The Dance of Death

A bit of an airborne piggy sighting in, of all places, the Globe and Mail. Ian Johnson, author of A Mosque in Munich: Nazis the CIA and the Rise of the Muslim Brotherhood in the West, explains how and why we infidels have gotten up close and personal with Hassan al-Banna's Loyal Order of Allah's Water Buffalo/Jihadis over the years. Apparently, back in the day the CIA thought them "more suave and debonaire" than the Muslims who had gotten down and dirty with Hitler. As such, it was believed they could be harnessed to help defeat the Soviets--as indeed they were during the Soviet sojourn in Afghanistan. One might have thought that, post-Cold War and, especially, post-9/11, the dalliance might have cooled, or even been called off, what with "jihad is the way, sharia is the goal" being numero uno on the Brothers' to-do list and all. But for some unaccountable reason, writes Johnson (naivete? stupidity? ignorance? irrationality?), "Western countries may be missing the bigger picture" (gee, ya think?), and the danse macabre continues:

How did this happen? Efforts to prosecute the Muslim Brotherhood – for example, by trying to indict members of the International Institute of Islamic Thought and its related organizations in Virginia, or self-styled Brotherhood foreign minister Youssef Nada in Switzerland – were based on a faulty assumption that the Brotherhood was directly responsible for the 9/11 attacks. While the Brotherhood and its intellectual leadership have always supported terrorism (mostly against Israel), there was never any evidence that it financed or directly backed the 2001 attacks. Exonerated of the attacks, the Brotherhood was seen as an acceptable interlocutor for Western countries.

What this missed, however, was the Brotherhood’s real threat: the creation of a milieu where terrorism can thrive. The Brotherhood and its groups build an exclusionary, us-versus-them mentality that is the bedrock of a terrorist’s worldview. In this mental universe, only the few adherents to “true” Islam are worthy of life. The rest, including most Muslims, are apostates and thus can easily be killed to further political gains. This can be seen in many top Brotherhood members’ endorsement of homophobic views and condemnation of non-Abrahamic religions.

Despite these failings, the Brotherhood has again come into favour among policy-makers in the West, especially the United States. Starting in the second term of George W. Bush’s administration and picking up speed under Barack Obama’s leadership, our decades-old flirtation with Islamists has resumed.

Er, I'm pretty sure the Brothers don't think too much of the other two "Abrahamic religions," either. I think they view them as--what's that strange, really "obscure" word again? oh, yeah--dhimmis.

There's a famous old Arabian expression that neither Dubya nor O seem to have heard: "Flirt with jihadis, get your head sliced off."
 
They should put it on posters and T-shirts, I think.