells; Egypt just has hungry mouths. Enlightened despotism based on the army, the one stable institution Egypt possesses, might not be the worst solution.”
    This allows some genarilizations on other backward countries, which Western liberals will never be able to contemplate. In such countries general population and even its more advanced middle class are relatively reactionary compared to ruling class. The only modernizing force is govenment itself, with all its repressive apparatus, army and police. Popular protest movements and revolutions in such circumstances tend to twart and destroy all progress that was achieved under repressive regimes and throw the countries backward, not forward. Even the scale of repression and atrocites tend to increase, not decrease, after such “liberation”. Pushkin, the Russian Bard, wrote in his diary: “In Russia the government is the only true European”.

  10. Intelligentsia is the most myth-creating segment of population in modern world. This is their most important social function, this is true dream industry, not only Hollywood, but all academia, journalists, creative types in advertisment and PR, artists and musicians. They all began their day with “Imagine…” and proceed to invent some adorable picture of world events to make some sense from senseless existence. Before modern times, this was a function of Church, and was done with some discipline and intellectuall rigor. But when liberals came to power in dream industry, it became crazy and utterly divorced from reality, logic and respect for truth.

  11. The Egyptian people are fighting for freedom: freedom of press, freedom of speech, freedom to protest and freedom to elect whoever they choose.
    If the last point means that Muslim Brotherhood gets elected, then so be it. It’s Egyptian people who would’ve made the decision – and if they don’t like it they may go out to protest again. The one thing the Egyptian authorities are right at is not really listening to calls from outside. The world does not exist to align to how the USA works. USA only owns their territory – not any other sovereign country. So leave it – it’s down to the people of Egypt to choose their fate.

  12. Delusional people do not deserve freedom, they deserve straitjacket, medication and locking up in lunatic asylum. The whole Arab world is nothing else as lunatic asylum at open air, and I certainly prefer that it was not run by inmates.

  13. In Wright’s book The Looming Tower he provides a couple of interesting anecdotes about Qutb and his spiritual progeny.

    It seems Qutb himself was throroughly radicalized not on some pilgrimage to Mecca but at a sock hop in the gym at the University of N. Colorado in Greeley, Colorado, the same place we used to write for all those helpful government pamphlets.

    Seems the shameless display of bare shins and bestocking’d female feet did it for Qutb and he was forever after determined to root out any hint of Western corruption.

    Tower also has an instructive passage involving Osama bin Laden and his band of merry beheaders. It seems they were holed-up in a cave hiding from the Russians when Dr. Z decided to give OSL come IV medication.

    Dr. Z would set up the IV stand, hang up the bag, insert the needle, and at that point the Russians would get lucky with an artillery shell which hit near the cave and cause the usual sound effects and flying rocks, dust, etc.

    Then a period of calm would ensue and Dr. Z would go back to work. Just about the time he was putting in the needle the Russians would get lucky again.

    The third time this happened the mujahideen in the cave were convinced that the bag of IV solution was attracting the shells and deterred Dr. Z from setting another one up.

    The Israelis are currently exploiting this childlike credulousness by spreading the story that they are ruining Egypt’s tourism business by training sharks to eat tourists at Sharm el Sheikh

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  15. Dmitry: how naive you are.

    Democracy often means one person, one vote, one time. Power-hungry groups will always try to hijack a democracy. That’s why democracy and voting means absolutely nothing without a constitution that protects the rights of the people. The USA’s founding fathers knew that. Iran is an excellent example of how the people cannot speak after the initial transition, and cannot go out into the streets to effectively change what they would like to change. See this piece I wrote about the importance of a constitution that protects against tyranny–including a tyranny voted in by the majority.

  16. I think the entire “Muslim Brotherhood” should be boiled in pig fat.

    Sorry, just living up to my moniker.

  17. Thank you for your comments.
    neo-neocon, even if democracy truly means that, it shows that people want it – it’s better than their current system of one person, rigged votes, all the time. And who knows – maybe the same uprisings will happen if islamists take over – without the aftermath of Iran. In fact, people like ElBaradei, whom the US seems to support, do propose drawing up a new constitution. Yes, we can’t argue that it will be of the same quality as what the Founding Fathers desired in the USA – instead, hopefully, pro-democracy groups will choose it, and few will be unhappy. And if Islamists take over, people would, undoubtedly, intervene – we’ve seen that they can do that very well. Iran has little effect on the uprising – yes, they support it, but they are stupid in thinking that it’s an islamic revolution – yes, that’s what they want to see, but not what they will see. I still think nukes would be an acceptable policy with the Middle East – most of the time 😛

  18. Dmitry: Iran is not better today than it was under the Shah. Nor is the entire world, as a result of Iran being a repressive and terrorist-supporting theocracy about to develop nuclear weapons.

    So no, it’s not clear at all that the results are better. Maybe some day they will be, if the Iranian people throw off their present yoke and manage to replace it with liberty plus protection of their rights, but I wouldn’t sit on a hot stove till that happens.

    Same with Egypt.

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  20. Pingback:Mubarak: the devil we knew « amy kane blog

  21. As for willful ignorance of the jihadist threat, well, that’s been the case for at least a decade. Within weeks of 9/11 I was asked to lead a group study of the Qur’an so my faculty colleagues “could better understand the roots of Muslim discontent.” After a couple weeks one blithely ignorant soul said “I think Muhammad had authority issues–he seems awfully angry.”

    Skip ahead to today and there remain folks–well meaning, well educated folks–who simply refuse to acknowledge that Sharia law (or some interpretation of it ala Mr. Zakaria) would completely undo CENTURIES of Anglo-American jurisprudence. But since Islam is viewed as the underdog, it gets a complete pass from the academic left. As Rabbi Jacob Neusner once wrote: “A Christian nation? We could do much worse.”

  22. islam is a horrible ideology for human rights

    4 key things about islam

    1. mythical religious b.s. – all religions have this (faith) because its part of being a religion, having beliefs without proof until after the believer dies. the problem is people will believe almost anything

    2. totalitarianism – there is no free will in islam sharia law governs all. there is no seperation of church and state in islam: only submission to the will of allah as conveniently determined by the imams who spew vapors to feather their own nests. there are no moderate muslims they all support sharia law, see dar al harb

    3. violence – of all religions islam leads the pack in violent tenets for their ideology & history: containing eternal canonical imperatives for supremacy at all costs using violence & intimidation as basic tools to achieve these goals.

    4. dishonesty – only islam has dishonesty as a fundamental tenet: this stems from allah speaking to mohamhead & abrogation in the koran which is used to explain how mo’s peaceful early life was superseded by his warlord role later, see al taqiyya

    really there are NO redeeming qualities for this muddled pile of propaganda named islam

    islam is just another fascist totalitarian ideology used by power hungry fanatics in yet another quest for worldwide domination and includes all the usual human rights abuses & suppression of freedom

    graphics version:
    http://img829.imageshack.us/img829/5792/dangero.jpg
    http://img814.imageshack.us/img814/6729/shallah.jpg
    http://img814.imageshack.us/img814/6463/slam6.jpg
    http://img829.imageshack.us/img829/6457/action3.jpg
    http://img829.imageshack.us/img829/2821/burn8.jpg
    http://img829.imageshack.us/img829/8439/daily20.jpg
    http://img829.imageshack.us/img829/6877/border5.jpg

    thanks for reading 🙂

  23. “Or do you think we have a fine old bridge in Brooklyn to sell Mr. Zacharia?”

    Rather, Mr Zacharia has a fine old bridge in Brooklyn to sell us.

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