Egypt’s Elections: Titanic of Western Interests, Meet Iceberg of Islamist Revolutionary Zeal
23 Apr 2012
Egypt will hold its presidential election May 23-24 with a possible run-off on June 16-17. It is impossible at this point to predict what’s going to happen but I can make a good guess. Eight weeks from now Egypt will be led by either a radical anti-American Islamist who wants to wipe Israel off the map or by a radical anti-American nationalist who just hates Israel passionately.

Let’s review the background and then analyze the likely events to come.

Since Egypt’s revolution began a year ago five propositions have monopolized the Western debate and coverage, all of which were wrong:

--That Egypt would become a real democratic state in which human rights and civil liberties would be respected.
--That this state would be dominated by moderate and modernist secular groups.
--That the Muslim Brotherhood is moderate and a bulwark against the really radical Islamists.
--That the army is simultaneously the main enemy of democracy in Egypt that should be opposed and yet also the force that would keep Egypt stable and pro-Western.
--That the new Egypt would remain an ally of the United States or at peace with Israel.

Only the second has been reluctantly dropped by governments and mass media. All the others are still in place today! Indeed, the Muslim Brotherhood has become the substitute moderate democratic hope. This blindness ignores all the daily evidence to the contrary.

The “moderate democratic” forces up until now have defined the military as their main enemy. Perhaps they still do so. But they also woke up to realize that a constitution written by a vast majority of Islamists wouldn’t be a great thing for them. So they followed the classical Arab mistake of boycotting the constitution-writing process, thus ensuring that the Islamists will have even more power.

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Two Islamist candidates—the Brotherhood’s Khairat al-Shater and the Salafists’ Hazem Salah Abu Ismail—and one secularist—Omar Suleiman—have been disqualified. The Brotherhood simply substituted Muhammad Mursi, leader of its Freedom and Justice Party, for al-Shater, who returned to his job as deputy head of the Brotherhood. Morsy told a news conference, “We intend to make the Palestinian issue our main issue.”

The other main candidate is the radical nationalist Amr Moussa. His stances have varied depending on whether he thought he could hope for the Brotherhood’s backing. Since his main rival is the Brotherhood-backed Morsy, Amr Moussa is in a relatively anti-Islamist phase. And that’s not to say that Moussa, albeit the lesser of two evils, is any great prize, though he is certainly preferable.

Click here to read the entire article.

Barry Rubin is director of the Global Research in International Affairs (GLORIA) Center and editor of the Middle East Review of International Affairs (MERIA) Journal. His book, Israel: An Introduction, has just been published by Yale University Press. Other recent books include The Israel-Arab Reader (seventh edition), The Long War for Freedom: The Arab Struggle for Democracy in the Middle East (Wiley), and The Truth About Syria (Palgrave-Macmillan). The website of the GLORIA Center and of his blog, Rubin Reports. His original articles are published at PJMedia.

Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan: An Anti-Radical Liberal Who Saw The Unfortunate Future Where We Now Live

Posted: 22 Apr 2012 10:39 AM PDT

By Barry Rubin

Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan: An Anti-Radical Liberal Who Saw The Unfortunate Future Where We Now Live
It’s time for a revival of interest in the late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, one of the last American politicians with serious intellectual credentials as well. (Compare Moynihan to Obama to see how shallow and mythical are the latter's intellectual attainments.) Moynihan was one of the first people to try to deal with the lurch leftward of the liberal and Democratic streams that is now so dangerously dominant in America.

In 1970, Moynihan wrote

“A post-liberal critique is necessary and we are trying to evolve one: not because we don’t know enough, but because we know too much to be content with the wisdom of the 1940s.”

He was writing in response to three developments. First, the New Left challenge of the 1960s that seems to be furnishing the ideas and personnel running America today.

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Second, he refers to the failures and problems arising from an ever larger, more powerful government. Moynihan was particularly interested in how well-intentioned welfare policies had disastrous effects on their victims (I mean, “beneficiaries.”)

And third he was worried by the undermining of the very elite institutions, in particular the universities, that were supposed to be the watchdogs to provide a reality check and keep politicians from straying into dangerous territory. Moynihan wrote, over-optimistically as it would turn out:

“In the best universities the best men are increasingly appalled by the authoritarian tendencies of the left. The inadequacies of traditional liberalism are equally unmistakable, while, no less important, the credulity, even the vulgarity of the supposed intellectual and social elite of the country has led increasing numbers of men and women of no especial political persuasion to realize that something is wrong somewhere. These persons are [our] natural allies.”
Unfortunately, nowadays, these people are relatively rare in academic institutions swamped with ideologues who are proud to be indoctrinators.

Moynihan noticed the increasingly deep divisions in America that have now widened into chasms of conflict:
“America has developed, in Lionel Trilling’s phrase, `an adversary culture’….The `culture’ is more in opposition now than perhaps at any time in history....As Richard Hofstadter recently observed, some really surprising event…is going to have to happen to change the minds of the present generation.”

One might have thought that this event would have been September 11, 2001, but it didn’t turn out that way. Perhaps that event will be the Obama Administration's follies and failures.

All quotes from Steven R. Weisman (editor), Daniel Patrick Moynihan: A Portrait In Letters Of An American Visionary, Public Affairs (New York: 2010).

This article can also be found here.

Barry Rubin is director of the Global Research in International Affairs (GLORIA) Center and editor of the Middle East Review of International Affairs (MERIA) Journal. His book, Israel: An Introduction, has just been published by Yale University Press. Other recent books include The Israel-Arab Reader (seventh edition), The Long War for Freedom: The Arab Struggle for Democracy in the Middle East (Wiley), and The Truth About Syria (Palgrave-Macmillan). The website of the GLORIA Center and of his blog, Rubin Reports. His original articles are published at PJMedia.