All told, this week has produced a surplus of bad news on several fronts. Here are just a few items.
Muslim Brotherhood: Mrs. Clinton’s decision this week to talk to Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood because it is committed to the “democratic process” again moves us into the fantasy world of our governing elite. There is no “democratic process” occurring in Egypt, there is only talk of a democratic process until the Egyptian military and the Muslim Brotherhood can decide on the particulars of how they will seize power under the guise of elections and then manage a much more Islamic and anti-U.S./anti-Israel regime, one which will kept up to mark militancy-wise by Saudi money and the growing size and popularity of Egypt’s Salafist movement. One hopes that Clinton, Obama, McCain, and Graham are beginning to realize that they helped to open the door for Islamism by knifing Mubarak in the back and not bothering to correct the journalists-turned-cheerleaders who trumpeted Tahrir Square as the “victory of democracy,” but such a grasp of reality is doubtful. Indeed, even as Mrs. Clinton offered to talk to the Brotherhood she demanded that it abide by the demands of the cultural/feminist war official Washington is waging on Islam. It seems like Mrs. Clinton genuinely expects that the Brotherhood’s membership and all religious Egyptians will forgive and forget U.S. support for thirty-plus years of Cairo’s repression and persecution of Muslims.
Bin Laden’s documents: One of the hardest things to do for a U.S. citizen at this time, I think, is to have faith in the federal government’s veracity. In the last week have been treated to a wave of leaked information said to be derived from the “trove” of documents taken from bin Laden’s residence. Amazingly, these documents match up almost perfectly with the three of the main themes of anti-Al-Qaeda propaganda of the Bush and Obama administrations: (a) “Bin Laden could not communicate with his organization” (This leak, of course, contradicted the early-May leak claiming that the captured documents and electronic media showed he was in contact with and in command of the organization); (b) “al-Qaeda is broke” (How does this mesh with al-Qaeda’s ability to build operational platforms in seven countries and regions when it had only one in 2001?); “Al-Qaeda was panicked over intelligence penetrations of its organization and formed a task force to combat them” (No mention by the leakers that al-Qaeda has had a counter-intelligence arm since the early 1990s and that Sayf al-Adl published a handbook on how to counter intelligence attacks in 2001-02). Now, it may be that all the leaked claims accurately reflect what has been found in bin Laden’s papers, but the correspondence between the leaked data and Washington’s main propaganda themes is an interesting coincidence.
Al-Qaeda says jump, U.S. politicians ask how high: The American jihadi Azzam al-Amriki several weeks ago urged U.S.-citizen Muslims to buy weapons at gun shows and begin solo jihads by killing their fellow citizens. Now this is nothing new, bin Laden, al-Zawahiri, and their colleagues called for the same thing as long ago as 1998. But in response to al-Amriki, New York’s Mayor Bloomberg and his merry band of brother majors used the California jihadi’s inaccurate claim about the easy availability of fully automatic assault rifles in the United States to renew their attack on the 2nd Amendment. One must wonder how long it will take Bloomberg and his ilk to realize that the 2nd Amendment was written by the Founders specifically to protect Americans against scheming politicians like Bloomberg and his ilk, men and women who want to make sure that government at all levels has a monopoly on weapons so they can put into place any laws and regulations they deem fit; that is, so they can build a tyranny. At a time when the federal and state governments refuse to control U.S. borders; presidents wage unconstitutional wars at their whim; the Congress is spending us into an economic disaster that may well yield social disorder and perhaps violence; and Islamist forces are expanding their presence and lethal capabilities in North America, maintaining the original, anti-tyranny intent of 2nd Amendment is vital if Americans are to protect themselves and their families from the willful and across-the-board-failures of their political elites in economics, foreign policy, and national security.
Libya: The unconstitutional Obama-Clinton-McCain-Graham-led NATO war on Libya seems bound to make North Africa a mujahideen paradise from Mauritania to the Suez Canal. Colonel Gaddafi, Tunisia’s Ben Ali, Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak, and the current Algerian regime were long the reliable if bloody-and-brutal bulwark against an effective Islamist movement in North Africa. With Ben Ali and Mubarak gone and Gaddafi on the ropes, only the Algerians remain, and they — with more discreet Moroccans, Mauritanians, and Chadians — are signaling in every way possible that the U.S.-French-British-UN crusade against Libya is going to yield an enormous Islamist victory, but so far to no avail. The interventionists Obama, Cameron, and Sarkozy seem to think that they know far better than their little Third-World brothers — they are Muslims, after all — and are content to wage the war and wait for what they have determined will be the inevitable triumph of secular democracy across North Africa. Indeed, so confident are the interventionists that the Libyan rebels are true-blue democrats that the French are air-dropping arms to the resistance’s Islamist-dominated military forces, even as the latter are cleaning out several of Gaddafi’s enormous arsenals of modern weaponry and reinforcing themselves with veteran fighters by opening Gaddafi’s prisons. If mindless wishing for the best can make it so, the West will not suffer from the Libyan war. If reality and history have their way, however, it is best to start battening down the hatches.
Oh well, maybe next week will be better.
