Robert Spencer: Egypt Designates Israel Its Top Enemy — Obama Restores Military Aid

To Egypt, that is. My column in FrontPage this morning:

Egypt’s parliament, which is dominated by two pro-Sharia Islamic supremacist groups, the Muslim Brotherhood and the Salafists, voted unanimously last Monday to expel Israel’s ambassador to Egypt, and signaled that the Camp David Accords would soon be a thing of the past: Egypt, the parliamentarians declared, would “never” be Israel’s ally. In fact, Israel was Egypt’s “number one enemy.” And how did Barack Obama respond to this egregious trampling upon the agreement that has kept an uneasy peace between Israel and Egypt for thirty years? By announcing a resumption of military aid to Egypt.

From the beginning of the “Arab Spring,” I said repeatedly that it was not a democracy movement, as the Western press was claiming, but an Islamic supremacist takeover that would result in the creation of Sharia states that would be far more hostile to the U.S. and Israel than the Arab nationalist regimes they were supplanting. This assessment was greeted with the usual scorn: the Islamic supremacist media machine charged “Islamophobia,” on Fox Juan Williams said I was “fearmongering,” and the usual suspects made the usual ad hominem attacks. Yet everything that has happened since then has shown that the “Arab Spring” is indeed an Islamic supremacist winter, ushering in repressive Sharia regimes with the enthusiastic blessing of Barack Obama.

Yet even as Egypt’s Islamic supremacists rattle their sabers, their spokesmen, allies and useful idiots in the American mainstream media continue to peddle their soothing lies. The Islamic supremacist and adolescent mudslinger Reza Aslan was at West Virginia University last week speaking about the developments in the Middle East, and heaping more steaming piles of what he calls analysis on the hapless marks in his audience. “Believe it or not,” Aslan said, and anyone with eyes in his head will opt for “not,” “the greatest single aspiration in the region at this moment is to achieve democracy.” Slyly implying that those who have cast doubts on this alleged wonderful flowering of democracy are motivated by racism, he continued: “It does not matter where you pray or what skin color you were born with; democracy is a fundamental right of life.” He also, according to the report on his talk in the campus paper, “aimed to debunk that the Arab Spring is an Islamic takeover. This myth is simply an American paradox due to the primary belief that we live in a secular country that easily separates church and state, he said.” Ah yes, of course. “There is not much difference between us and them,” Aslan said. “These groups now have the opportunity to come out of the mosque and to market ideas and see how they can come to life in reality.”

Yes, “there is not much difference between us and them.” After all, we all want to cover women in burqas and enslave them to their husbands, brutalize and terrorize non-Muslims, murder apostates from Islam, and extinguish the freedom of speech, don’t we? And apparently one way these Egyptian parliamentarians hope to “come to life in reality” is by crucifying people and amputating their limbs. Yet as always, it doesn’t matter how outstandingly wrong and deceptive politically correct spokesmen are. It doesn’t matter that none of their predictions ever come true, or that everything they said was nothing to be concerned about turns out to be a matter of major concern. There is never any accountability for them at all — that a clown like Reza Aslan gets invited to speak at any university at all, while those who are consistently correct are demonized and marginalized, is a measure of how debased and politicized American academia and the public square in general have become.

Aslan also complained in January that “pundits and politicians are already ringing the alarm bells. The common refrain you hear in the US: The Middle East is being overrun with religious radicals bent on oppressing women and destroying Israel. That is nonsense, of course. Nevertheless, there is no doubt that political Islam will be a force in the new, democratic Middle East. And that is a good thing.” His comment on Egypt’s designation of Israel as its “number one enemy” was not recorded, but Aslan is no stupider or more malevolent than many other mainstream media and government spokesmen who assured us that the “Arab Spring” would bring a new flowering of freedom to the Middle East and North Africa. And chief among these was Barack Obama himself.

There is more.