Andrew C. McCarthy's Blog, page 69

Do the Protesters Want Democracy?

If one factor unites them, it is not Mubarak's brutality but his cupidity.

Between Twitter, Facebook, and the 24/7 news cycle (which seems to have a built-in 18/7 opinion cycle), we in the U.S. can learn in real time what is happening on the ground thousands of miles away in Cairo’s Tahrir Square. Alas, instant awareness does not translate into instant understanding.

Worse, the limited attention spans weaned on the news/opinion cycle demand that complex events be reduced to bumper stickers, reinforced by endlessly recycled video loops. So we’re told that “the people” in Egypt are revolting because they crave “democracy.” That, we are to understand, accounts for their determination to oust Pres. Hosni Mubarak, the despot who has ruled the country under tyrannical emergency powers for 30 years.

#ad#Egypt, however, is a complex country of 80 million. There is no “the people.” Though predominantly Islamic, the country is home to about 8 million non-Muslims, mostly Coptic Christians. Of the 70 million–plus Muslims, a very sizable segment is devout and fundamentalist. Indeed, in 2007, pollsters found that about half “strongly” supported implementation of “strict” sharia (Islamic law) -- and even more were “somewhat” supportive. Nevertheless, millions of Egyptian Muslims are secularists who regard sharia as, at most, a matter of private ethics, not a roadmap for public policy. Of these, many are strongly pro-Western, but a goodly number are anti-Western Leftists of a Nasserite bent.

Most of the commentary, very much including conservative commentary, ignores this diversity. It assumes a monolithic Egypt -- whatever monolith best serves the particular commentator’s policy preferences. When neoconservative enthusiasts of the Bush democracy project look at Egypt, they seem to see only the pro-Western secularists. Discounting profound cultural differences between Islam and the West, presuming instead that all people are essentially the same and have a common yearning for freedom, they marginalize Egyptians who do not fit the mold -- as if these tens of millions were some unrepresentative fringe or the product of someone’s fevered imagination. On the other hand, many other conservatives, justifiably alarmed over the potential Muslim Brotherhood ascendancy, portray the Brothers as if they were ten feet tall -- poised to roll effortlessly over secular Egyptians, hijack the armed forces, and begin bombing Tel Aviv by noon tomorrow.

Egypt is far more complicated than these competing visions, and others on offer, suggest. To begin with, not all of Egypt is rebelling, and not all of those protesting in the streets are protesting for the same reasons. Some actually support Mubarak. That should come as no surprise: One doesn’t hang on as an authoritarian ruler for 30 years without cultivating the right elements of society. Life, however, could get considerably less comfortable for the pro-regime elements if their patron is gone, so they want him to stick around -- even at 82 and in failing health.

The anti-Mubarak opposition encompasses a majority of the country, but it is a mixed bag. If there is one uniting factor, it is not Mubarak’s brutality but his cupidity. He and his family seem to have socked away a fortune larger than Egypt’s public debt, making them billionaires 40 times over. A number of Mubarak cronies are now billionaires, too, having skimmed off the regime’s hammer-lock on industry -- and this, in a country with rampant poverty, real unemployment at over 20 percent, and many working Egyptians surviving on only a few hundred dollars a year.

Concern over Mubarak’s iron fist is what most animates the Western press, which takes its cues from progressive intellectuals and self-styled human-rights crusaders. Among Egyptians, though, dissent over Mubarak’s brutality against Islamists and suppression of political opposition pales beside revulsion over his financial corruption.

#page#In fact, many Egyptians are not terribly upset about Mubarak’s police-state tactics. That doesn’t mean they approve of these practices in the abstract. It means they have a better memory than we apparently do of the jihadist atrocities that provoked and sustained the state of emergency. Moreover, because they are forced to grapple with the Islamist ideology that is all around them, they don’t buy the Western psychobabble about how Mubarak’s iron fist is the principal cause of Islamist rage. They remember that the Islamists were raging long before there was a Mubarak -- and know that Islamist ideology will have them raging long after he’s gone.

Other Egyptians -- those who seemed ready ten days ago to add the president’s brass-knuckle practices to the case for his ouster -- are less sure about that now. Violence, looting, and jail-breaks will do that to you. Having stared into the abyss, the heady desire for “change” has, for these Egyptians, given way to the hard-headed question: Yes, we’d like Mubarak gone, but what replaces him?

#ad#That’s anything but clear, and calling for “democracy” in this environment is not clarifying. Secular, pro-Western Muslims and Copts would certainly favor something the West would recognize as democracy. Still, they are a minority and a disorganized one at that. The Islamists, led by the Muslim Brotherhood, are highly organized, but they are most certainly not the latter-day Madisons of Western media lore. The Ikhwan only talks a good democracy game. The Brothers will never walk the walk, because their agenda is sharia. Democratic processes are a serviceable route to power, but democratic principles would not guide their exercise of power.

Much is made, including by President Obama, of the fact that the Brotherhood is a minority faction, popular with perhaps a quarter of Egyptians. That, though, is a formidable plurality -- the Bolsheviks probably had less popular support in 1917. To be effective, especially when things are in disarray, a faction doesn’t need to be a majority. It needs to be disciplined and better organized than its competition. Under one authoritarian regime after another for generations, most Egyptians have been busy just trying to get by. Game-planning a revolutionary reordering of society hasn’t been on their radar. But it has been the Brotherhood’s obsession since 1928. Moreover, the Brothers have been gradualists about their goals precisely because they believed it would be important, when their moment finally came, to be ready to hit the ground running.

They are ready. Even as a technically outlawed organization, the Brotherhood has become the leading opposition group in the assembly. If there is a quick transition, meaning popular elections and a new government, the Brotherhood is certain to improve its position. In all likelihood, it will not be a majority party, but it will have enough of a plurality to exercise enormous influence over the levers of power and perhaps to decide who wields them.

The new Egyptian government would be more Islamist, more anti-American, and more hostile to Israel. How much the tide would turn from Mubarak’s pro-Western tilt would depend on the military, the upper ranks of which will not want to return to a state of war with Israel, regardless of the Muslim Brotherhood’s desires and the unpopularity of Israel among the broader Egyptian population. As I’ve argued previously, while the military is the most stable institution in Egypt, we should be careful not to overrate its promise as a bulwark against the Islamist advance.

The question in Egypt is not what happens at noon tomorrow but what happens, incrementally, over the next several years. While some analysts look at Iran 1979 as their guide, mine is present-day Turkey.

There, by law, the military is the guarantor of Atatürk’s secular Muslim society. Like Egypt’s armed forces, Turkey’s military is highly professional -- indeed, it is still (nominally) a NATO ally and until recently had strong ties to the Israeli defense forces. Yet now, after 80 years, Turkey is back in the Islamist fold and overtly hostile to Israel.

#page#This did not happen overnight. The Justice and Development Party (AKP), a disciplined, well-organized Islamist faction with close ties to the Muslim Brotherhood, managed to squeeze into power in 2002, even though it was a minority opposed by millions of pro-Western, secular Muslims. It increased its popularity by foreswearing any intention to impose sharia, avoiding the taint of financial corruption, adopting responsible economic policies, and only gradually enacting items on the Islamist punch-list -- beginning with the ones that enjoyed broad support. Behind the scenes, it used its power both to infiltrate the military and to install its loyalists in important institutions (e.g., the banks, bureaucracy, judiciary, and education system).

Based on this performance, it won reelection with a narrow majority -- no small thanks to cheerleading from Western governments and commentators about how Turkey under AKP rule symbolized a modern, “moderate” Islam. With that cover, the AKP promptly stepped up its Islamicization program, ordered arrests of its political opponents, and began challenging the military. To see what the Islamists could get away with, this challenge started with the arrests of a few officers. When there was no pushback, more prosecutions and harassment followed. It was clear that the military would not rise to the occasion, as the West always assumed it would.

#ad#Emboldened, the AKP regime has ended Turkey’s military cooperation with Israel and become an increasingly strident supporter of Palestinian “resistance.” Last spring, Turkey’s government financially backed the “peace flotilla” -- an attempt by Brotherhood-tied Islamists and anti-American Leftists to break Israel’s blockade of Hamas in Gaza. Turkey now formally rejects the description of Hamas as a terrorist organization, referring to it as a democratically elected political organization that is merely defending its rightful territory. The AKP government has also cozied up to Hezbollah and Syria while working against Western efforts to halt Iran’s nuclear program.

Here’s the part that ought to scare us: Unlike Turkey, Egypt has never undergone a rigorous, decades-long effort to purge Islam from public life. The AKP had a higher mountain to climb. If the Muslim Brotherhood gets its turn at the wheel and steers as shrewdly, the transformation of Egypt won’t happen tomorrow#...#but neither will it take the eight years Turkey needed.

—  Andrew C. McCarthy, a senior fellow at the National Review Institute, is the author, most recently, of The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America.

Andrew C. McCarthy

Don't Count on Egypt's Army

We cannot trust Egypt's military to combat Islamists.

‘My name is Khalid Islambouli,” the assassin thundered. “I have slain Pharaoh, and I do not fear death!” This was at an annual state parade in Cairo on October 6, 1981. Islambouli, swelling with a delirious pride, had just strafed the reviewing stand with bullets, killing Egyptian president Anwar Sadat and hurtling his nation into chaos.

#ad#That was the plan. Islambouli, like several of his coconspirators, was a Muslim Brotherhood veteran who’d drunk deep the incitements of the Ikhwan’s martyred leader, Sayyid Qutb, but lost patience with the organization’s Fabian approach to revolution. He’d joined Islamic Jihad, one of several splinter groups that would later be folded into al-Qaeda by another Brotherhood alum, Ayman Zawahiri.

They’d hoped to trigger an Islamic upheaval by “cutting off the head of the snake” and seizing power in the ensuing chaos. But apart from murdering the president, the plot failed. Power passed seamlessly to Sadat’s vice president, Hosni Mubarak, who cracked down brutally on the terrorists.

The story is worth remembering as chaos grips Egypt yet again. In the drama three decades ago, one tie beyond citizenship united all the major players -- the villain, the victim, the heroes who put down the uprising, and the bureaucrat who emerged from obscurity to grab the autocratic reins he has yet to relinquish: They were all members of the Egyptian military.

With events on the ground shifting even faster than the Obama administration’s positions on them -- though not quite as quickly as the sudden proliferation of Egypt experts -- received wisdom holds that the one anchor of stability in the unfolding crisis is the military. It is said to be the only solid ground in Cairo’s cataclysm. Otherwise, the scene at Tahrir Square, depending on who is doing the describing and who is projecting which hopes and fears, is alternatively a tea party, a human-rights riot, or an explosion of Islamist rage.

It’s true enough that Egypt’s highly professional armed forces constitute the most revered institution in the country. Their professionalism has been purchased at a cost of nearly $40 billion from U.S. taxpayers since 1978, when Sadat made the peace with Israel that drove the jihadists to kill him. Thus, when analysts herald the stability of Egypt’s military -- fortified by a generation of training and cooperative relations with U.S. warriors -- the implication is that this will be to our benefit. Their patriotism will prevent Mubarak’s worst excesses and usher him out the door, and their pro-Western bent will guard against that worst of all worlds: the very sharia state Khalid Islambouli and his fellow jihadists sought to impose 30 years ago.

Even if everything we’d like to believe about the Egyptian military were true, the dream of secular stability would be very difficult to realize. Thanks to the West’s conflating of democratic processes with democratic culture, the crisis is careering toward a premature “settlement” by popular elections, to be held no later than September. Unfortunately, that is years before civil society -- stunted by the powerful influence of fundamentalist Islam, the constant threat of terrorism, and Mubarak’s iron-fisted rule -- can evolve sufficiently for real self-government.

A transitional military coup would be best for all concerned, but it is very unlikely to happen. The democracy fetish of transnational progressives won’t allow it. That opens the field for the most organized, best disciplined faction, the Muslim Brotherhood. With the administration having finally decided to shove Mubarak under the bus, the Brotherhood and its beard, Mohammed ElBaradei, are hovering.

Let’s assume, for argument’s sake, that Egypt’s armed forces are capable of thwarting the Islamist rise. The question is: Will they?

Khalid Islambouli was a first lieutenant in the army. This station enabled him to be assigned to the parade held that fateful day -- an annual event at which the nation celebrates its great “victory” in the Yom Kippur War of 1973. (Yes, the same war the home team lost to Israel; this is Egypt we’re talking about.) How, you may wonder, does a jihadist terrorist become a military officer and get close enough to kill the Egyptian president, widely known at the time to be a marked man?

#page#Very simple: The Egyptian military is a reflection not of its American trainers but of Egyptian society. Its popularity in the country owes in large part to the fact that almost all able-bodied men are conscripted to serve for one to three years. Its uppermost ranks, from which rose Egypt’s presidents -- Mubarak, Sadat, and modern Egypt’s founder, Gamal Abdel Nasser -- are today largely pro-American. The rank and file, however, have always included thousands of Muslim fundamentalists and radicals. Unquestionably, military service is a leveling experience, creating a common bond that unites different social strata. We should not overstate its effect, though. The military features all the complexity and divisions of Egypt at large.

#ad#Since spearheading Nasser’s coup over a half century ago, the military has followed more than it has led. Nasser dragged it from the British-backed monarchy into the Soviet orbit. Sadat moved it into America’s column. Under Mubarak, it has maintained a cold peace with Israel, but it would be foolish to think new leadership could not shift the military back to hostilities with a nation millions of Egyptians revile -- a nation with which Egypt fought four wars between 1948 and 1973.

In the last 20 years, two former Egyptian military officers have come to prominent attention in the United States. The first was Emad Salem, a pro-American Muslim, who volunteered to infiltrate the New York terror cell formed by Omar Abdel Rahman, the Egyptian “Blind Sheikh” who had issued the fatwa authorizing Sadat’s murder, who called incessantly for the killing of Mubarak, and whose followers bombed the World Trade Center in 1993. Without his help, the FBI could not have disrupted these jihadists, several of whom were arrested in June 1993 while mixing explosives for a planned bombing spree against the Lincoln and Holland Tunnels, the United Nations complex, and a number of U.S. government targets.

The second was a contemporary of Salem’s, Ali Mohammed. He infiltrated the American military on behalf of Islamic Jihad, stealing sensitive files that he took to New York, where he used them to help train the Blind Sheikh’s cell. Later, he became al-Qaeda’s top security specialist, helped bin Laden move his headquarters from Sudan to Afghanistan, forged the terror network’s East African cells, and drew up the plans those cells later used to bomb the American embassy in Nairobi.

In Cairo, the Egyptian military is our last, best hope. We shouldn’t be overconfident.

—  Andrew C. McCarthy, a senior fellow at the National Review Institute, is the author, most recently, of The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America.

Andrew C. McCarthy

Mubarak v. the Brotherhood

It is simply delirious to suggest that we can work with the Muslim Brotherhood, that the Brotherhood has renounced violence, or that a Brotherhood-led government will ultimately be better for the United States or, for that matter, for Egyptians.

We have two principal interests in the region: peace and anti-terrorism. Say what you will about Mubarak, who has committed abominable abuses and stunted the growth of civil society -- albeit in the face of a non-stop terrorist threat that is more immediate and existential than anything we face in the U.S. Mubarak has also kept the peace with Israel, and he has been a real ally against terrorists (as opposed to "allies" who profess allegiance with us but do more to abet than defeat jihadism).

By contrast, the Muslim Brotherhood, which is staunchly opposed to the West and which supports aggression against U.S. forces operating (and promoting democracy) in Muslim countries, is pledged to the destruction of Israel. Hamas is a Brotherhood franchise. The Brotherhood would neither keep the peace nor support our efforts against terrorism. Its doctrine is a pro-terrorist doctrine. If you fall for its claims to be against "terrorism," you are falling for a word game -- they do not consider attacks against Israel or against Western forces in Muslim countries to be terrorism. They consider that to be resistance.

The sharia system a Brotherhood-led government would impose is itself a form of tyranny. It would repress freedom of conscience, individual liberty, and equality under the law. It would validate violence if committed in the service of jihad (and, as we saw when Brotherhood spiritual compass Yusuf Qaradawi endorsed the killing of U.S. troops in Iraq, it would have the support of the influential al-Azhar University in doing so). Moving to a government led or strongly influenced by the Brotherhood would not be a move toward democracy even if it were brought about by the process of free elections. Democracy -- at least as most of us mean it when we say we'd like to see it adopted -- is a culture, not a process.

Finally, Elliot Abrams's argument (see Jonah's post) is absurd. The Brotherhood remains a force to be reckoned with in Egypt, despite numerous attempts to suppress it, because of its tug on Egyptian Muslim society, not because the regime has been insufficiently nuanced in dealing with it. Mr. Abrams is idealizing Egypt, just as Bush democracy project enthusiasts have consistently idealized the Islamic ummah -- prioritizing democratic processes over democratic culture because they will not accept the dearth of the latter (indeed, the hostility towards the latter) in Islam. This is why, for example, Secretary Rice could say with a straight face that 70 percent of Palestinians just want to live side-by-side in peace with Israel when, in fact, well over 70 percent of Palestinians deny Israel's right to exist.

In 2007 polling by the University of Maryland and World Public Opinion, three-quarters of Egyptians said they favor a "strict" application of sharia law in every Muslim country (half said they "strongly" favored it, the other quarter favored it "somewhat"). And while two-thirds approved of "democracy," three-quarters also said they want to "keep Western values out of Islamic countries" -- i.e., their conception of "democracy" is very different from Western democracy (with features like establishment of Islam as the state religion, installation of sharia as a principal source of law, the invalidation of laws that are inconsistent with sharia, etc.). Moreover, fully 92 percent of Egyptians said that the U.S. was trying to weaken and divide the Islamic world. That's probably why 82 percent of them wanted U.S. forces withdrawn from all Muslim countries. 

The Muslim Brotherhood thrives in Egypt because, even if many Egyptians would prefer not to live under strict sharia, Egyptian society as a whole has a greater affinity for Muslim Brotherhood principles than it does for Western principles. The authoritarian regime has had to walk a tight-rope because the Brotherhood enjoys strong support in Egypt as a symbol of Islamic rectitude. Mubarak understood -- manifestly better than many of his critics -- that coming down too hard on the Brotherhood would be seen as an attack on Islam itself. One needn't think too long about the flip-turns our own government has done to avoid being perceived as "at war with Islam" (even though Muslims make up only about one percent of our population) to understand why Mubarak, in the Arabic world's most populous Muslim country, did not see a harder line with the Brotherhood as a very promising strategy.

With due respect to Mr. Abrams, the Brotherhood is regarded in some circles as "moderate" precisely because many Egyptians viewed it as not aggressive enough in pursuing the Islamist agenda. Islamic Jihad (EIJ) and Gamaat al Islamia (the Islamic Group), Egyptian terrorist organizations, broke away from the Brotherhood for just this reason. Mubarak calculated that he had to crack down mercilessly on EIJ and Gamaat but tolerate the Brotherhood (which is nominally banned but permitted to operate as long as it does not get caught orchestrating terrorist operations in Egypt). To maintain that he could have done things differently and that, if he had, the Brotherhood would somehow not be as strong and popular today is to take Egyptian society as we'd like to imagine it. Mubarak had to take Egyptian society as it is.

Andrew C. McCarthy

Fear the Muslim Brotherhood

At the Daily Beast, Bruce Riedel has posted an essay called “Don’t fear Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood,” the classic, conventional-wisdom response to the crisis in Egypt. The Muslim Brotherhood is just fine, he’d have you believe, no need to worry. After all, the Brothers have even renounced violence!

#ad#One might wonder how an organization can be thought to have renounced violence when it has inspired more jihadists than any other, and when its Palestinian branch, the Islamic Resistance Movement, is probably more familiar to you by the name Hamas -- a terrorist organization committed by charter to the violent destruction of Israel. Indeed, in recent years, the Brotherhood (a.k.a., the Ikhwan) has enthusiastically praised jihad and even applauded -- albeit in more muted tones -- Osama bin Laden. None of that, though, is an obstacle for Mr. Riedel, a former CIA officer who is now a Brookings scholar and Obama administration national-security adviser. Following the template the progressive (and bipartisan) foreign-policy establishment has been sculpting for years, his “no worries” conclusion is woven from a laughably incomplete history of the Ikhwan.

By his account, Brotherhood founder Hassan al-Banna “preached a fundamentalist Islamism and advocated the creation of an Islamic Egypt, but he was also open to importing techniques of political organization and propaganda from Europe that rapidly made the Brotherhood a fixture in Egyptian politics.” What this omits, as I recount in The Grand Jihad, is that terrorism and paramilitary training were core parts of Banna’s program. It is by leveraging the resulting atmosphere of intimidation that the Brotherhood’s “politics” have achieved success. The Ikhwan’s activist organizations follow the same program in the United States, where they enjoy outsize political influence because of the terrorist onslaught.

Banna was a practical revolutionary. On the one hand, he instructed his votaries to prepare for violence. They had to understand that, in the end -- when the time was right, when the Brotherhood was finally strong enough that violent attacks would more likely achieve Ikhwan objectives than provoke crippling blowback -- violence would surely be necessary to complete the revolution (meaning, to institute sharia, Islam’s legal-political framework). Meanwhile, on the other hand, he taught that the Brothers should take whatever they could get from the regime, the political system, the legal system, and the culture. He shrewdly realized that, if the Brothers did not overplay their hand, if they duped the media, the intelligentsia, and the public into seeing them as fighters for social justice, these institutions would be apt to make substantial concessions. Appeasement, he knew, is often a society’s first response to a threat it does not wish to believe is existential.

Here’s Riedel again:

By World War 2, [the Brotherhood] became more violent in its opposition to the British and the British-dominated monarchy, sponsoring assassinations and mass violence. After the army seized power in 1952, [the Brotherhood] briefly flirted with supporting Gamal Abdel Nasser’s government but then moved into opposition. Nasser ruthlessly suppressed it.

This history is selective to the point of parody. The Brotherhood did not suddenly become violent (or “more violent”) during World War II. It was violent from its origins two decades earlier. This fact -- along with Egyptian Islamic society’s deep antipathy toward the West and its attraction to the Nazis’ virulent anti-Semitism -- is what gradually beat European powers, especially Britain, into withdrawal.

#page#Banna himself was killed in 1949, during the Brotherhood’s revolt against the British-backed monarchy. Thereafter, the Brotherhood did not wait until after the Free Officers Movement seized power to flirt with Nasser. They were part of the coup, Nasser having personally lobbied Sayyid Qutb (the most significant Ikhwan figure after Banna’s death) for an alliance.

Omitting this detail helps Riedel whitewash the Brothers’ complicity in what befell them. The Ikhwan did not seamlessly “move into the opposition” once Nasser came to power. First, it deemed itself double-crossed by Nasser, who had wooed the Brotherhood into the coup by signaling sympathy for its Islamist agenda but then, once in power, declined to implement elements of sharia. Furthermore, Nasser did not just wake up one day and begin “ruthlessly suppressing” the Brotherhood; the Ikhwan tried to assassinate him. It was at that point, when the Islamist coup attempt against the new regime failed, that the strongman cracked down relentlessly.

#ad#Riedel next asserts: “Nasser and his successors, Anwar Sadat and Mubarak, have alternatively repressed and demonized the Brotherhood or tolerated it as an anti-communist and right-wing opposition.” This, too, is hopelessly wrong and incomplete. To begin with, regardless of how obdurately progressives repeat the claim, Islamism is not a right-wing movement. The Brotherhood’s is a revolutionary program, the political and economic components of which are essentially socialist. It is no accident that Islamists in America are among the staunchest supporters of Obamacare and other redistributionist elements of the Obama agenda. In his Social Justice in Islam, Qutb concludes that Marx’s system is far superior to capitalism, which Islamists deplore. Communism, he argues, faltered principally in its rigid economic determinism, thus missing the spiritual components of Allah’s totalitarian plan -- though Qutb compared it favorably to Christianity, which he saw as insufficiently attentive to earthly concerns.

Nasser’s persecution of the Ikhwan led many of its leading figures to flee Egypt for Saudi Arabia, where the Brothers were welcomed because they were perceived, quite correctly, as urbane but stalwart jihadists who would greatly benefit a backwards society -- especially its education system (Banna and Qutb were both academics, and the Brotherhood teemed with professionals trained in many disciplines). The toxic mix of Saudi billions and Brotherhood ideology -- the marriage of Saudi Wahhabism and Brotherhood Salafism -- created the modern Islamist movement and inspired many of the terrorist organizations (including al-Qaeda) and other Islamist agitators by which we are confronted today. That Wahhabism and Salafism are fundamentalist doctrines does not make them right-wing. In fact, Islamism is in a virulent historical phase, and is a far more daunting challenge to the West than it was a half-century ago, precisely because its lavishly funded extremism has overwhelmed the conservative constraints of Arab culture.

Sadat pivoted away from his predecessor’s immersion of Egypt into the Soviet orbit. He did indeed invite the Ikhwan to return home, as Riedel indicates. Sadat knew the Brothers were bad news, but -- much like today’s geopolitical big thinkers -- he hubristically believed he could control the damage, betting that the Ikhwan would be more a thorn in the side of the jilted Nasserite Communists than a nuisance for the successor regime. Riedel’s readers may not appreciate what a naïve wager that was, since he fails to mention that the Brotherhood eventually murdered Sadat in a 1981 coup attempt -- in accordance with a fatwa issued by Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman (later of World Trade Center–bombing fame) after Sadat made peace with the hated “Zionist entity.”

Sadat’s successor, Mubarak, is undeniably a tyrant who has kept emergency powers in force through the three decades since Sadat’s assassination. Any fair assessment, however, must concede that he has had his reasons. Egypt is not just plagued by economic stagnation and inequality; it has been brutalized by jihadist terror. It would be fair enough -- though by no means completely convincing -- for Riedel and others to argue that Mubarak’s reign has been overkill. It makes no sense, though, to ignore both the reason emergency powers were instituted in the first place and the myriad excuses jihadists have given Mubarak to maintain them.

On that score, the Brotherhood seems comparatively moderate, if only because the most horrific atrocities have been committed by two even worse terrorist organizations -- Abdel Rahman’s Gamaat al Islamia and Ayman al-Zawahiri’s Islamic Jihad, both precursors to al-Qaeda (in which Zawahiri is bin Laden’s deputy). Of course, Zawahiri -- like bin Laden and such al-Qaeda chieftains as 9/11 architect Khalid Sheikh Mohammed -- came of age as a Muslim Brother, and Abdel Rahman notoriously had a close working relationship with the Ikhwan. But even if we close our eyes to the Ikhwan’s contributions to terrorist violence in Egypt since its attempted forcible overthrow of the regime in 1981, we must not overlook the sophisticated game the Ikhwan plays when it comes to terrorism.

Occasionally, the Brotherhood condemns terrorist attacks, but not because it regards terrorist violence as wrong per se. Instead, attacks are criticized either as situationally condemnable (al-Qaeda’s 1998 embassy bombings, though directed at American interests, killed many Muslims and were not supported by an authoritative fatwa), or as counterproductive (the 9/11 attacks provoked a backlash that resulted in the invasion and occupation of Muslim countries, the killing of many Muslims, and severe setbacks to the cause of spreading Islam). Yet, on other occasions, particularly in the Arab press, the Ikhwan embraces violence -- fueling Hamas and endorsing the murder of Americans in Iraq.

In addition, the Brotherhood even continues to lionize Osama bin Laden. In 2008, for example, “Supreme Guide” Muhammad Mahdi Akef lauded al-Qaeda’s emir, saying that bin Laden is not a terrorist at all but a “mujahid,” a term of honor for a jihad warrior. The Supreme Guide had “no doubt” about bin Laden’s “sincerity in resisting the occupation,” a point on which he proclaimed bin Laden “close to Allah on high.” Yes, Akef said, the Brotherhood opposed the killing of “civilians” -- and note that, in Brotherhood ideology, one who assists “occupiers” or is deemed to oppose Islam is not a civilian. But Akef affirmed the Brotherhood’s support for al-Qaeda’s “activities against the occupiers.”

By this point, the Ikhwan’s terror cheerleading should surprise no one -- no more than we should be surprised when the Brotherhood’s sharia compass, Sheikh Yusuf Qaradawi, approves suicide bombings or unleashes rioting over mere cartoons; no more than when the Ikhwan’s Hamas faction reaffirms its foundational pledge to destroy Israel. Still, just in case it is not obvious enough that the “Brotherhood renounces violence” canard is just that, a canard, consider Akef’s explicit call for jihad in Egypt just two years ago, saying that the time “requires the raising of the young people on the basis of the principles of jihad so as to create mujahideen [there’s that word again] who love to die as much as others love to live, and who can perform their duty towards their God, themselves, and their homeland.” That leitmotif -- We love death more than you love life -- has been a staple of every jihadist from bin Laden through Maj. Nidal Hasan, the Fort Hood killer.

#page#To this day, the Brotherhood’s motto remains, “Allah is our objective, the Prophet is our leader, the Koran is our law, Jihad is our way, and dying in the way of Allah is our highest hope. Allahu akbar!” Still, our see-no-Islamic-evil foreign-policy establishment blathers on about the Brotherhood’s purported renunciation of violence -- and never you mind that, with or without violence, its commitment is, as Qaradawi puts it, to “conquer America” and “conquer Europe.” It is necessary to whitewash the Ikhwan’s brutal legacy and its tyrannical designs in order to fit it into the experts’ paradigm: history for simpletons. This substitute for thinking holds that, as Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice famously told an Egyptian audience in 2005, America has too often opted for stability rather than freedom. As a result, the story goes, our nation has chosen to support dictators when we should have been supporting  . . .  never mind that.

#ad#But we have to mind that. History is rarely a Manichean contest between good and evil. It’s not a choice between the pro-Western shah and Iranian freedom, but between the shah and Khomeini’s ruthless Islamist revolution. It’s not a choice between the pro-Western Musharraf and Pakistani freedom, but between Musharraf and a tense alliance of kleptocratic socialists and Islamists. Back in the 1940s, it was not a choice between the British-backed monarchy and Egyptian freedom, but between the monarchy and a conglomeration of Nasserite pan-Arab socialists, Soviet Communists, and Brotherhood Islamists. And today, the choice is not between the pro-American Mubarak and Egyptian freedom; it is a question of whether to offer tepid support to a pro-American dictator or encourage swift transition to a different kind of tyranny -- one certain to be a lot worse for us, for the West at large, and for our Israeli ally: the Muslim Brotherhood tempered only, if at all, by Mohamed ElBaradei, an anti-American leftist who willfully abetted Iran’s nuclear ambitions while running the International Atomic Energy Agency.

History is not a quest for freedom. This is particularly true in the Islamic ummah, where the concept of freedom is not reasoned self-determination, as in the West, but nearly the opposite: perfect submission to Allah’s representative on earth, the Islamic state. Coupled with a Western myopia that elevates democratic forms over the culture of liberty, the failure to heed this truth has, in just the past few years, put Hamas in charge of Gaza, positioned Hezbollah to topple the Lebanese government, and presented Islamists with Kosovo -- an enduring sign that, where Islam is concerned, the West can be counted on to back away even from the fundamental principle that a sovereign nation’s territorial integrity is inviolable.

The Obama administration has courted Egyptian Islamists from the start. It invited the Muslim Brotherhood to the president’s 2009 Cairo speech, even though the organization is officially banned in Egypt. It has rolled out the red carpet to the Brotherhood’s Islamist infrastructure in the U.S. -- CAIR, the Muslim American Society, the Islamic Society of North America, the Ground Zero mosque activists -- even though many of them have a documented history of Hamas support. To be sure, the current administration has not been singular in this regard. The courting of Ikhwan-allied Islamists has been a bipartisan project since the early 1990s, and elements of the intelligence community and the State Department have long agitated for a license to cultivate the Brotherhood overtly. They think what Anwar Sadat thought: Hey, we can work with these guys.

There is a very good chance we are about to reap what they’ve sown. We ought to be very afraid.

—  Andrew C. McCarthy, a senior fellow at the National Review Institute, is the author, most recently, of The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America.

Andrew C. McCarthy

What could be worse than ElBaradei?

Jay could not be more correct that Mohammed ElBaradei is a menace. He is more responsible than any non-Iranian for the progress the mullahs have made on their nuke program (with dishonorable mention to China and Russia) -- although I think another Egyptian, Yasser Arafat, may have been a worse Nobel choice. I also agree that, under the circumstances, Egypt could do worse than having ElBaradei running its government. Some perspective: the guy I convicted in 1995,  Omar Abdel Rahman -- the Blind Sheikh who issued the fatwa approving the murder of Anwar Sadat and tried energetically to have his successor, Hosni Mubarak, killed -- was a great admirer of Ayatollah Khomeini Islamist revolution in Iran and hoped to replicate it (a Sunni version of it) in Egypt, with himself recognized as the top Islamic authority advising the sharia government.

We are beginning to see take shape, though, the something that could be worse than ElBaradei: ElBaradei in collusion with the Muslim Brotherhood.

Assuming the ouster of Mubarak, the Brotherhood has just announced its official support for the establishment of a transitional government under the direction of ElBaradei. In hearing Fox News report this, I was astonished to hear a correspondent opine that just because the Brotherhood is offering its support does not mean ElBaradei would want it. 

A few days ago, ElBaradei gave an interview to Der Spiegel -- Aaron Klein reported on it at WND yesterday. As Klein noted, ElBaradei is widely seen as a staunch ally of the Brotherhood (surprise!) and gave a spirited defense of them that was about as honest as his disclosures about the Iranian nuclear program used to be: "We should stop demonizing the Muslim Brotherhood," he insisted. According to ElBaradei, the Brothers "have not committed any acts of violence in five decades." [ACM note: the Brotherhood killed Sadat in 1981; Hamas kills people everyday.] ElBaradei, who also admires President Obama ardently, said that the Brothers just "want change." Thus, he concludes, "If we want democracy and freedom, we have to include them instead of marginalizing them." [ACM: Yeah, just like we did with Hamas -- and how's that workin' out?]

For its part, the Obama administration -- which has made outreach to the Muslim Brotherhood and its American affiliates a policy priority -- reciprocates ElBaradei's admiration. Robert Gibbs said Friday that the president knows ElBaradei well and has worked closely with him. 

By the way, ElBaradei also says "Israel is the number one threat to the Middle East," and has expressed strong support for the Palestinian "resistance," particularly in Hamas-controlled Gaza (which he calls "the world's largest prison"), because, in his opinion, "the Israeli occupation only understands the language of violence."

Makes you wonder how ElBaradei and the Muslim Brotherhood managed to find each other -- they're so very different. Amazing to see the forces that "change" brings together.

Andrew C. McCarthy

Hamas Is the Muslim Brotherhood

Nina, Hamas’s overt intervention in Egypt is an alarming development, although a predictable one. It is worth pointing out that Hamas is not merely colluding with the Muslim Brotherhood. Hamas is the Muslim Brotherhood. That, of course, will not be what you hear from our foreign-policy experts, such as Obama adviser Bruce Riedel, who are busily sculpting their narrative about how the Brotherhood -- the font on modern jihadist terror -- has renounced violence and is really nothing for us to be very concerned about. But the stubborn fact is that Hamas is the most prominent of the Brotherhood’s Palestinian branches, whose operations long predated Hamas and brought Hamas (a/k/a, the Islamic Resistance Movement) into being.

Don’t take my word for it (although I covered the topic in some detail in The Grand Jihad). Don’t even take the word of the Justice Department, which amply demonstrated during the Holy Land Foundation terrorism financing prosecution that the Muslim Brotherhood’s top project in the U.S. has been to drum up support for Hamas. Look, instead, at some relevant sections of Hamas’s 1988 charter (“The Charter of Allah: The Platform of the Islamic Resistance Movement”), announcing the terrorist organization’s existence:

From the Introduction: This is the Charter of the Islamic Resistance (Hamas) which will reveal its face, unveil its identity, state its position, clarify its purpose, discuss its hopes, call for support to its cause and reinforcement, and for joining its ranks. For our struggle against the Jews is extremely wide-ranging and grave, so much so that it will need all the loyal efforts we can wield, to be followed by further steps and reinforced by successive battalions from the multifarious Arab and Islamic world, until the enemies are defeated and Allah’s victory prevails. Thus we shall perceive them approaching in the horizon, and this will be known before long: “Allah has decreed: Lo! I very shall conquer, I and my messenger, lo! Allah is strong, almighty.”

***

Article Two: The Link between Hamas and the Association of Muslim Brothers. The Islamic Resistance Movement is one of the wings of the Muslim Brothers in Palestine. The Muslim Brotherhood Movement is a world organization, the largest Islamic Movement in the modern era. It is characterized by a profound understanding, by precise notions and by a complete comprehensiveness of all concepts of Islam in all domains of life: views and beliefs, politics and economics, education and society, jurisprudence and rule, indoctrination and teaching, the arts and publications, the hidden and the evident, and all the other domains of life.

***

Article Seven: The Universality of Hamas:….  Hamas is one of the links in the Chain of Jihad in the confrontation with the Zionist invasion. It links up with the setting out of the Martyr Izz a-din al-Qassam and his brothers in the Muslim Brotherhood who fought the Holy War in 1936; it further relates to another link of the Palestinian Jihad and the Jihad and efforts of the Muslim Brothers during the 1948 War, and to the Jihad operations of the Muslim Brothers in 1968 and thereafter. But even if the links have become distant from each other, and even if the obstacles erected by those who revolve in the Zionist orbit, aiming at obstructing the road before the Jihad fighters, have rendered the pursuance of Jihad impossible; nevertheless, the Hamas has been looking forward to implement Allah’s promise whatever time it might take. The prophet, prayer and peace be upon him, said: The time will not come until Muslims will fight the Jews (and kill them); until the Jews hide behind rocks and trees, which will cry: O Muslim! there is a Jew hiding behind me, come on and kill him! This will not apply to the Gharqad, which is a Jewish tree. [This is taken directly from authoritative hadith collections of Bukhari and Muslim.]

Article Eight: The Slogan of the Hamas: Allah is its goal, the Prophet its model, the Qur’an its Constitution, Jihad its path and death for the case of Allah its most sublime belief.

Note that Hamas’s slogan is indistinguishable from the Brotherhood’s: “Allah is our objective, the Prophet is our leader, the Koran is our law, Jihad is our way, and dying in the way of Allah is our highest hope. Allahu-akbar!”

Andrew C. McCarthy

Untangling Ghailani

An ugly but just ending to a terrorist's trial

In Manhattan on Tuesday, Judge Lewis Kaplan gave al-Qaeda terrorist Ahmed Ghailani a sentence of life imprisonment after his conviction on a single count of conspiring to bomb American embassies in 1998. Despite Ghailani’s acquittal on the remaining 284 charges, it was a just result -- the one I believed Kaplan, a good judge, would arrive at.

A just result, but an ugly one nonetheless. Ghailani could have received as little as 20 years in prison -- which, his lawyers understandably argued, is exactly what Congress had in mind for a defendant who is not responsible for killing anyone. By whacking him with a life term, the judge in effect sentenced Ghailani for the very crimes of which he’d been found not guilty, including a specific charge of conspiracy to kill Americans and every one of the 224 homicide counts.

#ad#To draw a comparison, conspiracy to bomb government buildings, the only charge on which Ghailani was convicted, is the same behavior engaged in by President Obama’s friend Bill Ayers. Yet Ayers is, as he put it, “Guilty as sin, free as a bird.” Ghailani will never see the light of day again. The only real difference between them is competence: Ghailani and his fellow jihadists succeeded in carrying out twin massacres in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam; Professor Ayers and the other Weather Underground bombers killed only a few of themselves in a botched effort to assemble explosives.

Ghailani faces life behind bars not because of the conspiracy but because of the dead -- even though the verdict says he did not kill them. Judge Kaplan gamely tip-toed around that uncomfortable fact, referring repeatedly to Ghailani’s “confederates” and “the conspiracy,” the better to stress the brute savagery of the plot rather than Ghailani’s ambiguous culpability for its results. But under the “rule of law” -- a phrase attorney general Eric Holder has turned into a verbal tic -- the plot is what matters most. Ghailani’s culpability for the results was not proven. Still, the murders clearly drove the sentence. “It was a cold-blooded killing and maiming of innocent people on an enormous scale,” said Kaplan, an assertion that rests uneasily with the murder acquittals. The judge added that Ghailani “knew and intended that people would be killed as a result of his own actions and the conspiracy he joined” -- a finding tough to square with Ghailani’s acquittal on the charge of conspiracy to kill Americans.

Alas, the rule of law is at war here with reality. The inconsistent, ostensibly irrational verdicts are not representative of what the twelve jurors actually concluded. The lopsided majority of them wanted to convict Ghailani on all the charges -- the only verdict that would have made logical sense. One juror, by contrast, wanted to acquit him across the board.

If this standoff had held, there would have been a hung jury and a need to try the case all over again. The clamor around such a mistrial would have featured protests from military-commission enthusiasts because (a) unanimous verdicts are not required for conviction in a non-capital commission case, and (b) the chance of seating an irrational juror on a panel of military officers is significantly smaller than in the crap-shoot that is civilian jury selection. That is, under the rule of law applicable in military commissions, Ghailani almost certainly would have been found guilty on all counts, just as he should have been. That would have been justice.

There was no mistrial, though, because the jury opted for compromise rather than stalemate. The majority caved on 284 counts, the naysayer’s steep price for conviction on one. Compromise verdicts are an unsavory part of our system, some real-world blight on the dreamy “rule of law” rhetoric. They’re the wall stain we hang a picture over because repainting is expensive -- and retrials are prohibitively expensive. Defendants, we tell ourselves, are protected from being railroaded: If the compromise conviction is not supported by sufficient evidence, it will be tossed out by the trial judge or the appeals court -- no harm done. And if the conviction is backed by sufficient proof, the defendant has nothing to complain about because the compromise acquittals are an undeserved windfall.

Our rationalizations do not make the specter of compromise any less scandalous, however. To appreciate this is to understand how thoroughly politicized the civilian-vs.-military debate on terror trials has become.

#page#The ACLU’s Hina Shamsi extolled Ghailani’s life sentence as a demonstration that “federal courts are not only the right place but the most effective place to prosecute terrorism suspects” -- that they work and “military commissions don’t.” Daphne Eviatar of Human Rights First (HRF) piled on, squealing that “you don’t see people like Ahmed Ghailani walking free” once the civilian justice system is done with them. To be sure, sentencing in civilian terrorism cases has been commendably severe. It compares favorably to commission sentencing, which has been erratic. Still, if you’ve been paying attention for the last two decades, you can’t help but ask: What on earth has happened to the ACLU, HRF, and the rest of the Left’s cavalcade of civil- and human-rights crusaders?

It’s a rhetorical question, of course. We know what has happened to them. They have become blindly invested in the quest to eviscerate the Bush administration’s war paradigm for counterterrorism and to reestablish the Clintonian law-enforcement model.

#ad#Remember, before there was a Bush administration, these progressive activists were telling us that life imprisonment without parole -- the sentence they now celebrate -- was punishment too cruel to satisfy our “maturing” society’s “evolving standards of decency.” And during the Bush administration, no self-respecting human-rights lawyer would spew the words “people like Ahmed Ghailani” with such contempt. From 9/11 through Jan. 21, 2009, “people like Ahmed Ghailani” -- anti-American jihadists -- were a cause célèbre to which organizations like the ACLU and HLF (not to mention law firm’s like Eric Holder’s) devoted bottomless energy and resources, doing everything in their power to get them “walking free” again.

They’ve changed their tune because of their politics. There is now a Democrat of the extreme Left in the White House, so anything goes. It’s that simple.

Let’s consider what happened to Ghailani through the prism of the Left’s rhetoric during the blistering campaign against Bush counterterrorism. Let’s imagine what sorts of things an Obama campaign adviser, say Eric Holder, might have said to a lefty lawyer outfit like the American Constitution Society (ACS) about the case. (And if your imagination is challenged, this excerpt from Holder’s June 2008 speech to the ACS might help.)

The court refused to throw Ghailani’s indictment out despite what human-rights lawyers typically call “outrageous government misconduct” -- the CIA’s harsh interrogation methods (“torture”) and the gross violation of the defendant’s rights to counsel and a speedy trial, caused by Bush’s shackling him indefinitely at Gitmo. The jury eventually reached a verdict that was patently irrational and thus unjust, convicting Ghailani of conspiring to murder people for whose murders it found he was not to blame. The government was nevertheless permitted to argue at sentencing that he was a “mass murderer” who “took away hundreds and hundreds of lives,” even though this was exactly what the jury said he was not. Indeed, the government knows Ghailani is a mass murderer mainly because of his confession, which was elicited so abusively that the jury was not told about it. Finally, the judge imposed the heretofore excessively cruel and unusual term of life without parole -- based, transparently, on the homicides the defendant was acquitted of committing.

Don’t get me wrong: Every seeming injustice I just catalogued is, under the law, completely defensible. There is bleating about outrageous government misconduct whenever there have been irregularities in the collection of evidence, but indictments are almost never dismissed -- particularly when the disputed evidence is suppressed, as it was in Ghailani’s case. Delay in bringing charges is actionable only in the rarest instances, when it is egregiously calculated to undermine the defense (Ghailani was a war prisoner -- his Gitmo detention was not about gaining a tactical advantage at trial). Defendants in terrorism cases are routinely imprisoned for years before their cases are heard. Inconsistent verdicts are unseemly but routine and unassailable on appeal. The government is often given to hyperbole at sentencing; it never matters. In imposing a sentence, the law has long authorized judges to take into account all the facts known to them -- even conduct for which the defendant has been acquitted or has never been charged. Whether a sentence is appropriate, moreover, is largely a matter of whether it is permitted by the statute that defines the crime of conviction, and here, life imprisonment is a permissible sentence (although not a mandatory one) for conspiring to bomb government buildings.

The irony here is that in the heady Clinton days -- to say nothing of the Bush era, during which the Left branded the Justice Department “the American Taliban” -- such legal niceties were irrelevant to the ACLU, HRF, and lawyers like Human Rights Watch’s Jennifer Daskal. Prosecutors like me could make all of these winning arguments; to the Left, the law didn’t matter. What mattered was the narrative.

Civilian terror trials were said to be Kafkaesque nightmares in which jurors, cowed by the government-manufactured atmosphere of intimidation, convicted defendants for no better reason than that they were Muslims. If the proof of guilt was undeniable, we were treated to airy lectures about the need to temper justice with mercy, then warned that aggressive investigations and stiff sentences would convey the impression that Islam itself was on trial -- fueling terrorist recruitment. And no matter how legally defensible, the gory details of Ghailani’s trial and sentencing would surely have induced blood-curdling screams from human-rights lawyers. In the contest between moral preening and jurisprudential rigor, there would be no doubt which had pride of place.

There is still no doubt. It’s just that the goal posts of moral preening have been moved. Civilian terror trials, once the bane of the lawyer Left’s existence, are now, they tell us, the indispensable measure of our virtue. So, like the Obama Justice Department, where the Bush-deranged Ms. Daskal is now a top adviser, the Bush-deranged ACLU and HRF proclaim the Ghailani case a smashing success, a triumph of the rule of law -- and never you mind a few little hiccups.

Times change. The will-to-power Left, though, stays forever the same.

—  Andrew C. McCarthy, a senior fellow at the National Review Institute, is the author, most recently, of The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America.

Andrew C. McCarthy

Moderate Replacement for Moderate Imam Rauf: Public Apostates from Islam Should Be Jailed

Aaron Klein is the World Net Daily reporter and WABC radio host to whom Imam Feisal Rauf could not bring himself to admit that Hamas is a terrorist organization, an episode I wrote about in a column last week. Mr. Klein has just uncovered a recent recording in which the imam who has replaced Rauf as the face of the Ground Zero Mosque explains that Islam's sharia law requires the imprisonment of former Muslims who publicly renounce Islam.

"If someone leaves the din, leaves the path privately, they cannot be touched. If someone preaches about apostasy, or preaches their views, they're jailed," stated Shaykh Abdallah Adhami, a 44-year-old American and scholar of sharia. His remarks were made in a lecture two months ago.

Here is the moderate part: As Adhami acknowledged, many sharia jurists say that apostates -- Muslims who renounce Islam -- must be killed. But Adhami maintains that sharia distinguishes between "public" apostates and "private" apostates. Only the former, he says, must be punished and -- to be even more moderate about it -- they don't have to be killed . . . just "jailed so they are contained."

Feel better now? Not surprisingly, this enlightened position on apostasy places Shaykh Adhami close to another well known moderate, Sheikh Yusuf Qaradawi -- the Muslim Brotherhood's spiritual adviser who is, as previously noted, is much touted by Imam Rauf.

In The Grand Jihad, I outlined Sheikh Qaradawi's views on apostasy from Islam, responding to his many admirers on the American Left -- such as Georgetown University's Saudi funded Islamic studies centers -- who regard him as a great modernizer . . . notwithstanding his pronouncements that Islam will "conquer" America and Europe; his fatwas approving suicide bombings and the killing of Americans in Iraq; his incitement of rioting over the Danish cartoons; etc. I put it this way:

The sheikh’s admirers are quick to point out that he does not call for the death of all apostates, as terrorists and many other Islamists commonly do. And it’s true: for private apostates who quietly go their separate way, Qaradawi holds that ostracism is a sufficient penalty, with God left to impose the punishment of eternal damnation at the time of His choosing. Qaradawi draws a sharp distinction, however, on public apostasy, in which the renouncing Muslim seeks to infect and divide the umma with his disbelief.  For this “offense” -- commonly committed by Muslim intellectuals and reformers -- Qaradawi decrees that “the punishment . . . is execution.” [See MEMRI Report No. 208, "Accusing Muslim Intellectuals of Apostasy" (2005).]

It was Sheikh Qaradawi's influential associate, the late Sheikh Mohammed al-Ghazali, who approved the killing of an authentic and courageous Muslim moderate reformer, Farag Fouda, by Egyptian militants. Sheikh Ghazali told an Egyptian court while testifying on behalf of the assassins that “anyone who openly resisted the full imposition of Islamic law was an apostate who should be killed either by the government or by devout individuals.” Fouda was a public apostate and critic of Islam. As Qaradawi has taught, "The gravest danger facing the Muslim is the one that threatens his spiritual existence -- i.e., that threatens his belief. Therefore, apostasy, or unbelief after having been Muslim, is the gravest danger to society." (For more on what Islam's scriptures say about apostasy, see Robert Spencer's post about Shaykh Adhami at Jihad Watch.)

Qaradawi and Ghazali both became credentialed sharia authorities at al-Azhar University. As I discuss in this morning's column, al-Azhar is the most influential center of Muslim learning in the world, and one of its scholars has just explicitly endorsed "offensive jihad."

Getting back to Shaykh Adhami, Aaron Klein goes on to cite a report by Joseph Klein about his appearance at the 2000 convention of the Islamic Association for Palestine (IAP). (See this pro-Islamist site, scroll to the last item on IAP's 14th Annual Convention.) The convention's theme was "All Palestine Is Sacred." Also addressing the gathering were Sami al-Arian, the Palestinian Islamic Jihad operative later convicted of material support to terrorism, and Azzam Tamimi, a British Palestinian supporter of Hamas and the Taliban, who rejects democracy and endorses suicide terrorism.

Coincidentally, IAP was established by Hamas, which is the Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood. IAP's role was to coordinate U.S. support for Hamas's cause, the destruction of Israel. In the Brotherhood's 1991 internal memorandum -- presented by the Justice Department at the trial of an Islamic "charity," the Holy Land Foundation, for funding Hamas -- IAP was identified as one of the "organizations of our friends" that was complicit in what the Brotherhood described as its strategy for "eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within" by "sabotaging its miserable house." They referred to the strategy as the "Grand Jihad," which, I must admit, is a catchy title. 

How could anyone be so intolerant and Islamophobic that he can't see how enormously our country would benefit from permitting Imam Rauf, Shaykh Adhami, and their friends to raise a colossal Islamic center and mosque on the site where Muslim terrorists killed nearly 3,000 Americans?

Andrew C. McCarthy

Ghailani Sentenced to Life Imprisonment in Embassy Bombings

Ahmed Ghailani, the al-Qaeda terrorist who was convicted on only one count, and acquitted on 284 counts, in his civilian trial for bombing the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998 has been sentenced to life imprisonment (without parole) by federal judge Lewis Kaplan. The New York Times has the story about today's sentencing, here. But you already knew this was going to happen . . . if you read this.

Andrew C. McCarthy

Islam and the State of the Union

Don't expect the president to tell the truth about Islamic doctrine tonight.

‘The state of our union is . . . denial -- at least when it comes to Islam.”

I’m not holding my breath waiting for President Obama, as denier-in-chief, to make that pronouncement when he addresses the nation this evening at one of Leviathan’s more notorious wastes of time, the State of the Union address. Indeed, Washington’s annual celebration of itself, high on pageantry and bereft of substance, is unlikely to dwell much on the “religion of peace,” notwithstanding its centrality -- acknowledged or not -- to much of U.S. policy. Such silence is fitting, as is its flip side: to brand as “Islamophobia” any deviation from the party line -- a bipartisan party line if ever there was one. An adult discussion of Islam would bring down the house of cards on which our policy is based. Better to say nothing.

#ad#Thankfully, the Jeruslam Post’s Barry Rubin won’t play along. He disrupted our sweet dreams last week with a pronouncement from al-Azhar University. Al-Azhar is the centuries-old seat of Sunni scholarship in Egypt, a status that vests its sharia scholars with unparalleled doctrinal influence over the world’s 1.4 billion Muslims.

It is conventional wisdom among the West’s Islamophilic opinion elites -- and thus prototypically among Obama administration officials -- that jihad, the Islamic injunction to struggle in Allah’s cause, has been distorted by sharia-obsessed Islamophobes into a summons to destroy the West. Jihad, this wisdom holds, is just an internal exercise in self-betterment -- kind of like greening the planet and brushing after every meal. Jihad becomes confrontational and even violent only in self-defense, when Muslims are truly under siege.

Au contraire, says al-Azhar’s Imad Mustafa. To be sure, he agrees that the doctrine of “defensive jihad” calls for war against non-Muslims who “attack” Muslims. But defense, for purposes of this doctrine, is in the eye of the beholder -- or, more accurately, in the eye of the mufti who decides what sorts of provocations constitute an “attack.” Implicitly, that leaves room for lots of pretty offensive jihad if the mufti construes the concept of “attack” broadly enough. What is bracing about Mustafa’s new fatwa, however, is that he’s not leaving anything to chance. He’s making what is implicit unmistakably explicit.

Besides the defensive variety, Mustafa expressly endorses “offensive jihad” as the license to attack non-Muslims living in non-Islamic countries. It is the consensus of sharia scholars, he instructs, that offensive jihad is “permissible” in three different situations: (a) “to secure Islam’s border”; (b) “to extend God’s religion to people in cases where the governments do not allow it”; and (c) “to remove every religion but Islam from the Arabian peninsula.”

The unapologetic aggression affirmed here is breathtaking. Ever wonder why Muslims demand a right of return to Israel for Palestinians but impose the death penalty on Palestinians who sell land to Jews? Why Muslims demand the right to build a grand mosque and Islamic community center on the lower Manhattan site of radical Islam’s 9/11 atrocity but think nothing of barring non-Muslims from Mecca and Medina pursuant to their scriptures? It is because Islam -- not radical Islam, political Islam, or Islamism, but Islam itself -- is threaded with an intolerance that would be undeniable to anyone not in denial.

This is not something al-Qaeda dreamed up. Mainstream Islamic scholarship is reflected by Mustafa’s first and third claims: a right to brutalize non-Muslims in order to ensure that an Islamic territory remains Islamic, and a right to purge non-Islamic influences from the Arabian Peninsula. The latter, in fact, explains not only Saudi Arabia’s official policy of apartheid in Islam’s major cities but al-Azhar’s prior green-lighting of attacks on American troops in Iraq.

#page#More immediately alarming for us, however, is the second justification Mustafa offers for offensive jihad. As Rubin correctly contends, this injunction “to spread God’s religion” is not limited to circumstances in which a government has imposed an absolute prohibition on Islam, or at least driven Islam from the public square as Ataturk did in Turkey. It would also approve campaigns of aggression against countries that bar any aspect of Islamic belief or practice that Muslim scholars deem “necessary” to the full implementation of Islamic law.

Al-Qaeda seeks to spread Islam by brute force. The Muslim Brotherhood and its American confederates -- CAIR, the Muslim American Society, the Islamic Society of North America, etc. -- agree with al-Qaeda on the endgame but part company on methodology. Theirs is a sophisticated potpourri of political agitation, legal extortion, public-relations legerdemain (such as Imam Feisal Rauf’s claim that the U.S. Constitution is perfectly consonant with sharia -- which is true only in the sense that the Constitution does contain the seeds of its own undoing), and clever campaigns to legitimize terrorism practitioners while ostensibly condemning terrorism in the abstract. But whether we are talking about violent jihadists or stealth jihadists, notice that there is no real daylight between what these forces seek to achieve and what the most influential Islamic scholars would authorize.

#ad#Nothing about that would surprise us at this point if we were watching as yet another terrorist murderer of yet another moderate Muslim politician is celebrated as a hero in Pakistan; if we saw the new Iraq, of which we are midwife, purge Christians and other non-Muslims from its territory; if we noticed the Ahmadi, a Muslim minority sect, being brutally persecuted for beliefs that are heretical to Muslims taking their cues from al-Azhar; and if we were studying polling that tells us most Muslims in Islamic countries would like to see a strict application of sharia.

But we are not watching, seeing, noticing, or studying. President Obama just announced the appointment of Quintan Wiktorowicz to the National Security Council as “senior director for [what else?] global engagement.” A perfect fit for the administration, Wiktorowicz is a former Rhodes College professor whose claim to academic fame is the trendy theory that, as NPR admiringly put it, “very religious Muslims were in fact the people who ended up being the most resistant to radicalization.”

Who, then, becomes a radical, Mr. Wiktorowicz? They tend to be (in NPR’s description of his theory) “people who don’t have a good grounding in the religion.” Grounding in what aspect of the religion? We’re not told -- just left with his insistence that Islam is ecumenical and non-violent, end of story. The game, though, is given away with our new engagement director’s explanation that any effective “counterradicalization” campaign must include “beefing up education about Islam among Muslims themselves.”

Alas, real “education about Islam” would include such discomfiting texts as Imad Mustafa’s latest fatwa. Wiktorowicz is not talking about teaching the Islam that is. He’s talking about teaching the Islam of his dreams. On the Islam that is, al-Azhar has the ear of Muslims. The Obama administration has the ear of NPR.

Denial is not a river in Egypt. Turns out it’s a university in Egypt.

— Andrew C. McCarthy, a senior fellow at the National Review Institute, is the author, most recently, of The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America.

Andrew C. McCarthy