Andrew C. McCarthy's Blog, page 9

Morsi’s Maneuver

Phase II of Egyptian president Mohamed Morsi’s declaration of sweeping dictatorial powers was completed on Thursday night. That is when the “constituent assembly” hastily completed a draft constitution that would enshrine sharia principles as fundamental law.

Morsi grabbed the reins with a shrewd caveat: His dictatorship would end once the draft constitution was approved by Egyptians in a national referendum -- which is to say, once the dictatorship had served its purpose. Nearly three months ago, in my e-book Spring Fever: The Illusion of Islamic Democracy (which is about to be published in paperback), I explained that Morsi’s agglomeration of power -- which was already underway only weeks after his election -- was just a placeholder. He is an Islamic-supremacist hardliner whose ultimate goal has always been to impose sharia, the real dictatorship.

#ad#Remember the Brotherhood’s notorious motto, which includes the proclamation “the Koran is our law.” It is about to be. In effect, Morsi has used the West’s democracy fetish to put a gun to his population’s head: Either democratically approve anti-democratic sharia or accept the sharia-compliant rule of your democratically elected Islamist despot. Some choice.

Naturally, secularists and religious minorities are grousing. This has the Western media, once again, in full spring-fever flush. For our intelligentsia, the Middle East is a wonderland where Islamists are imagined to be “moderate” (even “largely secular”!) and -- to hedge their bets, on the off chance that the Islamists turn out to be, well, Islamists -- the population is imagined to be teeming with freedom-loving Jamal al-Madisons who crave American-style civil rights. In reality, supremacist Islam is the predominant ideology of the region. The Muslim Brotherhood is strong because it is the avant-garde of the Islamic masses. Non-Islamist democrats are a decided minority.

Of course, in a place like Egypt, with its population of 80 million people, a decided minority can easily be masqueraded as the majority. The West’s progressive media is good at that -- ignoring tea-party throngs while lavishing coverage on five-person Occupy protests as if they were a groundswell. But, you see, the hocus-pocus works here only because we’ve ceded all the leading institutions of opinion to progressives for a half-century. Conditioned to see what they’ve been told to believe, half of our population no longer sees through the smoke and mirrors.

In contrast, the Islamists control and otherwise intimidate Egyptian society’s influential institutions by vigorously enforcing sharia’s repression of discussion and dissent. The public knows the tune is called by the likes of Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the Brotherhood’s powerhouse jurist, not by Wael Ghonim and the young, tech-savvy progressives beloved of the New York Times. In Egypt, the conspiracy theories run against the progressives. The public won’t be snookered into seeing an Islamist uprising as a “democratic” upheaval. They’ll leave that to us.

The Times and the Brotherhood-smitten Obama administration won’t tell you, but Spring Fever will: The constitution was always the prize. That is why the Brothers pursued it with their signature mendacity. The story goes back to the weeks immediately after Mubarak’s fall in early 2011 -- back to the most tellingly underreported and willfully misreported event in the “Arab Spring” saga: Egypt’s first-ever free election.

With the trillion-plus dollars U.S. taxpayers have expended to promote “Islamic democracy” and its companion fantasy that elections equal democracy, you’d think you might have heard a bit more about the maiden voyage in Arabia’s most important country. But no, the story barely registered. That is because the Islamists crushed the secular democrats. To grasp what happened on Thursday night, you need to understand why. That first election, zealously contested in sectarian terms, was precisely about Egypt’s future constitution.

Technically, the referendum concerned amendments to the constitution in effect during Mubarak’s reign. Despite the “Arab Spring” paeans you were hearing from Washington, Egyptian democrats knew they were weak. To have any hope of competing with the Brotherhood’s vast, long-established, highly disciplined organization, they would need time. So they argued that before parliamentary and presidential elections could take place, a new constitution should be written. That would take a while and would put voting off into the distant future. The idea was that as long as no one had been elected yet -- as long as the Islamists could not claim a popular mandate -- the democrats would be in a better position both to influence the content of the constitution and to buy the time necessary to build party organizations that might contest elections effectively.

#page#The Brothers are no fools. They realized that rapidly held elections would favor them, and if they won big, they’d have a hammerlock on the constituent assembly that would write the constitution. They also grasped the disdain in which the West, under progressive regimes, holds military governments. They’d watched how their Islamist ally, Turkey’s prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, had leveraged American and European pressure to beat down his military -- the pro-Western opposition to his anti-Western Islamic supremacism. The Brotherhood knew the U.S. and the EU would be similarly -- and self-destructively -- supportive of a call for quick elections that would pressure Egypt's reigning military junta to cede authority to a “democratic” civilian government.

#ad#Consequently, the Brothers insisted that parliamentary and presidential elections could proceed promptly if the public just approved a handful of amendments to the current constitution, with a new constitution to be drafted afterwards.

As is its wont, the Brotherhood was deceitful about its intentions. To arm their Western apologists and assuage those Egyptians who might think a new government’s constitution should be in place before the new government is elected, the Brothers swore up and down that they understood constitutions are different from ordinary legislation. To be legitimate, they soothingly agreed, a nation’s fundamental law must reflect a consensus of the whole society -- guaranteeing the rights of women and religious minorities. Beyond that, though, the Islamist campaign over the referendum portrayed secular democratic opponents of the amendments as “enemies of Islam” and “enemies of the revolution” who secretly supported the old regime and its Zionist allies.

When the votes were counted, it was a rout. The Brotherhood’s amendments were adopted by a margin of 78 to 22 percent. With the handwriting on the wall that the referendum would blow the cheery “Arab Spring” narrative to smithereens, the Western media ignored it. Once the numbers were in, they dismissed it. The historic vote, we were told, was just a hyper-technical matter to determine when elections would be scheduled -- move along, nothing else to see here. But in fact, the amendments referendum foreshadowed today’s Islamist Winter. It exactly tracked the nearly four-to-one margin by which the Brotherhood and its Salafist allies would swamp the secular democrats in the parliamentary elections that followed.

The Brothers being the Brothers, they lied at each stage of the game. In the amendments referendum, they lied about their commitment to societal “consensus”; upon winning, they elbowed the democrats aside and infused the draft constitution with sharia principles. When they got their quick elections, they lied about how many seats they would seek in parliament, again to assuage those worried about Islamist control of the government. In going back on that commitment, they promised that they would not field a candidate for president. But once overwhelming control of parliament was secured, they reneged on that promise, too -- announcing the candidacy of their charismatic leader, Khairat al-Shater.

Mind you, all of that happened before you ever heard of Mohamed Morsi. He is an afterthought: the Plan B the Brothers came up with when Shater -- Morsi’s mentor and patron -- was elbowed out of the race in the panicked military junta’s last gasp. While Morsi basks in the spotlight, you should know that Shater is the power behind the throne because he is the avatar of sharia. He is the author of the Brotherhood’s announced “Islamic Renaissance” plan, which the Western media continue to ignore. As Spring Fever recounts, however, here is how Shater proclaimed the Brotherhood’s objective in April 2011, right after the Islamist victory in the amendments referendum:

You all know that our main and overall mission as Muslim Brothers is to empower God’s religion on earth, to organize our life and the lives of the people on the basis of Islam, to establish the Nahda [i.e., the Renaissance] of the ummah [i.e., the notional global Muslim nation] and its civilization on the basis of Islam, and to subjugate people to God on earth.

Morsi accidentally happened into notoriety because he is a true believer and a faithful Shater servant. In fact, before Shater was excluded from presidential contention, Morsi was a constant presence at his side, introduced at rallies as an “architect” of Shater’s “Renaissance” plan. His principal task as president has been to get a new sharia constitution across the finish line.

That is why he claimed dictatorial powers last week: not to aggrandize himself further but to shield the constituent assembly from being de-commissioned by judges. Unlike Erdogan, who has ruled Turkey for a decade, Morsi has not yet been in power long enough to change the complexion of Egypt’s judiciary. It is still filled with Mubarak-era appointees and, to the extent the minority secular democrats have any toehold in Egypt, it is in the courts. So Morsi issued his “sovereign” decree, denying the judiciary any power to invalidate the draft constitution, as the non-Islamists have petitioned it to do. That means the draft constitution will be submitted to the public for an up-or-down vote.

#page#Consistent with the Arab Spring fable to which they continue clinging, Western commentators are enthralled by the new round of Tahrir Square protests against Morsi’s power grab. But they are a pale imitation of the anti-Mubarak uprising, because the Islamists now side with the dictator. They are the zealots who gave the original Tahrir protests their fearsome edge. Morsi is not backing down, because he is doing what he was put there to do and he has little to fear. He has already faced down the remnants of Mubarak’s armed forces and replaced them with Brotherhood loyalists -- a ragtag collection of Facebook malcontents does not faze him. He also knows the national referendum on the new constitution will go the same way as the original referendum on constitutional amendments: Sharia will win going away.

#ad#Deep down, the Western media know it too. Desperate to preserve its narrative about moderate, modernizing Islamists, Reuters was quick to suggest that the Brotherhood-dominated constituent assembly had not really Islamized the new constitution. Sure, it provides that “principles of sharia” are the main source of legislation, but that, the report crowed, is the same thing the Mubarak-era constitution said -- the Islamists did not alter it. You are supposed to conclude from this that “principles of sharia” are not as repressive as plain old “sharia” (the formulation preferred by Salafists) would have been.  

Yet, the new constitution actually goes much farther. Not only does it add provisions that make clear “principles of sharia” means “sharia”; it also installs the scholars of al-Azhar University as official expert consultants on all sharia-related matters -- a longtime Morsi goal. Egypt thus becomes the Sunni version of Iran’s totalitarian regime, in which Shiite mullahs exercise ultimate authority.

And how exactly is sharia interpreted by the scholars of al-Azhar, whose alumni include such jihadist eminences as Sheikh Qaradawi and the Blind Sheikh? Not to wear you out with Spring Fever, but as it outlines (with citations to the Azhar-approved, Brotherhood-certified sharia manual, Reliance of the Traveller), they interpret it to call for: death to apostates from Islam; “charitable” contributions to those fighting jihad (expressly defined as “war against non-Muslims”); discrimination against women; discrimination against non-Muslims; death to homosexuals; death to those who spy against Muslims; death by stoning for adulterers; and so on.

It is going to be a long, cold spring.

— Andrew C. McCarthy is a senior fellow at the National Review Institute and the executive director of the  Philadelphia Freedom Center . He is the author, most recently, of  Spring Fever: The Illusion of Islamic Democracy , which was published by Encounter Books.

Rich on the Brotherhood

The boss also has a great column at Politico today on Morsi's organization, the Muslim Brotherhood -- a column I would brag about even if Rich hadn't been good enough to mention me. Particularly good is his dissection of the New York Times' account of Obama's swoon over Morsi's "pragmatism" during the recent spike in the unending war of aggression waged against Israel by Hamas (the terrorist organization that is Brotherhood's Palestinian branch and a close Mosi ally). The article, Rich explains, "ought to be preserved in amber as a record of 21st-century liberal naiveté." Amen. 

Jonah on Morsi

If you haven't read it, you should.

I'm especially glad Jonah ended with the warning -- which should be obvious enough based on what Morsi has done over the last several months, but is explicit for anyone who has taken the time to study Morsi's career -- that Morsi is not a "moderate." As I recount in Spring Fever, he has long been regarded as a hardliner in Muslim Brotherhood circles, which is to say: his zeal stands out even in a crowd of zealots. He is in the same school of thought as another hardliner heavily influenced by the Muslim Brotherhood, Turkey's strongman Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who indignantly denies that there is any such thing as "moderate Islam" -- in fact, he says the term "is offensive and an insult to our religion. There is no moderate or immoderate Islam. Islam is Islam, and that's it."

Jonah has Morsi pegged ... and that's it.

Re: Benghazi, Rice and the 'Consulate'

Jonah, those are all excellent points -- and I especially agree that Steve has long been right (as have you) in pointing out the White House's propensity to downplay terror attacks (I'd call them "jihadist" attacks if we were still allowed to say "jihad"). I just want to react to two things you cover, not to disagree but to make a couple of points worth making.

I do think Benghazi could be an impeachable scandal, and I don't think this is an extreme position. Impeachment is a political remedy for gross abuses or power (including derelictions of duty). We do not yet have the answers about what happened on September 11 -- most significantly, when did the commander-in-chief learn of the terrorist attack on the compound and what action did he take to defend Americans who were besieged for over seven hours under circumstances where there were U.S. military assets an hour away? We also do not know how the Mohammed movie cover-up was orchestrated, although the evidence and common sense point to the White House. With four Americans killed and the nation appallingly misled in the stretch-run of a presidential campaign, this is a far more consequential matter than those that led to the Watergate and Lewinsky investigations. A commander-in-chief's dereliction of duty and his administration's intentional lying to the American people -- to say nothing of its overbearing prosecution of the filmmaker in a transparent effort to shift responsibility to him -- would be impeachable offenses if they are proved.

Understand, I am not under any illusions that the Benghazi scandal will actually result in anyone's impeachment, much less removal from office. Again, impeachment is a political remedy, not a legal one. At a critical political moment, Mitt Romney, as the GOP's presidential candidate, was the leader of the president's opposition party. For whatever reason, he calculated that it was in his interest not to focus on Benghazi -- indeed, he and his advisers somehow decided it was to his advantage to allow no daylight between Obama's handling of foreign affairs and what a President Romney would do.

I point this out not to dwell on daftness of this strategy, but to make the simple point that it is very hard to resurrect a serious scandal when the opposition's standard-bearer treats it like a trifle and the matter thus fades away for three or four weeks. Even if Benghazi bears out our worst suspicions, the average person will reasonably ask: "How can this be impeachable when Romney didn't even think it was worth talking about?"

Second, your excerpt of the Rice interview by Jake Tapper is very interesting -- raising something I'd missed up until now. Amb. Rice is quoted as claiming: "[W]e had a substantial security presence with our personnel ... and the consulate in Benghazi. Tragically, two of the four Americans who were killed there were providing security. That was their function." (Emphasis added.)

Question: Why did Rice refer to our "consulate in Benghazi"?

We now know that the U.S. facility in Benghazi was not a consulate. Consular functions in Libya are handled in Tripoli. More to the point, Ben Rhodes, the White House deputy national security adviser, has explained that the "talking points" from the CIA off which Rice was working had been edited by the White House to reflect that there was no consulate in Benghazi. As Fox News reported on November 17:

The White House denied allegations Saturday that it scrubbed terrorist involvement from original CIA talking points on the fatal Libya attacks – part of a weekend back and forth in which both parties continued to defend their positions.

White House Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes said only one minor change was made by the Oval Office.

"The only edit that was made by the White House and also by the State Department was to change the word 'consulate' to the word 'diplomatic facility,' since the facility in Benghazi was not formally a consulate," Rhodes told reporters Saturday aboard Air Force One.

"We were provided with points by the intelligence community that represented their assessment. The only edit made by the White House was the factual edit about how to refer to the facility," Rhodes also said.

This raises at least two issues. First, it certainly appears that Ambassador Rice was not going strictly by the CIA talking points, as she has claimed. She said it was a consulate even though the White House had taken pains to remove the designation "consulate" from the talking points.

Second, and more importantly, what was the administration up to in Benghazi? In the Jake Tapper interview, Rice asserted -- at least incorrectly, if not falsely -- that two of the Americans killed on September 11 had the assigned "function" of "providing security" for a "consulate."

By the administration's own admission, the facility was not a consulate. So what exactly were those two Americans doing at this "diplomatic facility"? 

Expenditure of U.S. Taxpayer Dollars Is Up to Congress, Not the IMF

As Patrick's excellent post demonstrates, the State Department moves seamlessly from Obama's fictional account of the Benghazi massacre to Obama's fictional account of Egypt's Islamist dystopia.

There is much to be said about Egypt in the grip of the Muslim Brotherhood -- e.g., the lunatic lionizing of Morsi, a Muslim Brotherhood hardliner, for mediating a ceasefire in which Israel (a) is placed on a par with Hamas, a terrorist organization that is the Muslim Brotherhood's Palestinian branch, and (b) is now expected to ease its blockade of Hamas-controlled Gaza, a longtime Brotherhood goal; the latest Morsi power grab; the fact that challenging Brotherhood aggression has become much more difficult because of the Beltway's bipartisan democracy fetish. I want to focus for now, though, on the insanity of American funding for Egypt's virulently anti-American Islamist rulers.

As Patrick recounts, the State Department is vigorously defending Obama's underwriting of Morsi's Islamic supremacist regime -- both direct American taxpayer assistance (through payments and debt forgiveness) and indirect American taxpayer assistance through the International Monetary Fund. American taxpayers foot 18 percent of the IMF bill -- nearly three times more than the next highest contributor, Japan. To support Islamic supremacist governments like Egypt's through the IMF, we thus pay six times more than Saudi Arabia, the leading global propagator of Islamist ideology.

So why doesn't the administration use this financial leverage to pressure Egypt to turn away from repressive sharia and adopt real democracy? According to the State Department, because the conditions that can be placed on an IMF funding grant are primarily "in the economic arena ... not the political arena."

This, of course, is the problem with ceding sovereign decisions, such as which foreign governments to support, to international institutions rather than making them on our own as our Constitution intends. There is no global consensus about politics -- to the IMF, ours is just another system, like China's, Russia's or Iran's. Consequently, the internationalists tell us, the only strings on IMF loans should involve repayment arrangements and the like.

Wrong. The Obama administration would like you to think our hands are tied by international understandings. They are not. Our Constitution still controls our affairs and our government's actions. Under our Constitution, Congress, not the IMF, gets to decide whether our grossly indebted government sends American taxpayer dollars to Egypt at all. It is also for Congress, not the IMF and not the State Department, to decide what conditions to place on any funding. Moreover, though it has become the fashion to allow the president to waive conditions imposed by Congress, there is no requirement that lawmakers permit this to happen. 

Congress can cut off U.S. funding to Egypt. Congress can also cut off, or at least slash, U.S. contributions to the IMF that are underwriting anti-American governments. Of course, Congressional Republicans will give you the usual song-and-dance about how they "only control one-half of one-third of the government." But it happens to be the one-half of one-third that the Constitution makes supreme in the matter of raising and spending public money. Obama would have no money to give to Egypt unless Congress first gave it to him. 

As the Justice Department proved in court five years ago, the Muslim Brotherhood's professed mission in the United States is to eliminate and destroy Western civilization. When will Congress insist that we stop putting American taxpayers on the hook to pay for this grand jihad?

If You Read Spring Fever, Egypt's Crisis Is No Surprise

I'm also grateful to Lou Dobbs for observing last night that events in Egypt are playing out exactly as predicted in Spring Fever: The Illusion of Islamic Democracy -- my eBook which is about to be published in paperback. The country is aflame again because there is no "Arab Spring." We are witnessing the rise of Islamic supremacists who regard democracy not as a way of life but as a route to power. Rather than opposing them, Obama is the wind at their backs.

Emboldened by U.S. backing and funding, Mohamed Morsi, the Muslim Brotherhood heavyweight Egyptians elected to be their president, has essentially declared dictatorial powers -- i.e., that his "sovereign" actions are beyond judicial review. This is actually the second phase of the power-grab; no one noticed the first, a few months back, because Western progressives were too busy swooning over Morsi's sacking of the generals to be much bothered by his usurpation of legislative authority.

Now, Morsi is riding roughshod over the judiciary. His objective is to clear the field of secular interference so the Islamist-dominated "constituent assembly" can finish writing and ramming through a new constitution that further suffocates Egypt in the classical sharia framework favored by the Brothers and their allies (including Mohammed al-Zawahiri, who is the brother of al-Qaeda's leader, and the Islamic Group [Gama'at al Islamia], the Blind Sheik's jihadist organization).

As I argued in Spring Fever, the Brotherhood in Egypt is following an easily accessible, albeit widely ignored, game-plan. It is the one by which Islamists moved Turkey back into their column, away from real democracy. It took Erdogan's Islamist government a decade to flip Turkey. I predicted that things would go much faster in Egypt, where they never tried an 80-year secularization project, where Islamic supremacism has deep roots, and where the Brotherhood has always been a powerhouse. It's happening. Fast.

Benghazi and Rice's Disastrous Meeting with McCain, Graham and Ayotte

Greetings Cornerites ... nice to be back after a short mental health break (mainly spent on a field trip with 10-year-old hockey studs).

At FoxBiz last night, Lou Dobbs invited John Bolton and me to weigh in on the latest Benghazi news -- Susan Rice's disastrous meeting with GOP Senators McCain, Graham and Ayotte, against the continuing tragicomic backdrop of Obama administration fumbling: the acting CIA director first blaming the FBI for removing references to al Qaeda and terrorism from Rice's talking points; then retracting that claim, acknowledging that it was the CIA that excised these key points, but being unwilling or unable to explain how and why.

Between Rice's quest to succeed Hillary Clinton at the State Department and finger-pointing between the intelligence community and the White House, it would be easy to get lost in the sideshows. As I tried to stress again last night, the central issue in probing the Benghazi massacre is President Obama's dereliction of duty during a seven-and-a-half hour siege in which, as commander-in-chief, he failed to take adequate action to protect Americans under attack. Rice did not lie to the country for her own benefit. The CIA did not author a misleading account of what happened for its own benefit. The obvious beneficiary of these shenanigans was Barack Obama -- whose Libya policy of empowering Islamists created the conditions for the killing of four Americans, and whose reelection campaign was based on the fiction that al Qaeda had been defeated by his killing of bin Laden.

When it comes to Benghazi, the cover-up is not worse than the crime. The main issues remain: Obama's overall policy of promoting anti-Western Islamists under the guise of "democracy" (i.e., his four years of "spring fever"); Obama's specific abdication of duty while Americans were under attack; and the matter of what the administration was up to in Benghazi -- were Libyans being detained there? was the administration engaged in an Iran-Contra style operation to arm the Islamsit-dominated Syrian opposition?

The Rice/CIA Follies may be a route to the truth, but Congress must not let it become a distraction from the truth.   

The Ceasefire

It's amusing to read (in Patrick's update) that the Israeli government has agreed, as part of the "ceasefire," to stop the "targeting of individuals." What moral universe do we live in where Hamas launches hundreds of missiles and sets off bombs the intent of which is the mass homicide of civilians, yet what the world is whipped up about is Israel's targeted assassination of the jihadist leaders who direct the mass homicide of civilians?

If you're actually concerned about human rights, Israel's approach, targeting the terror chiefs in order to minimize civilian casualties (notwithstanding that Palestinian civilians are the ones who voted to put Hamas in charge), compares quite favorably to Hamas's intentional targeting of civilians and its storage of military assets in and around civilian infrastructure -- guaranteeing that there will be Palestinian civilian casualties when Israel inevitably reacts to Hamas's relentless provocations. If Israel is not going to target the terrorist leaders -- who then have license to orchestrate mass-murder attacks with impunity -- what is it going to target?

Interesting that Israel is pressured to treat the terrorist leaders as if they were heads of state but the Palestinians are never expected to concede that Israel has a right to exist. In fact, Hamas's reason for existing is to destroy Israel by violent jihad -- as I've pointed out here before, that's not just me saying so; it's in the Hamas charter. I wonder what, for example, the State Department and our Muslim Brotherhood "allies" in Egypt and Turkey would say were Prime Minister Netanyahu to counter, "No ceasefire, and we're going to keep targeting individuals, until Hamas repudiates the introductory section of its charter": 

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.”

"And the charter's Article 7": 

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 Islamic scripture -- the hadith collections of Bukhari and Muslim.]

There are no ceasefires other than in the diplomats' Islamophilic imaginations. Hamas is at permanent, existential war with the Jewish state. So are the region's other Islamists. These "ceasefires" are just periodic lulls that allow Islamists to catch their breath and rearm for the jihad's next round, while the diplomats browbeat Israel into more concessions -- assuring the jihadists that their barbarism works. The war will continue until one side decisively wins, meaning the other decisively loses. With all that is stacked against them, with the perverse way the supposedly civilized world averts its eyes from the unabashed savagery of Israel's enemies, it is a marvel that Israelis remain so strong and so decent. 

Along Comes Hamas

The day of reckoning is here.

For over 30 years, the United States government and the institutions that drive public opinion have made like Susan Rice when it comes to the ideological threat that Islamic supremacists pose to freedom, fabricating reasons to remain in denial. Thus inured, the American people have elected, and now reelected, a president notoriously fond of America-bashing Islamists. The attraction would not be hard to understand if we were not so ideology-averse -- GOP strategists having made Obama’s radicalism a subject nearly as off-limits as Islamic supremacism, helpfully leaving the Left to fill the canvas with their portrait of Mitt Romney: “Where Gordon Gekko Meets Michael Vick.”

The president is a movement leftist who sees in our society a condemnable legacy of racism, imperialism, and economic exploitation that cries out for “fundamental change.” That is not meaningfully different from the Islamist perspective of America: The Brotherhood’s self-proclaimed mandate to “eliminate and destroy Western civilization from within” by “sabotage” is, in effect, a cognate summons to “fundamental change,” even allowing that Islamists are driven to statism by sharia rather than Marxism. The Brotherhood’s American mouthpiece, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, brags that the president nabbed 85 percent of the Muslim vote on November 6 -- larger even than Obama’s lopsided share of the Hispanic vote, which has GOP strategists hyperventilating. You wouldn’t want to take CAIR claims at face value, but their ardor for Obama, like the Brotherhood’s, is palpable. And as we’ve seen for four years, it is not an unrequited love.

#ad#So along comes Hamas. Just days before the presidential election, the terrorist organization -- begotten by the Brotherhood and serving as its Palestinian branch -- spearheaded an Islamist offensive, firing in just a few days over 120 rockets into the Jewish state from its home base in Gaza. You may not have heard about it until a few days after the election. Like Iran’s act of war in shooting at a U.S. drone in international waters, it signaled a further dangerous unraveling of the Middle East that undercut the media narrative of Obama as foreign-policy chess master, so it was tucked under the rug. But it could not be ignored forever, for it is not just another spike in the ever-thrumming Gaza border skirmish. It is the renewal of an unending war -- an existential one for Israel, which is expected to fight “proportionately,” with both hands tied behind its back, yet blithely accept, as the international community has, the barbaric Islamist claim that nothing short of Israel’s destruction will be satisfactory.

By its own declaration, Hamas will be at war with Israel until the latter’s demise. Toward that end, the jihad has now been taken to population centers such as Tel Aviv. As of this writing, the Israeli death toll stands at three, kept low only by the crudeness of the jihadist weapons and tactics.

By the calculation of terrorism analyst Ryan Mauro, the onslaught begun last week brought the yearly total of missile attacks on Israel to about 700. That is, while the Obama administration has been facilitating the Muslim Brotherhood’s rise in Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, and soon Syria -- with Obama drawing ever closer to Turkey’s Islamist prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, even as Erdogan champions and funds Hamas -- Gaza’s jihadists have been emboldened to step up their terror campaign.

#page#And it is not just Gaza’s jihadists. Understand: This is not Hamas’s war of extermination against Israel. It is Islam’s. And yes, for the millionth time, there are various ways of interpreting Islam, but the Islam that matters in the Middle East, the Islam that animates tens of millions of Muslims, is Islamic supremacism. Israel, the canary in the West’s coal mine, is not besieged by an eccentric doctrine weaved by Hamas, Hezbollah, and al-Qaeda. Jihadist terrorists are just the point of the ideological spear.

#ad#Recent polling shows that four in five Egyptians (i.e., about 60 million people) believe the Camp David Accords -- the treaty that has kept peace between Egypt and Israel for 30 years -- should be dissolved. It is the same four out of five Egyptians that, given the chance, voted to put Islamists in control of their government. Just as Muslims have chosen to empower Islamists in Turkey, Gaza, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Tunisia, as well as in Lebanon and Libya to a lesser but still consequential extent.

The jihad against Israel “isn’t a matter of individuals, not a matter of community. It is a matter of a nation. The Arab nation, the Islamic nation.” So exclaimed Egyptian prime minister Hisham Qandil on Thursday in Gaza. He had been sent there to show solidarity with Hamas by Mohamed Morsi, the Brotherhood leader Egyptians elected as their president. “We are all behind you,” Qandil continued -- behind “the struggling nation#...#that is presenting its children as heroes every day.”

This is how the Middle East’s Muslims see the situation. They are not Palestinians, Egyptians, Saudis, Iraqis, and so on. They are the ummah, the “Islamic nation.” For them, Gaza is not a regional dustup over parochial grievances. It is a civilizational struggle to be fought to the finish -- the finish being when the enemy is vanquished. We used to fight wars that way, too. The fact that we’ve decided total victory by force of arms is a quaint concept does not mean everybody else has. Islamists define victory in the Middle East as the annihilation of Israel. That is the ambition of the region, not just of Hamas. Our government’s decades-old claim that the aggression results from a “perversion of Islam” weaved by a fringe of “violent extremists” is dangerously delusional.

Delusion, of course, is nothing new. For 30 years, ever since the Carter administration hailed Ayatollah Khomeini as a “saint,” willful blindness has been the order of the day. It induced the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations to insist that Islam was a “religion of peace” even as scripture-citing Islamists repeatedly mass-murdered Americans. But Barack Obama is something else again. This president has supplanted conscious avoidance of our enemies’ ideology with empathy. Our government no longer just ignores Islamist goals; it affirmatively empowers Islamist factions.

It has been only eleven days, but we’re already seeing the wages of November 6. The world has become a much more dangerous place, and not just for Israelis.

— Andrew C. McCarthy is a senior fellow at the National Review Institute and the executive director of the  Philadelphia Freedom Center . He is the author, most recently, of  Spring Fever: The Illusion of Islamic Democracy , which was published by Encounter Books.

Re: The Second Letter

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