CAIRO -- The world's most influential Islamist movement is in danger of collapse in the land of its birth -- its leaders imprisoned, its supporters slain and its activists branded as terrorists in what many are describing as the worst crisis to confront Egypt's 85-year-old Muslim Brotherhood.
Analysts worry that its members, bitter and angry after the deaths of more than 1,000 Morsi supporters in the past week, could abandon the Brotherhood's decades-long commitment to nonviolence, WTF? Isn't the Brotherhood's motto: Allah is our objective. The Prophet is our leader. The Qur'an is our law. Jihad is our way. Dying in the way of Allah is our highest hope. Allahu akbar!
particularly as its leadership loses its grip on them. Some pro-Morsi demonstrators have been spotted with weapons, and attacks against security forces in the volatile Sinai Peninsula have intensified since Morsi was deposed July 3.
Meanwhile, the movement is battling a level of popular hostility perhaps unprecedented in its history. The Brotherhood's strategy of confronting the government with sit-ins and marches in recent weeks seems only to have inflamed public opinion.
"Our only option is the peaceful method," Khaled Hanafi, secretary general of the Brotherhood's Freedom and Justice Party....
An organization that just two months ago was governing the Arab world's most populous nation is at risk of falling apart, said Diaa Rashwan, an expert on Islamist movements at Cairo's al-Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies.
"They are facing a really critical moment. They could disappear. And alternatives already exist," Rashwan said...what's different now, analysts say, is that it's battling not only a military-backed government but also the disdain of a broad swath of society. Many Egyptians are irate at Morsi for the country's economic slide and the rise in crime during his one-year rule. Others complain that the Brotherhood tried to grab power by excluding minority political groups and trying to insulate its decisions from judicial review.
"It's the first time to see the Muslim Brotherhood in conflict not only with the state -- but with the whole of the state, [including] the bureaucracy, and the political elite, and an important part of society. It's not a limited confrontation," Rashwan said.
With Egypt becoming increasingly polarized, the Brotherhood's opponents are cheering signs of the group's possible demise. Newspapers and television stations have been waging a sustained campaign against the group, labeling the Brotherhood as terrorists and predicting its collapse. On Tuesday, the headline in the liberal Tahrir newspaper, named for the revolution that unfolded more than two years ago in Cairo's central Tahrir Square, trumpeted: "The End of the Brotherhood."
The Tamarod movement, which led the massive street demonstrations that culminated in the coup that toppled Morsi, on Tuesday repeated its call to ban the Brotherhood.
#1
Muslim Brotherhood is going full circle and it is going to be more painful for the holders-on:
" Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Muslim Brotherhood ?" I rate Morsi a Zero.
#2
Most Perts seem to think that, ina worse-case scenario, the MusBros in Egypt will copy post-OBL, Ayman-led "Core" Al-Qaeda + intentionally decentralize their org, network to live + fight another day.
If our country is attacked with a nuclear, chemical, or biological weapon in the next decade, I predict that the weapon will pass through our borders or one of our ports in a shipping container. I also predict that if such an attack comes, the weapon will be made with materials or plans from North Korea. This danger is so great because the Obama administration has sent a clear message to North Korea: you can sell anything to anyone, cross any red line, or attack any ally, and do so with full confidence that you will get away with it. In fact, we might even give you aid while you're doing it.
Two weeks ago, South Korea's largest newspaper reported that North Korean technicians have been helping Syria manufacture chemical weapons to use against its people. For months, President Obama has been telling Syria that the use of chemical weapons would cross a "red line." If you wonder whether a typical rogue dictator takes such threats seriously, just look how quickly Bashar Assad called the president's bluff. Furthermore, if the use of chemical weapons was a red line for Syria, the proliferation of chemical weapons is also a red line for North Korea. Maybe Kim Jong Un wouldn't hesitate to sell a nuclear weapon to a terrorist before, but no action we've taken since would further deter him. The president owes us straight answers about whether this latest report is true and he must explain how he intends to deter North Korea's reckless young dictator.
The report of North Korea's chemical weapons proliferation is part of a larger effort to aid Syria. North Korean military advisers are reportedly in Syria, helping Assad's army with logistics, planning and artillery tactics. In January, the Israeli Air Force struck Syria's main research facility for chemical and biological weapons, which has been linked to North Korea. In 2009, at least two North Korean arms shipments were intercepted on their way to Iran, for the likely use of Syria's terrorist ally, Hezbollah, or Hamas. That same year, Greek authorities intercepted a shipment of 14,000 chemical protective suits and boxes of chemical reagents in transit from North Korea to Syria.
In September 2007, the Israeli Air Force destroyed a North Korean-designed nuclear reactor in the Syrian desert, shortly before it went online. The attack came just seven months after the State Department signed a denuclearization agreement with North Korea. Instead of abandoning the deal after learning of North Korea's duplicity, the State Department concealed North Korea's involvement from Congress and continued to ship fuel oil to North Korea.
Presidents should not make empty threats, and they should not throw away their leverage for the promises of untrustworthy dictators. President Obama's empty threats have made us less safe, and President Bush's ill-advised 2007 deal abandoned the one strategy that has worked against North Korea: freezing its offshore bank accounts and its money-laundering network. North Korea cannot maintain its leaders' opulent lifestyle or million-man conscript army without foreign cash.
Starting in September 2005, the Treasury Department methodically unplugged North Korea's money-laundering network by threatening to cut foreign banks that launder North Korean money out of the global financial network. Within a year, Kim Jong Il's palace economy was brought to the brink of ruin. That pressure forced him to seek a deal to get the sanctions lifted. North Korea demanded that we lift most U.S. sanctions first, and then denied the existence of a hidden uranium enrichment program that it later showed to a visiting nuclear scientist. In the final months of the Bush administration, North Korea reneged, correctly assuming that Obama would want his own deal and would hesitate to re-impose the sanctions.
Congress is now seeking to restore, toughen, and target the sanctions that worked before with H.R. 1771, the North Korea Sanctions Enforcement Act. The sanctions implemented by this bill, one with bipartisan support from the House Foreign Affairs Committee, cannot be lifted until we verify North Korea's disarmament. Of course, North Korea might never agree to disarmament, but if these sanctions are enforced aggressively, we may achieve the only real guarantee of North Korea's disarmament: the end of North Korea.
Posted by: Steve White ||
08/21/2013 00:00 ||
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Top|| File under: Commies
#1
Congress is kicking the wrong dog, North Korea. Want results ? Make it clear to Red China, that if they do not minimize support for NK, insure the unilateral disarmament of nuclear, chemical, or biological weapon from the NK within a month, factories of US based companies based in Red China will be "repatriated" to other locations on the globe.
Of course, no one has the balls in the present Congress to do it... Brinkmanship belongs in the 20th Century not the 21st Century right ?
Posted by: Marilyn (I had a Sex Change) Bourbon6503 ||
08/21/2013 9:04 Comments ||
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#2
I recall in 1970 apply for a certain federal program and on the application was a set of organizations and people that the government wanted to know if I had contact with. One was the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, which was composed of Americans, mostly Leftist, who fought in the Spanish Civil War for the Communist Republican side. That was thirty years after the war had ended. I'd say its a good bet in the Lefty PC environment you can't ask similar questions today, excluding of course YAF, the Tea Party, etc.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
