The Brotherhood has a few questions

Andrew McCarthy reminds us that the grand strategy of President Obama involves an inability to sort out our friends from our enemies:

The president is mulishly determined to cultivate Islamic-supremacist governments and movements like the Muslim Brotherhood. The stubborn problem is that al Qaeda — the only Muslim outfit the administration seems willing to hang the “terrorist” label on — is also Islamic-supremacist. That is, al Qaeda is adherent to the same ideology — based on sharia, Islam’s legal code and societal framework — as the groups the administration considers “allies” and “moderates.”

At the Foreign Policy blog, David Kenner gives us a look at the Muslim Brotherhood in action this week, speaking in English with a forked tongue and in Arabic revealing its characteristic train of thought:

In English, the Brotherhood’s political party released a statement “categorically reject[ing] as intolerable the bombings committed in the U.S. city of Boston,” and “offer[ing] heartfelt sympathies and solemn condolences to the American people and the families of the victims.”

In Arabic, senior Brotherhood leader and the vice chairman of the group’s political party Essam el-Erian took a different tack. In a post on his Facebook page, he condemned the Boston attack — but also linked it to the French war in Mali, the destruction in Syria and Iraq, and faltering rapprochement between the Turkish government and Kurdish rebels.

El-Erian is making the case that all of these setbacks — from Boston to Baghdad — are somehow connected. “Who disturbed democratic transformations, despite the difficult transition from despotism, corruption, poverty, hatred, and intolerance to freedom, justice tolerance, development, human dignity, and social justice?” he asked. “Who planted Islamophobia through research, the press, and the media? Who funded the violence?”

Kenner notes that El-Erian just poses those questions — he doesn’t accuse any specific group of masterminding the Boston Marathon attack or the unrest across the Middle East. Kenner characterizes the el-Erian’s ruminations in Arabic as conspiracy-mongering, but I think we can go further in explicating the text.

I think we understand what el-Erian is getting at with those questions. We’d guess the malefactors of el-Erian’s imagination are to be found among the infidels, or a subset of them. The references to the press and to funding are a strong hint, if not a dead giveaway, aren’t they?

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