While the Republican establishment lead by John McCain, Lindsey Graham and George W. Bush cheer on the Muslim Brotherhood’s Arab Spring, many Conservatives see the truth. Andrew McCarthy was one of the first on the Right to break with the whole Islamic Democracy movement. For this, he has become ostracized with elite Republicans. Now the Left is taking shots at him.
Salon has a article called NeoCons vs. Islamophobes. After years of being vilified, Progressives now embrace the NeoCons as the good guys. Andrew McCarthy is named as the leader of the “Islamophobes.” Opposing the Muslim Brotherhood is now considered Islamophobic. Never mind that people like McCarthy are not scared of Islam, just they don’t want to support their agenda. Andrew rips into the Salon article and the concept of supporting the Arab Spring.
A few weeks ago, amid the “Arab Spring” giddiness, a Shiite mosque opened in Cairo. This was big news. Among Egypt’s 80 million people, there are only a few thousand Shiites. It’s a 90 percent Sunni country, with even Christians vastly outnumbering the Shia. So, in their euphoria over the mosque’s inauguration, Shiite clerics heralded this Husseiniya (as Shiite mosques are known) as a symbol of rapprochement.
[….]
The stories are different now. The Husseiniya was shut down last week. Yesterday’s euphoria is melting into today’s harsh reality. In Cairo, home to the Muslim Brotherhood and the sharia jurists of ancient Al-Azhar University, “democracy” has meant the rise of Sunni supremacists. Turns out they don’t do bridge-building. Their tightening grip has translated into brutalizing dhimmitude for Christians and increasing intolerance of Shiism — which the Sunni leaders perceive less as Islam than as apostasy, an offense that sharia counts as more grievous than treason.
News of the mosque’s demise arrived shortly after a report entitled “Neocons vs. Islamophobes” by the leftist e-magazine Salon. Foreign-policy correspondent Jordan Michael Smith was good enough to appoint me leader of “what might be called the ‘to-hell-with-democracy’ strain of thought” in “the American conservative movement.” And if anything needs an Arab Spring, it must be the American conservative movement. We Islamophobes haven’t even had an election yet, much less gotten one of those mellifluous sharia-constitutions the State Department likes to write for its emerging “democracies,” and yet here I am the leader! And a “relentless” leader, too — scalding the Muslim Brotherhood on behalf of a cadre that allegedly includes such luminaries as John Bolton, Michele Bachmann, and Frank Gaffney.
In our struggle “to define the Republican response to the increased power of political Islam,” we are said to be “vying” with “another faction among the right-wing that is equally powerful . . . the neoconservatives.” Counting among their number such heavyweights as GOP senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham, they are portrayed as “rather admirably insisting that the Muslim Brotherhood be given a chance.” After the tumultuous Bush years, my friends Norman Podhoretz, Paul Wolfowitz, and Bill Kristol must be having a good laugh: It may have taken a motley crew of despicable Islamophobes, but the Left has suddenly decided that neocons may not be the root of all evil after all.
For all its pretensions to sober analysis, the Salon hit piece usefully demonstrates how nonsensical policy debates about the Arab Spring have become.
There is a split on the Right. The elites view Islam as another religion and think that democracy will solve everything. The average Conservative after having seen the failures of Nation Building (there were no military failures), have had enough and refuses to support the Muslim Brotherhood. Andrew McCarthy has given a voice to us on the Right that don’t want to support the Muslim Brotherhood and its sinister agenda. I salute him and will continue to support his work!
