Shocker: Media/Liberal Internationalist Conventional Wisdom Wrong on Egypt, Muslim Brotherhood

It's a day of shocks. Again, I mean.

Via @benk84: the same people who claim that Christians are plotting a "Quiverfull" military takeover of the United States also claimed that the Muslim Brotherhood was a moderate group which was "mostly secular" in outlook.

The prognosis is exceedingly grim. Two years after the ouster of long-serving strongman Hosni Mubarak, Egypt is in the throes of a full-blown economic crisis. Government reserves have dropped by more than half, plummeting from $36 billion in 2011 to just $15 billion today. That’s enough to cover just three months of imports of vital commodities such as food and petroleum. GDP growth has slowed to under 2 percent, and the country’s national currency, the Egyptian Pound, is in freefall. At the same time, unemployment has surged, now estimated at nearly 13 percent and rising...

These statistics are all the more tragic because they could have been avoided. The February 2011 ouster of Mubarak was followed by a pronounced fiscal downturn, leading many to conclude that the country’s new, Muslim Brotherhood-dominated government—for all of its bluster to the contrary—wouldn’t impose radical changes on the country’s political direction. Instead, conventional wisdom held that the new powers-that-be in Cairo would, for both economic and political reasons, opt for a process of “creeping Islamization”—a slow, gradual changeover of the country’s civilian bureaucracy and legislature which wouldn’t rile international markets or spook jittery investors.

The conventional wisdom turned out to be wrong. In recent months, the Brotherhood has thrown caution to the wind and set about remaking the Egyptian state in its own image with a speed and ferocity that has surprised most onlookers.

Even though they got this one (and the last one, and the one before that) wildly wrong, they'll be very arrogant and demanding that you trust them on the next one.

The central gravamen of the leftist worldview on foreign policy is that the right spends far too much time "hating" and "fearing" external enemies, imagining those external enemies to be very different from themselves, and thus alien and threatening.

To combat this supposed failing, leftist worldview pushes the idea that those in other countries are "really no different from ourselves," and they base their prognoses on this idea. The idiots at Davos imagine that the Muslim Brotherhood types might talk tough, but deep down, in their truest heart, they'd... all rather be at Davos, too. They too would like to sip champers and chomp on shrimp.

They then peacock around, showing off their Morally Superior feathers, noting how -- unlike those Xtianists in the US -- they don't "hate" and "fear" what they don't understand.

Now, simultaneous with pushing the idea that the Muslim Brotherhood is "just like us" and comprised of Davos-loving Men of the Enlightenment, they push the idea that the Christian right in the US is in fact to be be both feared and hated -- the Muslim Brotherhood would never, ever impose a radical new social order on Egypt (even though they've proclaimed their desire to do so for years), but Focus on the Family, on the other hand, does indeed plot just such a takeover of the US.

But what -- I thought we weren't supposed to "hate" and "fear" what we don't understand? I thought it was base to feel threatened by people and think of them as strange and alien simply because they're not similar to you culturally and religiously?

Shut up, they explained.

Leftism isn't really a worldview which even attempts an evenhanded and universal application to similar situations. It's merely a goal, an agenda, and any means, including blatant dishonesty and laughable hypocrisy and inconsistency, are fair means for pursuing its ultimate end.

Supposedly they are high-minded in refusing to accept that we might have any external enemies. They might seem more high-minded if they weren't constantly finding internal enemies which they would have us fear and despise.

posted by Ace at 01:58 PM

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