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An e-newsletter delivering updates and analysis on current issues about Israel and the Middle East conflict

December 13, 2011

Radical Islamists Win Big in Egypt, Taking the First Step Toward the Caliphate. (New York Times and CNN, Are You Listening?)

Dear Friend of FLAME:

Brace yourself for a new Middle East: Islamists just won a large majority in Egypt's recent elections---bigger than anyone in the mainstream media dared to predict.

To the contrary: For months commentators at CNN and The New York Times have been assuring us in the face of all facts that not only is Egypt's radical Islamic Muslim Brotherhood a peaceful, moderate force, but also that the group would not be a significant political player in the so-called "Arab democracy movement."

We at FLAME were not fooled and have fully documented the terrorist roots, connections and murderous mission of the Muslim Brotherhood (MB). Let's start with the fact that the MB is the parent organization of the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas and that al Qaeda founder Ayman al Zawahiri was primarily inspired by notorious Brotherhood founder Sayyid Qutb.

Yes, those gullible Middle East commentators (as well as numerous U.S. diplomats) insisted that the Muslim Brotherhood would take no more than 20-30% of the final vote in Egypt---but the highly organized MB actually captured 36% of the early vote! What's even worse---much worse---the Salafist Nour party, an even more hard-line Islamist group, took an additional 25% of the vote. When final votes are in from rural areas, we predict the two parties will capture an astonishing 65-70% of the vote.

This week's FLAME Hotline takes those naïve media commentators and elected officials, including the U.S. State Department, to task for misleading the American public. The author of the article below, Tony Blankley, a former political operative, current author and Washington, D.C. public relations executive, renews the warning about trusting Egypt's insidious and determined Islamist parties.

Their avowed purpose is to impose hard-core Sharia law upon the entire region. They are committed to oppressing women, expelling infidels (like Christians), and restricting power to ultra-conservative Muslims. The Islamists do not stand for democracy (and have never said they do), and once in power are virtually certain to eliminate free elections and the rule of law, just as the imams in Iran and Hamas thugs in Gaza have done.

I think you'll profit greatly from Blankley's short, but powerful article. As always, I urge you to pass this issue along to friends, colleagues and family who would benefit from a wake-up call about the threat of radical Islam in the Middle East.

Best regards,

Jim Sinkinson
Vice President, FLAME

P.S.

Earlier this year FLAME became one of the first pro-Israel groups to raise an alarm about the dangers of trusting the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. We published this warning in publications nationwide, reaching some 10 million readers, as well as mailing it to every member of the House of Representatives and every U.S. Senator. I invite you to review this piece now, so you can better explain the rising threat to your contacts: "The Truth About the Muslim Brotherhood: Is it a moderate Egyptian party committed to democracy . . . or a jihadist group seeking to create an Islamist empire?" If you support of this kind of powerful, outspoken public relations effort on Israel's behalf, I hope you'll take a minute to support us. Remember: FLAME's ability to influence public and political opinion comes from individuals like you, one by one. I hope you'll consider giving a donation now, as you're able---with $500, $250, $100, or even $18. (Remember, your donation to FLAME is tax deductible.) To donate online, just go to http://www.factsandlogic.org/make_a_donation.html. Now more than ever we need your support to ensure that Israel gets the support it needs---from the U.S. Congress, from President Obama, and from the American people.
P.P.S.

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Short-lived Shibboleth of a Moderate Egypt
Islamists' election victory leaves Western predictions in shambles.

By Tony Blankley, The Washington Times, December 5, 2011

[Editor's Note: A shibboleth is a belief usually regarded by others as false or empty of real meaning.]

One of the nice things about human history is that no matter how much people or their leaders misjudge events and make a hash of things, within a few centuries, the debris is cleared away and we can have a another go at getting things right.

Yes, I am thinking about the Middle East and the latest mix-up by the experts—their assessment just a few months ago of the nature of the Arab Spring and its democracy movement. Back in the spring, leading experts—from the Obama administration to the neoconservatives on the right to the major liberal media to most of the academic area specialists—were overwhelmingly predicting that all those great secular, liberal, college-educated kids with their iPhones in Tahrir Square represented the new Egypt and would bring all their wonderful values to the revolution. It was primarily us cranky right-wingers who have been writing about radical Islamic politics (and, of course, the Israelis, who can't afford to get it wrong on Muslim political habits) who warned that this was all going to end in the rise in still-ancient Egypt of radical Islamist, anti-Israeli, anti-Semitic, anti-Christian, anti American, anti-Western governance.

So our government—as I said, cheered on by neoconservatives as well as liberals—undercut Hosni Mubarak's regime and told us not to worry about the Islamists. The Muslim Brotherhood was a group of really old, tired men who were no longer really radical and had been propped up just to provide the regime with an opposition punching bag. Armed with their social-media devices, the kids would run rings around the sorry excuse for Islamists and deliver real democracy.

Hadn't any of those experts been to Egypt? There are not a lot of secular liberals hanging out—even at the universities—let alone in the thousands of villages and urban slums. Who the heck did the experts think those angry, bearded men were who were roaming around glaring at Westerners and Muslim women who dared to walk on the street? I saw them back in the 1960s and '70s, and they were scary even then. By the way, as I recall, Tahrir Square was pretty much a circle. But who's counting when you are having deranged, liberal fantasies? Even if these experts on Sunday political round-table chatters had not been to Egypt, perhaps it was a clue that a Pew poll in the spring said 65 percent of the public would vote Islamist.

The early returns are in. (There are still two more rounds of voting in 18 of the country's 27 provinces over the next month.) The Islamists look likely to get 65 percent 70 percent of the eventual vote. According to the High Election Commission, the Islamic fundamentalist Muslim Brotherhood's Freedom and Justice Party got about 36 percent, while the Salafist Nour Party got a stunning 25 percent. The Salafists are the hysterical wing of the fundamentally reactionary general Muslim population, while the Brotherhood is merely the fanatical wing.

The grand total for all the parties that, by the ancient cultural standards of Pharaonic Egypt, are considered the liberal-secular bloc—the makers of the glorious Arab Spring democracy was, wait for it—13 percent. I predict that if any of them try to practice any of that liberal-secular stuff in public, either the military eventually will lock them up or the Salafists eventually will beat them up or kill them on the street. Adios, liberal-secular Egypt, we hardly new ya. Hello, kill the Coptic Christians and the Jews.

Of course, the various ever-bewildered wire services and newspapers are reporting the "unpredicted," "unexpected" size of the Islamist vote while taking to calling the Brotherhood, in its 2.0 form, "moderate." But anyway, not to worry. As our brother in journalism Jackson Diehl wrote in this weekend's Washington Post, he has talked with various former terrorists and Muslim Brotherhood leaders in Egypt, and he assures us that "the ascendancy of parties such as the Muslim Brotherhood should not be as alarming as many in the West suppose. ... The biggest reason for this is that the Muslim Brotherhood, as well as the more fundamentalist parties to its right, has renounced violence."

Well, that's a relief. I suppose the Brotherhood also has no more territorial demands. Oh, wait a moment. Mr. Diehl notes that the Brotherhood's platform does say that Egypt should "aid and support the Palestinian people and Palestinian resistance against the Zionist usurpers of their homeland." So, I guess, after they kill all the Jews, they will stop practicing violence. Of course, even then there will be the little matter of the Brotherhood's credo: "God is our objective; the Koran is our constitution; the prophet is our leader; jihad is our way; and death for the sake of God is the highest of our aspirations." But it's OK. That is the moderate wing of the upcoming Egyptian parliament.

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