Obama's Muslim Outreach 2.0: Doing Business with the Muslim Brotherhood

Details: Written by RC_Anderson; Published: 20 May 2011

Analyst's note: Absolutely must read. The President’s speech yesterday showed support to the protest movements in Arab nations. Effectively, the United States is now prepared to work with the Muslim Brotherhood.

Why would we be supporting budding "democracies," which is the very form of government our Founding Fathers tried so hard to keep us from? We should consult reality and our own history before we leap. Certainly wishful thinking does not a viable foreign policy make.

I still say a trial for treason is in order for giving aid and comfort to our enemies.

President Obama's latest paean to what he calls "the Muslim world," delivered at the State Department today, was an exercise in whistling past the graveyard of real and growing dangers and a litany of misleading statements that borders on official malpractice. Its most important upshot is this: The United States is now prepared to do business with the Muslim Brotherhood.

While Mr. Obama did not use those exact words in his Muslim Outreach 2.0 speech, that was surely the practical effect of his effusively depicting the so-called "Arab Spring" as a welcome expression of democratic sentiment throughout the region. By so doing, he studiously ignored the reality on the ground in virtually every country in the Middle East and North Africa now undergoing political turmoil: Islamists associated with or akin to the totalitarian, salafist Muslim Brotherhood are poised to be the principal beneficiaries of any balloting that ultimately occurs in Egypt and Tunisia - and, perhaps in due course in, Syria, Yemen, Tunisia, Libya, Bahrain and beyond.

Mr. Obama seeks to provide the putative, newly minted "democracies" with tangible evidence of his commitment to their future success. He declared that the United States would give up to a billion dollars in debt relief to Egypt and economic, trade and technical aid to the Egyptians and Tunisians. Other nations stand to get similar treatment if only they replace their present autocrats with new ones - provided the latter are prepared to come to power via elections.

With such a policy, the United States stands to compound the mistake now being made in Libya - where al Qaeda operatives, former Guantanamo Bay detainees and other Islamists are already being given "non-lethal" and "humanitarian assistance" and U.S. political support. Without knowing precisely who are likely to be the beneficiaries of such assistance, we run the very considerable risk that we will effectively be arming, as well as legitimating, our enemies.

[....] Add in his view that Israel must withdraw fully to the 1967 borders (albeit with some "swaps" of territory) - what amounts, implicitly, if not explicitly to a call for the re-partitioning of Jerusalem - and the expectations can only be fanned among Israel's many enemies that the moment is arriving at last, to drive the Jews into the sea. Lip service paid to Israel having secure and defensible borders will founder on the reality that the 1967 borders are wholly incompatible with either security or the defense of Israel, and the growing readiness and ability of her foes to exploit that reality.

The President's ongoing efforts to align the United States with Muslims, irrespective of whether they seek to impose shariah or otherwise seek our destruction, is a prescription for furthering what has emerged as the Obama Doctine: Emboldening our enemies, undermining our friends and diminishing our country. It is also a formula for disaster. It should be challenged at every turn, in favor of a policy that makes clear we differentiate between Muslims who do not seek to impose shariah upon the rest of us and those who do. The former are our natural allies; the latter our unalterable foes. We had better start making that distinction, and act accordingly.

I am not the only one who sees a pattern here.