Jose Maria Aznar, former prime minister of Spain, grasps how free people should respond to the revolt in Egypt and elsewhere in the Middle East: On the one hand, they must do all within their power to “support those seeking to establish democracy and freedom in their countries, where men and women will have equal rights and dignity, leading to prosperity and stability.” And they must also “be equally vigilant about the possibility of these autocracies being replaced by theocratic regimes that will be hostile, dangerous, and even more oppressive.”
Specifically, autocracies in the region have too long “sown the seeds for the infiltration of radical Islamism as a false solution to society’s problems.”
From the outset of the anti-government protests in Egypt, many in the media hearkened effervescently, albeit shallowly, to the first part of this mandate. The narrative? Protestors were a jubilation composed of people from different walks of life, all united in their hunger for political and economic freedom.
The second part of Aznar’s formula, vigilance regarding the possible infiltration of inglorious evildoers in Glorious Revolutions, pointedly did not figure in the MSM’s reportage.
Most mainstream media outlets bent over backwards to ignore evidence that the country’s best-organized opposition group, the Muslim Brotherhood, is anything but a pacified, benign force deserving of respectful inclusion in any transition government and projected elections.
A prime example of these apologetics on behalf of the Brotherhood, as Ron Radosh points out at Pajamas Media, was featured in the International Herald Tribune, the English daily of the New York Times in Europe.
It was included in an op-ed by the putatively moderate Muslim, Tariq Ramadan, who painted the Brotherhood’s founder, Hassan al-Banna, as an opponent of violence, a critic of fascist governments, and proponent of gradual reform.
Citing a book by Paul Berman, Radosh shows that Ramadan is hardly a discerning moderate. Al-Banna in fact espoused a fascist agenda, envisaged a violent Brotherhood, and from the more sanguinary strain of European revolutionaries derived the notion of heroic death as a political art form.
What the Brotherhood intends in due course – when the West completely drops its guard – is to unveil and implement its real agenda, the establishment of an Islamic state. As it has stated, it wishes to revoke Egypt’s peace treaty with Israel and increase support for Hamas and other terrorist groups.
Other useful idiots in the media who have reported uncritically on the protests and whitewashed the Brotherhood, according to Accuracy in Media’s Roger Aronoff, are many of the anchors and correspondents from the major networks, notably Katie Couric, Brian Williams, Anderson Cooper, and Christiane Amanpour.
Their story line, propagated across the globe, has been that there is no cause for worry. The Egyptian uprising has been purely democratic, an exultant happening joining students and university graduates a-Twitter to the poor and other folks outraged by a rotten, authoritarian regime.
Dangerous elements in the mix? Not to worry.
As for the Brotherhood, in the networks’ pronouncements, it showed up late for the demonstrations, i.e., it was not particularly seminal to the demonstrations and thus not worthy of scrutiny.
Put aside, notes Aronoff, that the Brotherhood is the main political power center inside Egypt, counterbalanced only by the military.
But again, no cause for alarm, opined NBC’s Richard Engel, many of the Brothers
are truly patriotic Egyptians. They were nice people. I mean, if you fell down in the street, they would come and help you out. If you didn’t have enough money for the bus, they would give you money.Nonetheless, he admitted, they:
control a lot of the organizations that people would think are popular, a lot of the labor unions, the lawyers union, the different professional syndicates in this country. So what could seem like a professional revolution by the middle class could also have a lot of involvement by the Muslim Brotherhood.Peter Bergen on MSNBC’s Hardball blithely called the Brotherhood “very moderate” and proclaimed the news of its inclusion in a new government as “not bad news.”
An article on CNN’s website asserted irresponsibly that it “long ago renounced violence as a means to achieve its domestic agenda of Islamic change.”
Contrary to such blather, as FBI Director Robert Mueller recently testified before a House committee, and as relayed by counterterrorism expert Steve Emerson: “Elements of the Muslim Brotherhood, the Islamist group whose ideology has inspired terrorists such as Osama bin Laden, are in the United States and have supported terrorism here and overseas.”
Far be it from the MSM to entertain broader such perspectives that challenge their congenital, hard-shell assumptions.
They would give no truck, for example, to neo-con Daniel Greenfield’s view that:
- Egypt has not – as yet – even undergone a democratic revolution, because free and open elections, not street protests by a relatively small number of citizens, including leftists and Islamists, alone can a democracy make;
- most Egyptians are less committed to freedom than to Islamic law;
- and the “instant” removal of Mubarak, touted by the MSM (and, depending on which way the winds of power blow, the Obama administration), might be destabilizing to the extent of fortifying forces that are horrifically more totalitarian than Mubarak.
Rep. Sue Myrick’s concern is “that the Muslim Brotherhood is using peaceful protests in Egypt for a power grab, and our government doesn’t seem to grasp their threat.”
The same, to the peril of us all, can be said of the Obama administration’s lackeys in the press.
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