NOVANEWS
Watch very carefully how the NYT presents this story on the Muslim Brotherhood and its openness to rapprochement with the United States. The Obama administration is now very aware that MB lawmakers will work to create a state that will “respect individual freedoms, free markets and international commitments, including Egypt’s treaty with Israel”; in other words, respect the form but not the content of democracy while maintaining all the institutional scaffolding of capitalism and along with it the state’s control of the Egyptian people.
On the one hand, for the NYT, this move “underscores Washington’s increasing frustration with Egypt’s military rulers, who have sought to carve out permanent political powers for themselves and used deadly force against protesters seeking an end to their rule.” On the other, “The administration, however, has also sought to preserve its deep ties to the military rulers,” mainly maintaining the $1.3 billion dollars in military aid. Some frustration.
The article goes on to note that “Some close to the administration have even called this emerging American relationship with the Brotherhood a first step toward a pattern that could take shape with the Islamist parties’ coming to power around the region,” as the US moves close to Islamists. Of course, the US has always had the closest relationships with obscurantist religious regimes in the Gulf, but that is unmentionable here.
Behind the scenes, the US continues to call the shots. Responding to the raid on 10 NGOs this week – three of them closely linked to the US government, probably through National Endowment for Democracy funding – Victoria Nuland said that “It is, frankly, unacceptable to us that that situation has not been returned to normal.”
None of this should be surprising. What is slightly surprising is to see Hamas leaders, themselves with very little maneuvering room due to their ill-fated decision to take state power in Gaza, glorying in a renewed partnership with the MB. When Ismail Haniyeh was recently hosted by Mohammed Badie, the Supreme Guide of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, Haniyeh said this “presence with the Brotherhood threatens the Israeli entity,” while Badie reaffirmed the Brotherhood’s commitment [sic] to “issues of liberation, foremost the Palestinian issue.” What this may signal instead is the final cave-in of Hamas to imperial pressure.
And it also affirms the numbing blinkeredness of looking at the region as though Israel is calling America’s shots: in response to the initial stirrings of unrest, Israeli army Home Front Command Chief Major General Eyal Eisenberg spoke of a “radical Islamic winter.” We should hope not, not for Israel’s sake, which may only have to worry about political Islam to the North, but for the sake of the Arab people’s as they bridle under petro-dollar fueled political Islam.
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