As
Egypt under the heel of Mohamed Morsi unravels, here’s the
late-breaking news: The Muslim Brotherhood is the enemy of democracy.
This has always been obvious to anyone who took the time to look into
it. Nevertheless, it has not been an easy point to make lo these many
years. Even as the Justice Department proved beyond any doubt in court
that the Brotherhood’s major goal in America and Europe — its
self-professed “
grand jihad” — is “eliminating and destroying Western civilization,” to have the temerity to point this out is to be smeared as an “
Islamophobe.” That’s the Islamophilic Left’s code for “racist.”
Nor is it just the Left. Like the transnational progressives who hold
sway in Democratic circles, many of the neoconservative thinkers who
have captured Republican foreign-policy making encourage “outreach” to
“moderate Islamists” — a ludicrously self-contradictory term. The idea
is to collaborate in the construction of “Islamic democracies.” That’s
another nonsensical term — to
borrow
Michael Rubin’s quote of a moderate Muslim academic piqued by the
encroachments of Turkey’s ruling Islamists, “We are a democracy. Islam
has nothing to do with it.” That is clearly right. Yet, to argue the
chimerical folly of the sharia-democracy experiment is to be demagogued
as an “
isolationist.”
It is as if the Right can no longer fathom an engaged foreign policy
that concentrates solely on vital U.S. interests and treats America’s
enemies as, well, enemies.
Of course, it is neither Islamophobic nor isolationist to observe
that Islamic supremacism is derived from literal Muslim scripture; that
it is a mainstream interpretation of Islam whose adherents, far from
being limited to a “violent extremist” fringe, number in the hundreds of
millions and include many of Islam’s most influential thinkers and
institutions. These are simply facts. Nor is it Islamophobic or
isolationist to contend that any sensible engagement with Islamic
supremacists — very much including the Muslim Brotherhood — ought to be
aimed at their marginalization and defeat, not their cultivation and
empowerment. This is not a popular view; opinions amply supported by
unpleasant facts are rarely popular. But following it would strengthen
pro-Western Muslims while promoting an American global engagement that
is essential, effective, and affordable. That is the very antithesis of
Islamophobia and isolationism.
The central contention here has been that the Muslim Brotherhood is
an innately, incorrigibly Islamic-supremacist outfit. Wherever it
establishes a presence, it seeks — as gradually as indigenous conditions
require, and as rapidly as they allow — to implement its repressive
construction of sharia. Wherever it gets the opportunity to rule, it
uses its power to impose this sharia, despite resistance from the
society’s non-Islamist factions.
This is not a mere theory. Egypt, the world’s most important Arab
country, is violently convulsing before our eyes in direct reaction to
the suffocation that is Islamist rule. So, will we finally take the
lesson? Will we finally come to understand why democracy and Islamic
supremacism cannot coexist?
Western democracy has Judeo-Christian underpinnings. At its core is
the equal dignity of every person. This sacred commitment, ironically,
enables our bedrock secular guarantee: freedom of conscience. It is
anathema to the Brotherhood. As their guiding jurist, Sheikh Yusuf
Qaradawi, teaches: “Secularism can never enjoy general acceptance in an
Islamic society.” This is because “the acceptance of secularism means
abandonment of sharia.”