[Asharq al-Aswat] A news item, published in this paper, stated that the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt is considering changing its famous slogan 'Islam is the solution' as a precaution against obstacles that it might face from the government, especially as articles within the constitution emphasise the danger of practicing politics based on religion. The news item adds that the Muslim Brotherhood is currently looking into the idea of adopting other slogans instead of or as well as 'Islam is the solution.' According to the news item, the Muslim Brotherhood said that "this slogan caused there to be many legal and political reservations." Muslim Brotherhood students at Egyptian universities had anticipated the MB's official idea or to be more specific, the MB's new position by using an alternative slogan, 'we hope for the best for Egypt' during the university student elections. They argued, as the news item indicates, that they coined that new slogan to alleviate security pressures.
What was the position of the reformist figure in the Brotherhood leadership hierarchy, Essam al Eryan, towards this new youthful slogan? Al Eryan "decreed" that the new student slogan does not contradict the most cherished and sacred slogan of the Muslim Brotherhood, 'Islam is the solution.' He believes that the new slogan is part of a larger and more comprehensive slogan, namely, 'Islam is the solution.' It doesn't stop there. The Brotherhood mediator amazed us even further by stating that "every stage requires a different slogan." Al Eryan maintained that the slogan 'Islam is the solution' represents the identity of the Muslim Brotherhood.
Of course the Muslim Brotherhood has its own way of interpreting this flagrant religious slogan and normalizing it within the civil state and I am talking about the constitution here not the regime because the MB is feeling this constitutional dilemma that lies at the core of these slogans and it came up with the following solution or ploy: whoever says that the 'Islam is the solution' slogan contradicts the constitution of the Egyptian state is wrong. These are the words of former Muslim Brotherhood Deputy Chairman Mohammed Habib. He believes that rejecting this slogan means rejecting the Egyptian constitution, the second article of which states that Islam is the official state religion. Habib says that those who oppose the slogan 'Islam is the solution' are actually "opposing and protesting the public order of the state." But, Mohammed Hassan Shaban, the journalist who wrote this news item, cleverly pointed out that Habib did not refer to the fifth clause of the constitution that he cited from that outlaws practicing politics based on religion.
This controversy will never end; the theorists and politicians of the Muslim Brotherhood will always find a way out; they will always try verbal, emotional and constitutional tricks as well. This is not unusual with the Muslim Brotherhood and other bodies. We all remember how the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq dropped the word 'revolution' and opted for the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq. The then party leader Abdul Aziz al Hakim defended that change after securing enough votes for his party in the Iraqi parliament.
We also recall how the Muslim Brotherhood in Kuwait, after the war of liberation in 1991, called itself the Islamic Constitutional Movement in order to ride the wave of increasing Kuwaiti patriotism and demanding a return to the constitution and parliamentary life in Kuwait after the invasion. Also in Iraq today, the State of Law Coalition headed by Nouri al Maliki is nothing but a façade for the fundamentalist Dawaa Party.
Let us return to Egypt; perhaps all this can be understood in light of the vehemence of political rivalry for power and rule in Egypt, especially as parliamentary elections are drawing closer.
The war of words intensifies and arguments are being debated by rivals in a climate of electoral and political conflict.
My goal is not to recommend one Arab political party over another in Egypt or elsewhere as that is another topic altogether. Rather, the aim here is to reflect specifically on this clear "flexibility" in changing and altering slogans that are meant to be sacred and irrevocable, as their guardians have always claimed.
What the Muslim Brotherhood is doing in Egypt and elsewhere is political manoeuvring and the person carrying out these manoeuvres is open to change and transformation. Even Essam al Eryan, in the middle of defending the Muslim Brotherhood's slogan change and its durability, acknowledged that there was flexibility and willingness towards change if the position of its rival, i.e. the Egyptian authorities, forces them to adopt that approach. If the authorities show tolerance, the Muslim Brotherhood would introduce their sacred slogan unabashed. But if the authorities show vigilance and strictness then the MB would search for another slogan that is suitable to that stage and its requirements, and does not negate the basis of the main slogan.
Posted by: Fred ||
04/17/2010 00:00 ||
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#1
Islam is the solution?
1) To what problem?
2) The Final solution? Again?
The plane crash that killed Poland's president and 95 others is a tragedy for the Polish people and a loss of a good friend for the United States. For Poland's neighbor Russia, however, it's an opportunity to push for hegemony over Eastern Europe, as in the Iron Curtain days.
For the Russian bear is back. Like Dracula rising from his coffin, it now stalks the world long after we thought it dead and buried. And President Obama's feckless handling of foreign affairs is giving Russia's authoritarian leadership a chance like no other to expand its power -- and steadily diminish ours.
Some will believe the Russian account of the crash, that the Polish pilot deliberately endangered the lives of his president and the entire upper echelon of his country's leadership by trying to land in a thick fog despite repeated warnings from Russian ground control.
Others won't believe -- remembering that President Lech Kaczynski was a bitter foe of Russia's Vladimir Putin, and how Putin's dreaded FSB (the KGB's successor) was linked six years ago to a plot to poison Ukraine's president.
Either way, expect new, perhaps irresistible, pressure on Poland to toe the Kremlin line. Throw in the START treaty that Russia extracted from our president just last week, and anyone who imagined we won the Cold War had better think again.
Americans watched the Soviet Union implode in 1990, and saw Russia reduced to a national basket case. Her former empire splintered into 15 independent republics, from the Ukraine and Georgia to Kyrgyzstan. Her once-mighty army, navy and nuclear arsenal split the same way.
American policymakers simply wrote Russia off as a country without a present, and no clear hope for the future. Soviet experts like Condoleezza Rice, once the heavyweights of every Washington think tank, scrambled to find other work.
They should have realized that a country rich in resources from oil and natural gas to iron, gold and diamonds wouldn't stay poor for long -- and that a nation with a long history of aggressive imperial expansion wouldn't rest easy at having shrunk to a size smaller than when Peter the Great became czar.
In 2000, Russians elected Putin president. As rising oil prices began to fill Russia's coffers, he promised to restore Russia's pride and power -- with the price soon revealed as the end of her 10-year chaotic experiment with democratic freedom.
Putin the ex-KGB agent had learned a valuable lesson buried in the ashes of defeat: Communism had held back the Soviet Union. When it came to intimidating Russia's European neighbors as well as her own people, the cold, naked exercise of power for power's sake worked far better -- especially when the United States insisted on looking the other way.
So, for 10 years, America sat by while Putin massacred the Chechens, murdered dissident journalists and jailed Russia's leading industrialists while installing his cronies in their place.
We sat by while Putin tripled Russia's defense budget, helped Iran build and equip its nuclear reactor at Bushehr and sent the mullahs advanced missile systems and nuclear-sensitive technologies.
The US did nothing, for Rice and others insisted that nothing interfere with our effort to get Russia to endorse UN sanctions against Iran -- a country the Russians were helping to arm.
Finally, in the summer of 2008, the brutal Russian incursion into independent Georgia made the Bush administration change its mind about Putin. But then came a US election, and a new foreign-policy team. Far from learning from Bush's mistakes, Obama is now determined to compound them.
The first step was abandoning our democratic Eastern European allies, including Poland, that had defied Putin by agreeing to host US missile-defense systems in their countries: Obama dropped the plan because it offended the Russians. This was followed a week ago by the START treaty that locks us into permanent nuclear decline while Russia is free to modernize its nukes and even build its own missile-defense shield.
And the very day the treaty was signed came the coup against the government of Kyrgyzstan, which is a vital air-supply line to our troops in Afghanistan. Like the crash that killed Kaczynski, this eliminated a leader who had defied the Kremlin over a US base in his nation.
What's next? Putin and his puppet president, Dmitry Medvedev, now say they won't support any gasoline boycott against Iran -- the one sanction that might halt the Iranian nuclear program as it comes into the final turn.
We won't know the truth about this weekend's crash until the plane's "black box" flight recorder is safely out of Russian hands. But we already know the truth about Putin. People laughed when Bush said he'd looked into Putin's soul and saw a good man. Obama has looked at Putin's bloodstained hands and sees a leader we can deal with.
#1
Ukraine's a lost cause - even the democratic leaders there are completely corrupt - and the 'stans were never going to be part of our orbit. But Barry's decisions on nukes, missile defense and Iran are retarded.
The Russians are now paying us back, in spades, for 18 years of Russian retreat and degradation. And President KickMe is determined to help them any way he can. Jackass.
#2
The plane crash that killed Poland's president and 95 others is a tragedy for the Polish people and a loss of a good friend for the United States. For Poland's neighbor Russia, however, it's an opportunity to push for hegemony over Eastern Europe, as in the Iron Curtain days.
The premise ( that Russia is returning to its Soviet days, the geopolitical hegemony ) is insane.
So many factors were at work then. Soviet control of eastern Europe was the Soviet reward for their part of the victory over the Axis powers. Soviet attempts in expansionism in the Middle east was in response to Pan-Arab socialism, which was an answer to Islamic hegemony.
I don't see any of that now. What I see is Russia fighting an intra-border war with Islam it should have fought directly after WWI but for the CPSU.
What I do see is a nation emerging from a dark time, and finding its footing as a republic for the first time ever. The first of the "Freedom Babies" are coming of age as I write this and Russia is regaining a sense of its very culture as a republic.
That's why I have said that Russia must own up to the calamity it caused in 1940 in Katyn,and it must pay compensation to the families who suffer this mini-holocaust.
It is also why Barak Obama's giving away of the farm in nukes is such a cynical betrayal of the US. Russia didn't need the agreement and we couldn't afford it.
h/t Instapundit
As the Tea Party Express rolls across the country, drawing crowds of thousands at every stop, a golden lesson has dropped in their laps from above.
#1
By his Chicago-way, thug-tactics victory in the health care battle, he has clearly shown his own stripes, those of a determined revolutionary without regard for the will of the people.
I think we have to stop talking about the "Chicago way." It understates the threat.
The correct term should be the "SDS way" or "Weather Underground way" to properly reflect their commitment to Marxism, disrespect for the law, and hatred of middle class America.
Only when Americans realize how much Obama HATES them will they treat the 2010 election with the seriousness it deserves.
In the comments yesterday, it was pointed out we are now more socialist than Communist China (50% vs 32% government). If we do not systematically repeal Obama's laws we are in very great trouble.
Al
Posted by: Frozen Al ||
04/17/2010 12:14 Comments ||
Top||
#1
Might be interesting if there were any federalism left, but with DC calling all the shots it would make little difference. Only possible benefit would be to send more Republican Senators to DC, but the way the Republicans in the Senate vote these days there's probably not much hope there either.
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.
