God Experts

Nasser did not hate Jews. One of his first acts after taking power was to attend a service at a Cairo synagogue. He did see the state of Israel as a particularly galling instance of Western colonial dominance over a portion of the Arab world. If he could have waved a magic wand and sent the Jewish immigrants back where they came from, he would have done so. Realizing that he couldn’t, and that Arab obsession with this unresolved issue detracted from the modernization campaign that most interested him, Nasser repeatedly engaged in back channel negotiations to achieve a peace deal that would be face-saving enough to allow him to survive the inevitable Muslim rage. (King Abdullah of Jordan had been murdered in 1951 when word leaked out of his secret talks with the Israelis.)

These efforts, run through UN Secretary General Dag Hammarskjold, failed because Israel correctly calculated that Western support could allow it to survive without giving up a single inch of the territory it illegally seized in 1948, or allowing a single Arab refugee to return to his stolen house. Instead, Nasser agreed to allow UN peacekeeping forces to occupy the Egyptian side of his border with Israel, even though Israel refused to reciprocate. Israel used the respite provided by the lack of Egyptian pressure to develop its nuclear weapons.

The Palestinian refugee problem refused to disappear; tension built to the point where on May 9, 1967, the Israeli Knesset authorized the government to launch a war. This convinced Nasser that Israel was about to attack Syria, so he asked the UN to withdraw its peacekeeping force to deter such an attack. Three weeks later Israel unleashed its devastating sneak attack on Egypt itself, which succeeded because of even more Egyptian bureaucratic bungling.

Nasser took the blame and resigned, only to be called back by popular acclamation. He was still seeking peace with Israel in 1970, when he accepted without qualification a plan offered by U.S. Secretary of State William Rogers, in collaboration with the Soviet Union. When a plan essentially similar to the Rogers Plan was finally agreed by Israel and Nasser’s successor Anwar Sadat, the Muslim Brotherhood murdered Sadat – exactly the fate Nasser had always feared.

Nasser died of natural causes later in 1970, the same day he completed brokering a peace deal to end a vicious civil war in Jordan. Now the West is engaged in killing his memory. When President Obama visited Egypt last summer, he delivered a nearly 6,000 word address – not one of which words was “Nasser,” despite the fact that Nasser is thought by many to be greatest man Egypt has produced in centuries. In fact, Nasser was the first native Egyptian to rule his country since the time of the Pharaohs. Egypt’s per capita income more than doubled during the Nasser years, its arable land increased by a third, and over 100,000 Egyptians were enrolled in universities at his death. Instead, Obama focused on how wonderful Islam is, ignoring entirely the humanist tradition of Egypt that Nasser did so much to foster.

Two other words Obama did not mention were “Muslim Brotherhood.” He might have congratulated Egypt for its efforts – starting with Nasser – to crack down on what most observers see as the granddaddy of all Islamic terrorist outfits. (Hamas, for example, is a Muslim Brotherhood spinoff.)

The liberal media sheds crocodile tears over how oppressed the Muslim Brotherhood is, and how terribly undemocratic the Egyptian government is for continuing to repress an organization that represents the views of so many Egyptians – in fact, nearly one-fifth of Egypt’s Parliament members are unofficially associated with the movement. By curious coincidence, that’s about the same as the proportion of Germans were supported the Nazi Party in 1930. If the Muslim Brotherhood ever does take power in Egypt, democracy will assuredly suffer the same fate there as it did in Hitler’s Germany and Khomeini’s Iran.

Even the Voice of America recently quoted a Washington political scientist as saying “I think the most important thing that could happen for the political health of the region is that Islamist movements – those that are willing to participate in the legal system – be viewed as a political challenge rather than as a security threat. And making the mental shift, viewing them as a rival rather than as a mortal enemy, would do a lot to improve the political climate in the region.” A liberal think-tank called the “International Crisis Group” agrees – just legalize the Muslim Brotherhood, they say, and everyone will start to play together nicely.

Just speculating here, but I don’t think this political scientist was ever shot at by the Muslim Brotherhood, like Nasser was.

Why can’t we have a President speak to the Egyptians and congratulate them for having given the world a Gamal Abdel Nasser, congratulate them again for all the work they have done to try to stamp out the Muslim Brotherhood, and pledge our help in finishing the job? Or if saying something nice about Nasser would offend those who place Israeli interests ahead of American interests, why not say a few kind words about Muhammad Sa’id al-’Ashmawi, the retired Egyptian Chief Justice who developed his humanist ideas during the Nasser years, and now must live under round-the-clock police protection because of a book he wrote in 1998 called Against Islamic Extremism.

Obama is repeating the same mistake America has been making for decades: sucking up to Islam rather than standing up to it. Throughout the Nasser era, America pressed Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria to give refuge to the Muslim Brotherhood, while pressing Saudi Arabia to fund it, all in order to weaken Nasser. According to senior CIA operative William Crane Eveland, the agency financed anti-Nasser efforts in Syria and Lebanon to the tune of over $100 million. Never let Arab humanism grow strong; instead, keep it weak by toadying to the Muslim God experts. What would the world look like today if instead we had instead given that $100 million to Nasser to back his campaign to stamp out Muslim extremism and build a modern secular state? The Muslim God experts would have been angry, and the Jewish God experts even angrier; all we would have gotten for our money would have been the friendship of the overwhelming majority of the ordinary people of the Middle East, who now hate us instead.

Obama did decide to wade into one local Egyptian controversy, the wearing of the headscarf. The Egyptian government is trying to discourage this, as a symbol of centuries of Muslim oppression of women. But our Pollyanna President characterized the wearing of the headscarf as a woman’s free choice – the same spin the radical Islamists in countries they yet don’t control give it publicly, while behind the scenes Muslim Brothers make it clear to women that they damn well better make the right choice.

The Egyptian Government itself has been promoting the memory of Nasser of late, with a recent television serialization of his life – which the Muslim Brotherhood bitterly opposed. They didn’t want Egyptians to be reminded of Nasser’s support for family planning, for equal political rights for women, and for peace with Israel, all of which they oppose. Why couldn’t our President have taken sides in that controversy instead of defending the wearing of headscarves so women can voluntarily demonstrate how submissive they are?