Unholy Alliance

If the Mubarak government collapses, the Muslim Brotherhood is the organization most likely to fill the vacuum. Haaretz reports: “Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood eyes unity gov’t without Mubarak.”

Gamal Nasser, a spokesman for the Brotherhood, told DPA that his group was in talks with Mohammed El Baradei – the former UN nuclear watchdog chief – to form a national unity government without the National Democratic Party of Mubarak. …
Speaking to CNN later Sunday, El Baradei said he had a popular and political mandate to negotiate the creation of a national unity government.
“I have been authorized — mandated — by the people who organized these demonstrations and many other parties to agree on a national unity government,” he told CNN.

An Egyptian government in which the key players are the Muslim Brotherhood and El Baradei would be a terrible development for us; for Egypt, perhaps a catastrophic one. Some are now arguing that the MB is a relatively benign force to which we should not be opposed. Andy McCarthy explains in detail why we should fear the Muslim Brotherhood–the organization that has spawned most of today’s terrorist groups–but really, all you need to know is the Brotherhood’s motto:

Allah is our objective, the Prophet is our leader, the Koran is our law, Jihad is our way, and dying in the way of Allah is our highest hope. Allahu akbar!

That pretty well sums it up.
El Baradei, meanwhile, has a long history of anti-American activism. He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, which is often repeated in the press as though it were a good thing. As is so often the case in recent years, El Baradei’s prize was a reward for sticking his finger in America’s eye, as we noted back in 2005:

When the Nobel Peace Prize, which has become more or less a badge of infamy, was awarded to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and its Director-General Mohamed El Baradei, many suspected that the award was–once again–an implied rebuke to the United States. It turns out that this wasn’t just paranoid suspicion by us conservatives:

The speculation at the United Nations was that the Norwegian Nobel committee was sending its own message to the U.S. administration for its refusal to take meaningful steps on nuclear disarmament and for its continued militaristic policies in Iraq and Afghanistan.

El Baradei achieved his greatest renown in connection with the pre-war weapons inspections in Iraq, which he headed on behalf of the IAEA. One particularly discreditable moment in his tenure, which sheds considerable light on El Baradei, requires a walk down memory lane.
You probably don’t remember the Al Qaqaa affair, but it dominated the last days of the 2004 Presidential campaign. In a last-ditch effort to pull out the race, John Kerry and the Democrats fabricated a story that was intended to undermine President Bush’s national security credentials: they claimed that the U.S. Army had failed to secure 377 tons of explosives at a weapons depot near Baghdad (Al Qaqaa) that subsequently disappeared, presumably into the hands of terrorists. The story turned out to be a lie, and the day after the election it was completely forgotten–having failed to serve its purpose–but in the last week before the election, the liberal media gave it all the play they could. The Washington Post reported on October 27, 2004:

The disappearance of nearly 400 tons of explosives in Iraq dominated the presidential race for a third straight day on Wednesday, as Democratic nominee John F. Kerry accused President Bush of evading responsibility and the Republican said Kerry was making unsubstantiated charges.
Kerry, traveling in Iowa, scrapped plans to talk about domestic policy to accuse Bush of trying to cover up the failure to secure the explosives in Iraq. “This is a growing scandal and the American people deserve a full and honest explanation of how it happened and what the president is going to do about it,” Kerry told supporters in Sioux City. Instead, he said, “we’re seeing this White House dodging and bobbing and weaving . . . just as they’ve done each step of the way in our involvement in Iraq.” …
Bush’s remarks produced a furious response from Democrats. In a conference call arranged by the Kerry campaign, Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. (Del.) issued an extraordinary rebuke of the administration. Because of missing explosives, “my kid and a lot of other kids might get their ass over there and get blown up by these because of their civilian incompetence,” he said, his voice rising to a shout.
Campaigning in Florida, Kerry’s running mate, Sen. John Edwards (N.C.), kept the emphasis on the missing explosives.

The whole Al Qaqaa issue was a complete fraud; the explosives, if they ever existed, were gone by the time U.S. forces captured the depot. Once the election was over, not a single moment was wasted by anyone, worrying about the “missing” weapons. But here is the point: who started the Al Qaqaa fraud? Mohammed El Baradei. The Democrats’ claim was based on a letter from the IAEA that was leaked. We noted in 2004:

Clifford May at the NRO corner says that the New York Times story on the missing explosives was ginned up by the IAEA to undermine the administration, which wants to deny IAEA head, the anti-American Mohammed El Baradei, a second term. May relies on this message from an unamed government source:

The Iraqi explosives story is a fraud. These weapons were not there when US troops went to this site in 2003. The IAEA and its head, the anti-American Mohammed El Baradei, leaked a false letter on this issue to the media to embarrass the Bush administration. The US is trying to deny El Baradei a second term and we have been on his case for missing the Libyan nuclear weapons program and for weakness on the Iranian nuclear weapons program.

The combination of the Muslim Brotherhood and Mohamed El Baradei in control of Egypt would be deadly indeed.

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