On the heels of Secretary of State John Kerry’s announcement of another quarter-billion dollars in U.S. taxpayer aid to Egypt, the Blaze has unearthed some more hair-raising video from the “apes and swine” archive of that country’s Islamic supremacist president, Mohamed Morsi.
This undated footage features a younger Morsi as an up-and-coming Muslim Brotherhood firebrand, railing at then-president Hosni Mubarak’s coziness with Israel and the United States. Morsi’s device of choice in the speech is the rhetorical question: He posits a series of them, the obvious answer to each being Mubarak, who is portrayed as selling out the Egyptians to Islam’s two mortal enemies:
Who has pushed the nation into the margins? Who has misled it? Who gave in to her enemies? Who tried to sell her in the slave market? Who did that?
And who extended his had to the Zionists? Who has claimed that he wants to make peace with [them] (in order) to keep their chair, to remain in his place? Who’s given [them] the chance to interfere in our business?
Who has brought the Americans here? Who has given [in] to them? Who is dealing with them? Who’s making deals with them, and works for them, and is pleased with crumbs on their tables?
Who’s the one that knows them, who goes to them, who hosts them? Who’s the one who knows their desires? Who knows their countries? Who knows their children? Who obeys them? Who wants to continue having relations with them?
The Obama administration has evidently convinced itself that Islamic supremacism is the solution, not the problem, in the Middle East. As a result, Islamic supremacists are not vetted before the administration provides billions of dollars in aid and sophisticated weaponry to Egypt — even as the administration pretends that the “sequester” requires canceling White House tours, releasing illegal aliens from custody, and slashing the national-security budget at home. In fact, had it not been for some superb vetting by Sam Tadros at The Weekly Standard last week, the State Department (joined by First Lady Michelle Obama) would have presented an award to a raging anti-Semite who praised the 9/11 atrocities (“Today is the anniversary of 9/11. May every year come with America burning”).
But readers of Spring Fever: The Illusion of Islamic Democracy (my book on the so-called “Arab Spring,” recently released in paperback) will not be surprised by anything Morsi has said. The book explains why Morsi was the perfect choice for the Brotherhood to push after its preferred candidate, the charismatic Khairat al-Shater, was banned by the then-military government from seeking the presidency:
Morsi was a condign choice as the Brotherhood’s fallback plan. He is a Shater protégé whose rise in the organization, and to the leadership of the Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party, owed to the backing of his revered patron, as well as to Morsi’s own firm belief in the organization’s traditions of discipline and obedience to hierarchical superiors. He was twice jailed, for brief intervals, during Mubarak’s reign. He is also said to have had a difficult relationship with a rebellious group of young Brothers expelled from the organization during the Tahrir Square uprisings. Morsi adheres fiercely to classical sharia – reportedly, part of his dispute with the renegades involved his support for hardline Brotherhood positions that women and non-Muslims should be barred from running for president and that laws should be vetted by religious scholars. As a parliamentarian during Mubarak’s reign, moreover, he bitterly opposed the regime’s energy trade with Israel (Egypt provides 40 percent of Israel’s natural gas), in addition to arguing that pro-American elements in the regime were trying to weaken both Islamic education and the influence of al-Azhar scholars.
#moreOf course, Morsi’s major priority since being elected president (other than promoting Hamas and stumping for the release of the Blind Sheikh) has been to impose a sharia constitution. As recounted in the book, this is what Morsi campaigned on.
#more#Spring Fever further notes that Morsi was described by Shater as an “architect” of the Brotherhood’s “Nahda Project” — the “Islamic Renaissance” planned for post-Mubarak Egypt. As I recounted on that score:
In April 2011, Shater delivered a lengthy lecture, “Features of Nahda: Gains of the Revolution and the Horizons for Developing.” . . . Shater delivered his words in Arabic to like-minded Islamists – he was not speaking in English for Western consumption, as the Brothers do when they wish to appear as irenic pragmatists.
Shater’s instruction was remarkable. He emphasized that the Brotherhood’s fundamental principles and goals never change, only the tactics by which they are pursued. “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 of the ummah and its civilization on the basis of Islam, and to subjugate people to God on earth.” Shater went on to reaffirm the time-honored plan of the Brotherhood’s founder, Hassan al-Banna, stressing the need for both personal piety and internal organizational discipline in pursuing the goal of worldwide Islamic hegemony.
The lecture dovetailed with a 93-page platform released by the Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party, under the guidance of its leader Mohammed Morsi, a Shater confidant. The platform proposed to put every aspect of human life under sharia-compliant state regulation. The document was unmistakably anti-Western and anti-Israeli: structuring civil society on the foundation of “Arab and Islamic unity”; making the “strengthen[ing] of Arab and Islamic identity” the “goal of education”; making treaties (think: Camp David Accord) subject to approval by the population (i.e., the same population that had just, by a landslide, adopted the Islamist position on constitutional amendments); and describing Israel, “the Zionist entity, [as] an aggressive, expansionist, racist and settler entity.”
The book also relates Patrick Poole’s reporting about how Morsi found his gateway to the Brotherhood in the United States while he was a student in California: the Muslim Students Association, the foundation of the Brotherhood’s American infrastructure. It was in the MSA that Anwar al-Awlaki cut his teeth; another of its many interesting alumni is Wael Jalaidan, a founder of al-Qaeda. As Spring Fever further notes, Sam Tadros describes the MSA indoctrination program as a lengthy process of study and service that leads to [Brotherhood] membership — a process “designed to ensure with absolute certainty that there is conformity to the movement’s ideology and a clear adherence to its leadership’s authority.”
I have no access to classified information anymore. Everything I was able to find out about Morsi is open-source information, all of which is easily accessible and assimilable. The same can be said of the record of the Holy Land Foundation case, in which the Justice Department proved that the Brotherhood is virulently anti-American, seeking, in the words of its own internal memorandum, “to eliminate and destroy Western civilization from within” by “sabotage.” Anyone willing to take the time to investigate, and to bypass political correctness, can easily understand Morsi, the Brotherhood, and the ideology of our enemies.
Yet, at a time when we are trillions of dollars in debt and the administration is busy demagoguing Republicans over the “painful” cuts required by the sequester that was President Obama’s own idea, somehow we’re to believe that the Muslim Brotherhood is something Americans need to keep paying for. We will pay for that.