Only fools, and the easily fooled rush in.
The rush to embrace el-Sisi because he’s against the Muslim Brotherhood, doesn’t mean he’s for us, our values and Western ideas based upon the enlightenment. Dr.Andrew Bostom has been from the very beginning, pointing out all the glaring inconsistencies in El-Sisi’s actions, speeches and papers (past and present), and warns our influential opinion makers on the conservative side, the need to take a step back and look at the picture as a whole.
El-Sisi’s Jihad Against Freedom of Conscience
The Egyptian president’s much-heralded speech bears no resemblance to his life’s work.
by ANDREW G. BOSTOM
A recent PJ Media blog chastises mainstream (essentially Left) media for largely ignoring Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi’s 1/1/15 speech, an address much ballyhooed by conservatives (see for example, here, here, and here). This criticism of the Left-dominated media is warranted.
But conservative champions of Sisi’s address, and his subsequent unique, if brief appearance at Coptic Christmas mass held in the St. Mark’s (Abbasiya) Cathedral last Tuesday (1/6/15), are also guilty of what Ogden Nash referred to as “equally bad in the eyes of all right-thinking people,/ from Billy Sunday to Buddha, /And it consists of not having done something you shudda”—i.e., their own “sin of omission.” The shared conservative journalistic sin of omission is best illustrated by their collective failure to discuss the ongoing, Sharia-compliant campaign of el-Sisi’s youth and religious endowments ministries, begun after his landslide election, and assumption of power, to extirpate the alleged “scourge” of atheism afflicting Egypt. Moreover, this lacuna in conservative analysis, I argue, is rooted in their continued failure to acknowledge—let alone discuss—Sisi’s Weltanschauung as articulated in his 2006 U.S. Army War College mini-thesis (which can be read in full here).
While Sisi was “ambiguous”/“apologetic” in his romanticized 2006 view of the (Sharia totalitarian, jihad promoting) Caliphate system as an idealized form of Islamic governance, he was unequivocal in his denunciation of precisely the kind of secular consensus, tolerant form of rule Egypt requires if it is ever going to make its Coptic Christian minority, and truly secular leaning Muslims, equal members of the society. Sisi rejected that pursuit in 2006, and his government’s actions under his aegis—a continuing campaign against freedom of conscience, coupled to ongoing “blasphemy” prosecutions—pace soothing “rhetoric”—indicate he meant what he articulated then.
As I wrote last August 8, 2014, after studying Sisi’s 2006 mini-thesis, which required a FOIA request to obtain, Sisi never retrenches on his anti-secularism, frontally attacking even governments that “tend toward secular rule,” and their media mouthpieces, for allegedly “fomenting” Islamic religious extremism.
Thus Sisi’s critique of secularism goes well beyond merely acknowledging, “Democracy, as a secular entity, is unlikely to be favorably received by the vast majority of Middle Easterners, who are devout followers of the Islamic faith.”
He condemns secularism itself, and its alleged “media accomplices,” while fully idealizing his chimerical vision of “moderate” Islam, and Muslims:
The control of the media by government further presents problems to moderate Muslims. The media is managed via a secular philosophy. The secular media secures control for the government and further disenfranchises the religious moderates. It spreads a philosophy of liberal living that many moderate Muslims do not support and it also provides a vehicle for extremists to exploit because it enables them to relate to the religious moderates on a shared theme. This has the effect of strengthening the extremist philosophy
Sisi’s anti-secular, Sharia-based vision is now manifest in the prosecutions of Coptic “blasphemers,” and Muslim freethinkers, alike. Both “campaigns,” while consistent with the Sharia, and its mores, are an egregious affront to basic freedom. Observations such as these capture how the “anti-atheism,” freedom of conscience-crushing jihad, is an exercise in rather depraved paranoia, given Egypt’s estimated (2012) 82.5 million citizens:
On December 10 the Dar al-Ifta, a Justice Ministry wing that issues religious edicts, released a survey claiming that Egypt was home to 866 atheists, the highest number of any country in the Middle East. Two aides to the Grand Mufti – the head of the Dar al-Ifta – described the supposed increase in atheism as “a dangerous development” that “should ring alarm bells,” Mada Masr reported.
The late, brilliant political scientist, P.J. Vatikiotis (d. 1997), educated at the American University in Cairo, Egypt, and author of many important analyses of Egyptian socio-political history, opened his seminal 1981 study, “Religion and State,” with these words:
“Religion and State” is not a new preoccupation in the study of Egyptian or any other society where the faith of Islam predominates.
