It is not just that the United States government has aligned itself with the avowed vanguard of Islamic jihad -- the Muslim Brotherhood [MB] -- or committed American troops to battle (in Libya, and maybe soon in Syria) to ensure the victory of al-Qa'eda-linked militias. It is not just that whenever an opportunity has arisen, as in Iran in 2009, or pre-and-post revolutionary Egypt, or the Syrian civil war, the U.S. deliberately has chosen to side with the forces of jihad and shariah law and against the voices of civil society and genuine democracy.
The current U.S. administration has actually managed to flip from one side to the other, from "for the people in the streets" to "against the people in the streets," as recently became evident in late June 2013, when protests mounted against the incompetent, oppressive regime of Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood. The U.S. Ambassador to Egypt, Anne Patterson, reportedly asked Coptic Pope Tawadros II, "to urge the Copts not to participate" -- as well as other groups, apparently -- in the demonstrations planned for June 30. There had been no such request reported two years earlier when Muslim Brotherhood supporters thronged Tahrir Square to demand that long-time U.S. ally President Hosni Mubarak step down. Nor did Ambassador Patterson pressure Morsi's Muslim Brotherhood government to return power to Hosni Mubarak, an American ally for three decades, after those street demonstrations prompted the Egyptian military to remove him from power in February 2011. She also did not protest even after Morsi seized power outright from that military command in August 2012. Patterson has, however, reportedly been pressuring the Egyptian military command to reinstate Morsi after it stepped in once again on July 3, 2013 to remove chaos from the streets by removing Morsi from office.
What these policies make painfully obvious that the United States of America has apparently abandoned the core principles of its Founding Fathers and capitulated to the forces of jihad and shariah.The vision of America as "Shining City on a Hill," an exceptional nation whose leaders champion the natural rights of the individual against the liberty crushing oppression of totalitarian theocracy, for the moment at least, has been suborned to a different vision: the vision of an America as a force for harm in the world, that apologizes for its exceptionalism, abandons its friends and allies, emboldens its enemies, and seeks unilateral disarmament so as to better meet its president's desire to be just another "citizen of the world."
The years from 2009-2013 have witnessed the remaking of the map of the Middle East and North Africa [MENA] region. The driving forces behind the Islamic uprisings were powerful indeed: beginning no later than the summer of 2010, al-Qa'eda and the Muslim Brotherhood meshed their tactics and timing in a synchrony that previously had only characterized their identical Islamic ideology. Absent any serious groundwork over the preceding years by the U.S., whether official or by NGOs, to nourish genuine pro-democracy voices, once al-Qa'eda's July 2010 Inspire magazine call for jihad had been met with MB Supreme Guide Muhammad Badi's answering declaration of war in the cause of Islam [jihad] in late September 2010, and al-Azhar had provided the fatwa [Islamic religious edict] of approval for offensive jihad in January 2011, there was no one capable of standing effectively against the tidal wave of popular pro-shariah sentiment. Perhaps no one could have held back that long suppressed desire for Islamic Law.
But the U.S. did not even try. To the contrary, the current administration consistently and repeatedly appeared to respond eagerly to the calls for revolution from the Muslim Brotherhood's senior Islamic scholar, Yousef al-Qaradawi. When al-Qaradawi said that Mubarak had to go, the U.S. waited a whole three days before throwing America's key ally in the Middle East for over three decades under the bus. When al-Qaradawi called for Libyan rebels to kill Muammar Qaddafi (so the al-Qa'eda jihadis in his jails could get out and join the revolution), the U.S. led the Western military campaign that brought al-Qa'eda, the MB, and chaos to Libya. And when al-Qaradawi issued a call for jihad in Syria, in early June 2013, the U.S. quickly issued an invitation to Abdullah bin Bayyah (al-Qaradawi's vice president at the International Union of Muslim Scholars), who told an Al-Jazeera reporter that, "We demand Washington take a greater role in [Syria]." It took the U.S. less than one week after al-Qaradawi's fatwa to announce authorization of stepped-up military aid to the al-Qa'eda-and-Brotherhood-dominated Syrian rebels. The White House announcement came just a single day after bin Bayyah met with National Security and other senior administration officials.
When looking for some explanation, some reason for such astonishing behavior from the erstwhile leaders of the free world, the U.S. government's "disastrous Muslim outreach efforts," as described by Patrick Poole, must top the list. Unfortunately for us, what may have been rationalized as choosing the lesser of two evils -- picking the "good jihadis" (Muslim Brotherhood) over the "bad jihadis" (al-Qa'eda) -- instead has turned out exactly as dangerously detrimental to U.S. national security as the Islamic enemy planned.
Driven by fear of more violent terror into foolish relationships with the Armani-suited, soft-spoken purveyors of the "civilization jihad" who demand neutralization of our national defenses, we have officially purged our counterterrorism lexicon and training curriculum, and blacklisted and professionally marginalized our most capable instructors of Islamic doctrine, and thereby destroyed all ability to pre-empt Islamic terror in the ideological, pre-attack phase. The carnage at the April 15, 2013 Boston Marathon is Exhibit A for the catastrophic and inevitable domestic consequences of this misguided policy. Abroad, the current administration's unabashed embrace of jihadist forces, while abandoning courageous moderates to their fate, is contributing in a significant way to the march of Islamic law across the MENA region.
None of these cataclysmic changes benefits U.S. national security or that of our friends and allies. Far from inoculating the homeland against more Islamic terror, the current administration's limp response to direct enemy threats, such as its institutionalization of the U.S. government's increasingly cozy relationship with the Muslim Brotherhood, has only earned it the contempt of our adversaries, both Muslim and non-Muslim, and laid the country wide open to more terrorism. Russian strongman Vladimir Putin's body language at his June 2013 G-8 Summit meeting with Obama should have been enough to anticipate the predictable 'Nyet' from Moscow when it was suggested that renegade National Security Agency (NSA) leaker, Edward Snowden, might be put on a plane home from Sheremetyevo airport. Worse yet, as it is now increasingly difficult to recognize -- and even forbidden by official stated policy within the U.S. military and security agencies -- to act upon evidence of deepening jihadist commitment before an attack occurs, there will be more acts of fard 'ayn [individual jihad], just as al-Qa'eda has encouraged.
The growing list of demands being placed before U.S. leadership by its "partners" in Muslim outreach leads in one direction only: acquiescence to Islamic conquest and expansion in the MENA region accompanied by full withdrawal of all U.S. forces, both civilian and military, from allegedly "Muslim lands." Failure to comply in an expedient manner with Muslim demands will result in the repeated application of terror measures, until that state of submission is achieved which Brigadier-General S.K. Malik wrote about in his 1979 manual, "The Quranic Concept of War":
Terror struck into the hearts of the enemies is not only a means, it is the end in itself. Once a condition of terror into the opponent's heart is obtained, hardly anything is left to be achieved.
A number of demands, some even delivered in person and (incredibly) by invitation, have already been presented. Omar Abdel Rahman, known as the Blind Sheikh, a renowned juridical scholar of Islam and the emir (leader) of the Egyptian Gama'at al-Islamia terror group, is serving a life sentence in the U.S. after being convicted on terrorism charges. Those charges were based on his leadership of a jihadist cell responsible for bombing the World Trade Center in 1993, and other simultaneous plots to conduct bombings of New York City landmarks, including the Holland and Lincoln Tunnels, the United Nations complex, the George Washington Bridge, and more. After his successful prosecution by a Department of Justice legal team led by Andrew McCarthy, Abdel Rahman issued the fatwa that Usama bin Laden cited publicly as the shariah justification for the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center. Demands by Gama'at al-Islamia (the Islamic Group) for Abdel Rahman's release were punctuated by the brutal 1997 massacre of tourists in the Egyptian city of Luxor. The following year, in 1998, the Islamic Group joined bin Laden's and al-Qa'eda's formal declaration of war [jihad] against the U.S. As might be expected, Gama'at al-Islamia is on the U.S. Foreign Terrorist Organizations list.
