The Investigative Project on Terrorism has posted a disturbing essay by Dr. Essam Abdallah, an Egyptian liberal intellectual and college professor, outlining how the Islamist lobby in the U.S., led by the Muslim Brotherhood front group CAIR, has shaped the Obama administration’s policies regarding the Arab Spring (emphasis added):
The most dramatic oppression of the region’s civil societies and the Arab Spring is not by means of weapons, or in the Middle East. It is not led by Gaddafi, Mubarak, Bin Ali, Saleh, or Assad. It is led by the powerful Islamist lobbies in Washington DC. People may find my words curious if not provocative. But my arguments are sharp and well understood by many Arab and middle eastern liberals and freedom fighters. Indeed, we in the region, who are struggling for real democracy, not for the one time election type of democracy have been asking ourselves since January 2011 as the winds of Arab spring started blowing, why isn’t the West in general and the United States Administration in particular clearly and forcefully supporting our civil societies and particularly the secular democrats of the region? Why were the bureaucracies in Washington and in Brussels partnering with Islamists in the region and not with their natural allies the democracy promoting political forces?
Months into the Arab Spring, we realized that the Western powers, and the Obama Administration have put their support behind the new authoritarians, those who are claiming they will be brought to power via the votes of the people. Well, it is not quite so.
The Muslim Brotherhood, the Islamic Nahda of Tunisia, the Justice Party of Morocco and the Islamist militias in Libya’s Transitional National Council have been systematically supported by Washington at the expense of real liberal and secular forces. We saw day by day how the White House guided carefully the statements and the actions of the US and the State Department followed through to give all the chances to the Islamists and almost no chances to the secular and revolutionary youth. We will come back to detail these diplomatic and financial maneuvers which are giving victory to the fundamentalists while the seculars and progressives are going to be smashed by the forthcoming regimes.
Read the whole thing.
To understand the disgusting behavior with regard to the Arab Spring by the Obama administration (and the left in general), take note of three things.
First, the old saying, “The enemy of my enemy is my friend.”
Second, Barack Obama’s 2001 remarks dissing the U.S. Constitution (emphasis added):
But, the Supreme Court never ventured into the issues of redistribution of wealth, and of more basic issues such as political and economic justice in society. To that extent, as radical as I think people try to characterize the Warren Court, it wasn’t that radical. It didn’t break free from the essential constraints that were placed by the founding fathers in the Constitution, at least as its been interpreted and Warren Court interpreted in the same way, that generally the Constitution is a charter of negative liberties. Says what the states can’t do to you. Says what the Federal government can’t do to you, but doesn’t say what the Federal government or State government must do on your behalf, and that hasn’t shifted and one of the, I think, tragedies of the civil rights movement was, um, because the civil rights movement became so court focused I think there was a tendancy to lose track of the political and community organizing and activities on the ground that are able to put together the actual coalition of powers through which you bring about redistributive change. In some ways we still suffer from that.
Third, Supreme Court Justice Ginsburg’s recent advice to Egypt not to emulate the U.S. Constitution (and its “negative liberties”), but instead to emulate constitutions that are modeled after the U.N.’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights — a collection of “positive rights” (to a decent job, a nice place to live, plenty of food, free health care, etc.) creating a powerful government capable of redistributing anything and everything “equitably.”
The enemies of the Obama administration and leftists in general are those who embrace Lockean “negative rights,” individualism, limited government, and free markets.
The enemies of the Islamofascists in the Middle East are those who embrace Lockean “negative rights,” individualism, limited government, and free markets.
Thus the enemies of the Obama administration and leftists in general are also the enemies of the Islamofascists. Ipso facto, the Islamofascists are friends of the Obama administration and the left in general.
Politically, the Islamofascists are both authoritarians and egalitarians. Members of the Obama administration and leftists in general are both authoritarians and egalitarians. Authoritarians and egalitarians are inevitably drawn to each other. This is not news to anyone who’s read David Horowitz’s Unholy Alliance.
