There are two important columns each of which addresses the surge of Islamists throughout the Middle East and Central Asia.
The first column, by Andy McCarthy, focuses on reports that the Obama administration is using Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi as a conduit for contact with the Taliban:
The surrender is complete now. The Hindu reports that the Obama administration has turned to Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the Muslim Brotherhood’s leading jurist, to mediate secret negotiations between the United States and the Taliban.
You might remember al-Qaradawi from my posts last February, NY Times Whitewashes Return of Anti-Semitic Egyptian Cleric and The Yuppie Revolution In Egypt Is Over, The Islamist Revolution Has Begun, which included this video of al-Qaradawi leading over a million Egyptians in chanting “To Jerusalem We go, for us to be the Martyrs of the Millions.”
Regardless of whether the Obama administration is using al-Qaradawi himself, it has embraced Islamists.
Daniel Greenfield notes the rise of Islamists far beyond Egypt, The Year We Lost Afghanistan, Iraq, Egypt, Turkey, Tunisia and Most of the Middle East:
The news that the Obama Administration has brought in genocidal Muslim Brotherhood honcho Yusuf Al-Qaradawi to discuss terms of surrender for the transfer of Afghanistan to the Taliban caps a year in which the Brotherhood and the Salafists are looking up carve up Egypt, the Islamists won Tunisia’s elections, Turkey’s Islamist AKP Party purged the last bastions of the secular opposition and Libya’s future as an Islamist state was secured by American, British and French jets and special forces.
Time Magazine declared that 2011 was the Year of the Protester, they might have more honestly called it the Year of the Islamist. In 2010 the Taliban were still hiding in caves. In 2012 they are set to be in power from Tunisia to Afghanistan and from Egypt to Yemen. They won’t go by that name of course. Most of them will have elaborate names with the words “Justice” or “Community” in them, but they will for the most part be minor variations on the Muslim Brotherhood theme.
The Muslim Brotherhood has confirmed its intentions in Egypt:
Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood will not recognize Israel under any circumstances and might put the peace treaty with the Jewish state up to a referendum, the movement’s second in command told the Al-Hayat newspaper in an interview that was published Sunday….
The Muslim Brotherhood “did not sign the peace accords,” Rashad al-Bayoumi told the London-based newspaper. “We are allowed to ask the people or the elected parliament to express their opinion on the treaty, and (to find out) whether it compromised the people’s freedom and sovereignty….
“Is rising to power conditional on recognizing Israel?” al-Bayoumi wondered. “That’s out of the question, no matter what the situation is. On no condition will we recognize Israel. It is an enemy entity, an exploiting, criminal occupier.”
Polling indicates that Obama gets strong support for his foreign policy. The Obama messaging team has done an excellent job at masking a complete and utter failure by hiding behind the “I got bin Laden” sound bite.
We have to make sure the truth gets out in 2012.
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Comments
Looks like another particularly tense year for the Israelis and those of us who care about them.
Yeah, “He lost the Middle East, but he got bin Laden.” But will anybody notice?
By losing the Middle East, a thousand Bin
Ladens may now flourish.
The first round of elections in Iraq fell out along religious lines, as well. The real question is whether the next round of elections will occur, and after that, it will be whether political parties organized along the lines of political preferences, will develop. We won’t know the answers for a while.
If Egypt cancels the treaty, then it should give back the Sinai. Will the USA and the “observer forces” in the Sinai even dream of supporting such a demand, should Israel make it?
As bad as this may sound, things like this are why I wouldnt mind him winning re-election. He should have to reap what he has sewn.
This is truly a case of “women and minorities and gays hardest hit”. However, I am guessing the NYT will not follow that line.
Tiny Israel is surrounded by tens, if not hundreds of million people who want her destroyed, yet she must be absolutely perfectly precise in defending herself lest any collateral damage send the usual media suspects into an ecstatic fit of indignation.
But … where is that “disproportionate” media indignation about the thousands of neighboring Syrians slaughtered by their own government? If you didn’t read the news carefully, you might not even know it’s occuring.
But if Israel had been the cause of the deaths of those thousands of Syrians … that would’ve been about all you’d see in the news the past few months.
The same with the rise of the Islamists. I saw that all my high school classmates on Facebook were celebrating the “Arab Spring.” They heralded Mubarak’s fall as a big victory for Obama.
Now, because of the media’s “disproportionality” (of which they always accuse Israel), in this case, reverse disproportionality … the near non-reporting of a huge story … I’d bet if I were to ask my old high school classmates on Facebook what they thought of the rise of the Islamists in the Middle East recently, the reply, if any, would be a collective, “Huh??”
Journalism sure isn’t close to being an exact science, is it?
Just a simple little even-handedness wouldn’t go amiss.
The way I look at it is simple…
Carter lost Iran
Obama lost Tunisia, Libya, Egypt and probably Yemen and Syria.
So, can we conclude that Obama is five times worse than Carter?
If so, how long will his record as worse president ever stand?
Things that curious minds want the answers to…
WW III is not far off.
Threats from not just the Middle East….
“Officially aged 29, but probably only 26 or 27, Kim Jong-un is the youngest man in history with the power to launch a nuclear weapon.”
http://tinyurl.com/7ohbhzq
If the world is going to end, I hope it happens just before and not just after April 15th.
Happy New Year, Professor. I am an avid amateur Egyptologist, so I have found this holiday season most troubling in terms of news from Egypt:
The burning of its richest library, in which the book Napoleon’s researchers published (Description de L’Egypte) was located. Muslim extremists celebrated: http://templeofmut.wordpress.com/2011/12/27/i-see-islamist-extremists-only-start-fires/
And this chestnut: The Salafist party’s plan for the Pyramids? Cover them in wax
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-2077964/The-Salafist-partys-plan-Pyramids–cover-wax.html#ixzz1iEZvdkgB
It looks like Egypt is losing its connection to the West, and will soon enter a second Dark Ages. And this time, there will be no Napoleon to remake the connection. This is a loss of a legacy that should be cherished by all humanity.
“Obama got bin Laden just like Nixon landed on the moon.”
[…] Professor Jacobson/Legal Insurrection has a summary of the vast turmoil in the entire Middle East, and its root cause, today: He lost the Middle East, but he got bin Laden […]
Doesn’t the senate have to approve any treaty obama makes with a foreign power? A silly question, I know, since 1. The dims control the senate and will do his bidding. 2. obama isn’t obstructed by the rules of the Constitution that says he must get approval from the senate in the first place. 3. The Taliban is not a foreign power, just a bunch of displaced thugs. The sad thing is the majority of the country want to end this war not even giving any thought to what we will lose or what we have lost already. This is Viet Nam all over again , though luckily we haven’t lost 50,000 of the military, just about 5,000. All for nothing.
I’ll bet that the Afghan people, if they have any brains, will regret not co-operating fully with us when they had the chance. Back to beards, no music, no fun, no schools for girls and terrible cruelty especially to the women.
OTOH, some of them are not waiting for the Taliban to come back to commit cruely re the child bride tortured and starved by her husband and his family.
Also not putting certain vegetables together in a sexual way. These people are using religion to control the masses and the silly clunks go along with it. That goes for the entire Middle East and the stupidos who have immigrated to the West..
The common phrase since 279BC was “Pyrrhic Victory” but Obama has achieved yet another unprecedented milestone. Two thousand years from now our descendants will refer to such “magnificent achievements” as an “Obamic Victory”.
He said he wanted to fundamentally change the country and he has…
He got bin Laden?
OBL was hiding in plain sight in Pakistan. It strains credulity to think this ‘hiding’ location was not an open secret.
If that is so, then what Obama did was make a deal with the Pakistanis for OBL’s head, a deal we do not know the details of and which Bush was presumably unwilling to make.
The running joke at the time was that OBL had been relieved of his duties at al Qaeda and would be heading up Obama’s reelection campaign. We’ll know for sure next year, but for now I’m not willing to blandly state that Obama deserves a whole lot of credit here.
Professor, if you look at the actual poll results, BO gets strong marks on Iraq and terrorism, but his overall foreign policy approval is 49%. He’s still underwater! What it says to me is that Americans no longer consider the issues important. Iraq and terrorism may become important if something goes wrong, and if something goes wrong, BO will be to blame.
[…] Jacobson snarks, “but he got bin Laden“. So there’s […]