Barry Rubin Egypt

BARRY RUBIN’S LATEST ON THE RECENT ELEVATION OF MOHAMMED MURSI TO THE EGYPTIAN PRESIDENCY………

 The mind of the Left is a very messy, sticky, gooey place.

Egypt: A Muslim Brotherhood President Does Not Prove That We Are All ‘Chimps’

June 24, 2012 – 8:21 pm – by Barry Rubin

“I just can’t do what I done before/I just can’t beg you anymore/I’m gonna let you pass/And I’ll go last/Then time will tell just who fell/And who’s been left behind/When you go your way and I go mine.”

–Bob Dylan, “Most Likely You Go Your Way and I’ll Go Mine”

Muhammad al-Mursi, the Muslim Brotherhood candidate, has become president of Egypt. But what does it mean to be president of Egypt? That’s the current question. Let me divide the discussion into two parts: What does this tell about “us” and what does this tell about Egypt and its future?

First, what does it tell about the West? The answer is that there are things that can be learned and understood, leading to some predictive power, but unfortunately the current hegemonic elite and its worldview refuse to learn.

What could be more revealing of that fact than the words off Jacqueline Stevens in the New York Times: “Chimps randomly throwing darts at the possible outcomes would have done almost as well as the experts”? Well, it depends on which experts. Martin Kramer, one of those who was right all along about Egypt, has a choice selection of quotes from a certain kind of Middle East expert who was dead wrong. A near-infinite number of such quotes can be gathered from the pages of America’s most august newspapers.

These people all share the current left-wing ideology; the refusal to understand the menace of revolutionary Islamism; the general belief that President Barack Obama is doing a great job; and the tendency to blame either Israel or America for the region’s problems.  So if a big mistake has been made, it is that approach that has proven to be in the chimp category.

Having written about the Middle East for almost forty years, I’ve seen the power of the “chimps” that repeatedly make the same mistakes over and over again. Their power has waxed and waned, falling to the lowest points, for example, just after the 1991 Kuwait war and just after September 11, 2001. But they keep making comebacks and in the last two years their influence has been at an all-time high.

In early October 2010 I wrote an article based on actually reading what the Muslim Brotherhood leaders were saying. It was titled “The Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood is Declaring Jihad on America; Will Anyone in America Notice?” And they were signaling a change in their traditionally cautious strategy to go for revolution. Why? They told us: President Husni Mubarak was on his last legs, the regime seemed uncertain, America was weak, and their assessment was that the revolutionary Islamist forces were advancing everywhere.

More here.

3 Responses

  1. And now the chimps are trying to overthrow the only ME country that is safe for religious minorities to practice their faith openly and freely – Syria.

    Syria is also the country that has taken hundreds of thousand of Christian Iraqi refugees. You know the ones that had to flee the liberation of Iraq by the chimps.

  2. The one hope for the US is that the country will continue to disintegrate and not be a threat. The larger threat is the MB and its proxies in this country. It is amazing to me that the panders and apologists are ok with the decline in the quality of life. They live here too.

    That’s why the Repubs started being pro-environment. They live here too.

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