The Brotherhood's useful idiots

[Littlejoe]

The West was duped by the so-called 'Arab Spring'. Today, however, the blindness is voluntary, dangerous and repulsive. Why? More importantly, what it means

You have to hand it to the Muslim Brotherhood. They know how to play power politics. They know how to acquire power. And they know how to use power.

Last Friday, the day before Egyptian voters by most accounts elected the Brotherhood's candidate Muhammed Morsy to serve as Egypt's next president, the Wall Street Journal published a riveting account by Charles Levinson and Matt Bradley of how the Brotherhood outmaneuvered the secular revolutionaries to take control of the country's political space.

The Brotherhood kept a very low profile in the mass demonstrations in Tahrir Square in January and February 2011 that led to the overthrow of then president Hosni Mubarak. The Brotherhood's absence from Tahrir Square at that time is what enabled Westerners to fall in love with the Egyptian revolution.

Those demonstrations led to the impression, widespread in the US, that Mubarak's successors would be secular Facebook democrats. The role that Google's young Egyptian executive Wael Gonim played in organizing the demonstrations was reported expansively. His participation in the anti-regime protests — as well as his brief incarceration — was seen as proof that the next Egyptian regime would be indistinguishable from Generation X and Y Americans and Europeans.

In their report, Levinson and Bradley showed how the Brotherhood used the secularists to overthrow the regime and provide them with a fig leaf of moderation through March 2011 when the public voted on the sequencing of Egypt's of post-Mubarak transformation from a military dictatorship into a populist regime. The overwhelming majority of the public voted to first hold parliamentary elections and empower the newly elected parliament to select members of the constitutional assembly that would write Egypt's new constitution.

According to their account, the Brotherhood decided to call the demonstration "Sharia Friday." Failing to understand that the game was over, the secularists tried to regain what they thought was the unity of the anti-regime ranks from earlier in the year.

"Islamists and revolutionary leaders spent three days negotiating principles they could all support at the coming Friday demonstration in Cairo's Tahrir Square. They reached an agreement and the revolution seemed back on track."

The difference between the Brotherhood and the secularists is a fundamental one. The Brotherhood has always had a vision of the Egypt it wants to create. It has always used all the tools at its disposal to advance the goal of creating an Islamic state in Egypt.

However the Egyptian election results pan out, the die has been cast. We must prepare for what is coming.

Caroline B. Glick: The Brotherhood's useful idiots

[ShilohRose]

Very astute. There is none so blind as those who will not see.