Tag Archives: Coptic Christians

Islamic World Tells Clinton: Defamation of Islam Must be Prevented — in America

December 14, 2011Clare M. Lopez

As Secretary of State Hillary Clinton welcomes Secretary General of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu to Washington this week, it is critical that Americans pay attention to what these two leaders intend to do. From 12 to 14 December 2011, working teams from the Department of State (DoS) and the OIC are going to discuss implementation mechanisms that could impose limits on freedom of speech and expression.

The OIC’s purpose, as stated explicitly in its April 2011 4^th Annual Report on Islamophobia, is to criminalize "incitement to hatred and violence on religious grounds." Incitement is to be defined by applying the "test of consequences" to speech. Under this twisted perversion of falsely "yelling ‘fire’ in a crowded theater," it doesn’t matter what someone actually says — or even whether it is true or not; if someone else commits violence and says it’s because of something that person said, the speaker will be held criminally liable.

The OIC is taking direct aim at free speech and expression about Islam. Neither Christianity nor Judaism is named in the OIC’s official documents, whose only concern is to make the world safe from "defamation" of Islam — a charge that includes speaking truthfully about the national security implications of the Islamic doctrine of jihad.

Incitement to hatred under the OIC definition includes artistic expression like the Danish cartoons, literary expression like Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses, or Pastor Terry Jones’ burning of his personally owned copy of the Qur’an. According to the "test of consequences," if Muslims feel compelled to burn, loot, riot, and kill in response to such exercises of free expression, under the laws the OIC wants the U.S. to enact, it would be the editor and cartoonist of the Jyllands-Posten newspaper, Salman Rushdie, and Terry Jones who would be held criminally responsible for any damage or deaths that ensue.

Last March, the State Department and Secretary Clinton insisted that "combating intolerance based on religion" can be accomplished without compromising Americans’ treasured First Amendment rights. But if that were so, there would be no possible excuse for engaging at this level with an organization like the OIC that is openly dedicated to implementing Islamic law globally. This is why it is so important to pay attention not only to the present agenda, but to a series of documents leading up to it, issued by both the U.S. and the OIC. From 12 to 14 December 2011, the DoS and OIC working teams will focus on implementation mechanisms for "Resolution 16/18," a declaration that was adopted by the U.N. Human Rights Council in April 2011.

Resolution 16/18 was hailed as a victory by Clinton, because it calls on countries to combat "intolerance, negative stereotyping and stigmatization" based on religion without criminalizing free speech — except in cases of "incitement to imminent violence." But if the criterion for determining "incitement to imminent violence" is a new "test of consequences," then this is nothing but an invitation to stage Muslim "Days of Rage" following the slightest perceived offense by a Western blogger, instructor, or radio show guest, all of whom will be held legally liable for "causing" the destruction, possibly even if what they’ve said is merely a statement of fact. The implications of such prior restraint on free speech would be chilling (which is precisely the point).

In fact, the "test of consequences" is already being applied rigorously in European media and courts, where any act or threat of violence — whether by a jihadist, insane person, or counter-jihadist — is defined as a "consequence" of statements that are critical of some aspect of Islam and, therefore, to be criminalized. Recent trials of Dutch political leader Geert Wilders, Austrian free speech champion Elizabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff, and Danish Islamic expert Lars Hedegaard (as well as the witch hunt for "instigators" that followed the murderous attacks by Norwegian blogger Anders Behring Brevik) all attest to the extent of these "hate speech" laws’ oppressive pall over what is left of the European Enlightenment. Now, if the OIC and the Obama administration have their way, it’s America’s turn.

Once it’s understood that under Islamic law, "slander" is defined as saying "anything concerning a person [a Muslim] that he would dislike," the scope of potential proximate causes of Muslim rage becomes obvious. For instance, in the Preamble to the Resolutions on Legal Affairs Adopted by the 38^th Session of the Council of Foreign Ministers of the OIC in Astana, Kazakhstan in June 2011, under paragraph 9, the OIC:

Denounces media campaigns and fabrications made by some quarters in non-Member States [i.e., the Dar al-Harb or West] regarding the mistreatment of non-Muslim minorities and communities in the OIC Member States under the slogan of religious freedom and so on.

Consider what is likely to be a bloodbath for Coptic Christians that will occur as soon as the Muslim Brotherhood and its Salafist allies are firmly in control of Egypt. This provision means that any Western media that accurately report that coming massacre could be legally charged with "incitement to imminent violence" under the test of consequences, in effect blaming those who raise the alarm instead of those who perpetrate the violence.

Clearly, the OIC feels some sense of urgency to get the rest of the non-Muslim world, and especially the U.S., on board with these objectives as Paragraph 10:

Expresses the need to pursue as a matter of priority, a common policy aimed at preventing defamation of Islam perpetrated under the pretext and justification of the freedom of expression in particular through media and Internet.

In this same document is the OIC Council of Foreign Ministers’ "Resolution No. 1/38-LEG On Follow Up and Coordination of Work on Human Rights," which makes reference to the OIC’s new "Independent Permanent Commission on Human Rights" and stipulates that it "shall promote the civil, political, social, and economic rights enshrined in the Organization’s covenants and declarations and in universally agreed human rights instruments, in conformity with Islamic values." [Emphasis added.] This wording alone should set off alarm bells in view of the OIC’s 1990 Cairo Declaration on Human Rights in Islam (CDHRI), which explicitly declared that when the Muslim ummah (as represented by the OIC) uses the term "human rights," what is meant is Islamic law (sharia). "Universally agreed" or not, the CDHRI was served as an official document to the U.N. Commission on Human Rights in 1993, thereby creating an established instrument of reference on the Islamic definition of "human rights."

The foundational documents upon which the Muslim ummah — the OIC — now relies to undergird its sharia agenda were drafted years ago. The 1966 U.N. Commission for Human Rights International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), which entered into force in 1976, was based firmly on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and preceded the 1969 creation of the OIC by just a few years. The ICCPR’s Articles 19 (3) and 20 nevertheless foreshadow sharia Islam’s demand for restrictions on free speech in an explicit and chilling way — and, as will be seen, in a way the OIC is trying to exploit:

Article 19

1. Everyone shall have the right to hold opinions without interference

2. Everyone shall have the right to freedom of expression: this right shall include freedom to seek, receive, and impart information and ideas of all kinds, regardless of frontiers, either orally, in writing or in print, in the form of art, or through any other media of this choice

3. The exercise of the rights provided for in paragraph 2 of this article carries with it special duties and responsibilities. It may therefore be subject to certain restrictions, but these shall only be such as provided by law and are necessary.

(a) For respect of the rights or reputations of others;

(b) For the protection of national security or of public order (ordre public), or of public health or morals.

Article 20

1. Any propaganda for war shall be prohibited by law

2. Any advocacy of national, racial or religious hatred that constitutes incitement to discrimination, hostility or violence shall be prohibited by law.

Clearly, the OIC is trying to exploit these international standards, as shown in its April 2011 4^th Annual Report on Islamophobia posted at its online Islamophobia Observatory. Given the ICCPR’s assertions above, the OIC’s objective has long since been entered into official U.N. language. It required only a narrowing of the focus from the generality of the ICCPR down to the OIC’s exclusive interest in protecting Islam from discrimination. It also required bringing the U.S. on board with the program to enforce Islamic law on slander. With the willing participation of the Obama administration, the OIC has tackled both of these challenges. In Section 6 of the Islamophobia Report, "Conclusions and Recommendations," the language references the OIC goal of "removing the gaps in international legal instruments" to force the non-Muslim world to comply with its plan to criminalize "slander" of Islam (emphasis added):

d. Ensuring swift and effective implementation of the new approach signified by the consensual adoption of HRC Resolution 16/18, entitled ‘combating intolerance, negative stereotyping and stigmatization of, and discrimination, incitement to violence, and violence against persons based on religion or belief’, by inter alia, removing the gaps in implementation and interpretation of international legal instruments and criminalizing acts of incitement to hatred and violence…

e. Constructively engaging to bridge divergent views on the limits to the right to freedom of opinion and expression, in a structured multilateral framework…geared toward filling the ‘interpretation void’ with regard to the interface between articles 19(3) and 20 of the ICCPR based on emerging approaches like applying the ‘test of consequences.’

Those "gaps in implementation and interpretation" refer to U.S. objections to criminalizing free speech (in violation of the First Amendment), and the "structured multilateral framework" would appear to be the agenda in Washington, D.C. from December 12 to 14 at the meeting between Clinton and OIC Secretary General Ihsanoglu. It would not be overreaching to conclude that the purpose of this meeting, at least from the OIC perspective, is to convince the Obama administration that free speech that rouses Muslim masses to fury — as defined by the "test of consequences" — must be restricted under U.S. law to bring it into compliance with sharia law’s dictates on slander.

Clinton’s own statements reflect the OIC language on the "gap" (emphasis added):

… together we have begun to overcome the false divide that pits religious sensitivities against freedom of expression, and we are pursuing a new approach based on concrete steps … to use some old-fashioned techniques of peer pressure and shaming, so that people don’t feel that they have the support to do what we abhor.

Despite disingenuous protestations by Clinton, another OIC document likely to be on the table at the Department of State/OIC working sessions abandons all pretense that any other religion besides Islam is the point of discussion. The Resolutions on Political Affairs Adopted by the Thirty-Eighth Session of the Council of Foreign Ministers at the June 2011 OIC Council of Foreign Ministers in Kazakhstan (emphasis added):

5. Affirms that freedoms have to be exercised with responsibility and with due regard for the fundamental rights of others and, in this context, condemns in the strongest possible terms, all blasphemous acts against Islamic principles, symbols and sacred personalities, in particular, the despicable act of burning of the Holy Quran in Florida, USA on 20 March 2011, publication of offensive caricatures of Prophet Mohammad (PBUH), all abhorrent and irresponsible statements about Islam and its sacred personalities, and screening of defamatory documentary about the Holy Quran [Wilders’ Fitna] and dissemination of this hate material under the pretext of freedom of expression and opinion[.]

Subsequent sections in the same document stress "the need to prevent the abuse of freedom of expression and press for insulting Islam and other divine religions" and to reaffirm "that terrorism cannot and should not be associated with any religion, nationality, civilization or group." It furthermore:

[c]alls upon all States to prevent any advocacy of religious discrimination, hostility or violence and defamation of Islam by incorporating legal and administrative measures which render defamation illegal and punishable by law, and also urges all Member States to adopt specific and relevant educational measures at all levels[.]

It may be recalled that the Obama administration claimed, obviously incorrectly, that defamation was no longer part of these agreements. The language of these resolutions instead stresses "the importance of expediting the implementation process of its decision on developing a legally binding international instrument to prevent intolerance, discrimination, prejudice and hatred on the grounds of religion, and defamation of religions[.]"

The Department of State is not the only U.S. government agency committed to achieving compliance with the OIC’s "Islamophobia" censorship agenda. The Departments of Justice and Homeland Security both have committed publicly to an overhaul of their training materials to ensure that nothing in the curriculum gives "offense" to Muslim Brotherhood affiliates such as the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA) or the Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC), with which both departments maintain close relationships. Instructors who previously taught the intrinsic connection among Islamic doctrine, law, and scripture and Islamic terrorism henceforth will be blacklisted by the U.S. government. As documented by the intrepid columnist and author Diana West, the Department of Defense also has made its obeisance to Islam, with troop instructions on how to handle the Qur’an and avoid spitting, urinating, or sleeping with feet pointed in the direction of Mecca.

Capping the administration’s campaign to align U.S. national security policy within the parameters of Islamic law, the White House published "Strategic Implementation Plan for Empowering Local Partners to Prevent Violent Extremism in the United States" in December 2011. The plan makes clear that "violent extremism," not Islamic terrorism, is the primary national security threat to the homeland. According to this "strategy," the solution is partnership with "local communities" — the term used for the administration’s favored Muslim Brotherhood front groups, which already are using such relationships to silence their critics, both inside and outside government. These new rules of censorship state that the term "violent extremism" can no longer be used in combination with terms like "jihad," "Islam," "Islamist," or "sharia." And these new rules are already being taught to U.S. law enforcement, homeland security offices, and the military nationwide.

The agenda of this week’s Department of State/OIC meetings may mark an important "milestone," as Sayyed Qutb might put it, on the pathway to sharia in America. If — under the "test of consequences" — those who speak truth about Islam, sharia, and jihad may be held criminally responsible for the violent actions of those who say they find such truth "offensive," then, in the future, "violent extremists" could be just about anyone…anyone the government, in obedience to the sharia dictates of the OIC, decides they are.

Further, if the rubric is to be based on this "test of consequence," then it creates a real temptation to any administration so inclined to "create" consequences that will justify a change in America’s free speech rights. By way of example, analysts have suggested that the motive for the Department of Justice’s "Fast and Furious" scandal, now under congressional investigation, may have been to create a "crisis" — a "consequence" — caused by U.S. guns shipped across the border to Mexican drug-dealers (and used in multiple homicides, including an American Border Protection officer) to "nudge" public consensus to expand gun control laws.

Even if Obama’s State Department seems fully enamored with a "test of consequences" on speech critical of Islam, most Americans across the political spectrum will realize that this perverts the traditional understanding of the First Amendment. It is to be hoped that dedication to the Constitution — rather than to the OIC’s definition of "slander" of Islam or the "test of consequences" — will prevail among the ranks of our national leadership. Regardless of what’s going on behind closed doors at the State Department this week, Americans should be aware — and outraged. An informed citizenry, as always, remains the final defense of the Republic.

Clare M. Lopez is a senior fellow at the Center for Security Policy and also at The Clarion Fund.

Silencing the Watchdogs of Religious Freedom: Durbin’s War on the USCIRF

December 12, 2011Frank Gaffney, Jr.

We have been hearing a lot about the Muslim Brotherhood lately – and none of it is good news. Get used to it. With the Brotherhood’s ascendancy in the Middle East, North Africa, Turkey and beyond, the world is going to be subjected to a crash course in Islamist supremacism – and what it means for the rest of us.

We were on notice even before the Egyptian elections in which the Muslim Brotherhood (MB) and their allies secured upwards of sixty percent of the votes in that country’s new, post-Mubarak parliament – and the murderous violence towards Coptic Christians that preceded them. A reminder came on December 7th when a three-judge panel of the U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals unanimously affirmed convictions ofleaders of the MB-associated Holy Land Foundation. The earlier trial in 2008 did much to expose the totalitarian, supremacist nature and seditious objectives of that group, elsewhere and here in the United States.

Notably, evidence introduced (uncontested by the defense) in that case by federal prosecutors established that the Brotherhood has established myriad front organizations, including the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) and the North American IslamicTrust (NAIT), to pursue what it calls “civilization jihad.” This is a stealthy form of holy war, designed to “eliminate and destroy Western civilization from within…by their hands [i.e., those of the infidels].”

The Obama administration has greatly facilitated the efforts of such organizations to penetrate and influence the government of the United States. To cite but one example, on December 12-14, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is convening a meeting with representatives of theBrotherhood’s multinational official counterpart, the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC). As Phyllis Chesler points out in a brilliant essay published by PJMedia () entitled “The End of Religious Freedom,” the OIC’s stated purpose for this meeting is to counter: “media campaigns and fabrications made by some quarters in non-member states regarding the mistreatment of non-Muslim minorities and communities in the OIC member states under the slogans of religious freedoms and so on.”

Put simply, the Muslim Brotherhood, the Organization of Islamic Cooperation and other adherents to the Islamist politico-military-legal doctrine of shariah seek to impose their practice of “blasphemy” laws worldwide. Accordingly, they seek to suppress information that “offends Muslims” or otherwise puts them, their agenda or their behavior in a negative light – no matter how accurately.

In recent years, the U.S. government has increasingly conformed to what amount to shariah blasphemy laws. A singular exception has been the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF). Since its inception by act of Congress in 1998, the unpaid commissioners have rendered incalculably important servicemonitoring and reporting on threats to freedom of religion emanating from Islamist and other sources.

USCIRF has, for example, documented the plight of Copts in Egypt and Christians and Jews inother parts of the Middle East. They have exposed how non-shariah-adherent Muslims and “apostates” from Islam have been raped, tortured and killed for deviating from what is deemed to be the true faith by Brotherhood, OIC and like-minded forces.

The Commission has also helped expose how Saudi government-supplied textbooks used, among other places, in American madrassas, extol violent jihadism and intolerance for people of other faiths. Interestingly, such texts explain three different ways homosexuals can be executed in conformity with shariah’s treatment of their behavior as a capital offense.

Now that Team Obama has made promoting the radical lesbian-gay-bisexual-transgender agenda whatMrs. Clinton calls a U.S. foreign policy priority,” one would think the administration would be grateful for the work the Religious Freedom Commission has done, among other things, to expose and demand changes in such Saudi textbooks.

To the contrary, the Obama administration has been working behind the scenes to do as its Islamist friends have demanded by shutting down the USCIRF. It has enlisted for this purpose Senator Dick Durbin, the Senate’s Number 2 Democrat. Sen. Durbin is not only perfectly placed to do the deed stealthily. He has his own close associations with a number of the Brotherhood’s top fronts and operatives in his home state of Illinois, in Washington and elsewhere across the country.

As it happens, in addition to serving as the Majority Whip, Sen. Durbin is a member of both the Senate Foreign Relations and Appropriations Committees – the panels responsible for reauthorizing and funding the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom. He has used his leadership and committee positions to place what amount to secret “holds” on legislation that would extend the life of the commission.

Consequently, unless something changes before the current government funding bill expires, our nation’s sole official, independent and still-effective watchdog for religious liberty – and the most trusted and important American voice for those being denied it – will go out of business on December 16th.

The Majority Whip’s role in this stealthy jihad against an agency that still dares to speak thetruth to the Islamists’ power is all the more reprehensible since Senator Durbin frequently excoriates his colleagues’ use of secret holds. In fact, he has cosponsored legislation to bar the practice. Such rank hypocrisy simply adds to the venality of Sen. Durbin’s conduct in this matter.

So does the reported reason for the hold Senator Durbin has yet to acknowledge he is exercising against the USCIRF. Evidently, he is trying to euchre members of the House of Representatives into earmarking funds for the federal government to purchase a state prison in Thompson, Illinois that his home state can no longer afford to operate.

When the idea of a federal takeover of this facility was first floated last year, it ran into strenuous opposition on both sides of Capitol Hill. Not only was the deal deemed to be unaffordable at a time of yawning federal deficits. It turned out that the Obama administration and its allies in Illinois’ Democratic machine in Washington and Springfield state had in mind another, even more outrageous motivation: the Thompson prison could serve as the place to relocate terrorists currently held offshore at Guantanamo Bay, allowing Gitmo’s closure.

In other words, Sen. Durbin is seeking to secure by stealth an earmark that would overturn existing legislation barring the relocation of such detainees inside the United States – and the real risk that they would, thereby, be granted constitutional rights, access to civilian U.S. courts and perhaps be set loose in our country by irresponsible federal judges. How many more reasons do the American people need to oppose and condemn Dick Durbin’s shenanigans?

Voters in Illinois and elsewhere need to call out Senator Durbin’s contribution to the stealth jihad – both with his office and, in the case of other Senators’ constituents, those of their own representatives. America needs to safeguard religious freedoms against all enemies, foreign and domestic. To that end, we must strengthen, not garrote, the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom – the one official entity still doing that vital mission.

Frank J. Gaffney, Jr. is President of the Center for Security Policy, a columnist for the Washington Times and host of the nationally syndicated program, Secure Freedom Radio, heard in Washington weeknights at 9:00 p.m. on WRC 1260 AM.

Adel Guindy: Islamism & the Facade of Egyptian Democracy

December 9, 2011Center for Security Policy

Adel Guindy testified before the Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission in the House of Representatives. Reps. Frank Wolf and James McDermott presented “Under Threat: The Worsening Plight of Egypt’s Coptic Christians.”

Mr. Guindy is President of the Board of Coptic Solidarity. He is also President of Solidarité Copte (France), is a Member of the Board of Directors of the Middle East Freedom Forum (USA, Egypt), Le Monde Copte (France) and Egyptian Democratic Solidarity (Egypt).

He has been an activist for several years, and frequently writes on political transformation in Egypt, the Coptic issue and Islamism. He has authored several articles in English (MERIA and other publications), three books in Arabic, and co-authored one book in French. He was a senior editor of Egypt’s Coptic community weekly Watani.

Other witnesses included Kathy Fitzpatrick (Deputy Assistant Secretary, Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor, U.S. Department of State); Nina Shea (Director, Center for Religious Freedom, Hudson Institute); Dina Guirguis (Member, Egyptian American Rule of Law Association); Raymond Ibrahim (Middle East specialist and Associate fellow, Middle East Forum); and Cynthia Farahat (Egyptian political activist).

The following is Mr. Guindy’s testimony for the record and, below, is a transcript of his comments at the hearing.

Adel Guindy: Testimony before the Tom Lantos Commission, December 7 2011. Click here for a PDF of his testimony for the record.

TESTIMONY OF ADEL F. GUINDY

TOM LANTOS HUMAN RIGHTS COMMISSION

Thank you, Mr. Chairman, for conducting this important hearing entitled “Under Threat: The Worsening Plight of Egypt’s Coptic Christians.” I am honored to be here today, and I would like to request that my entire written statement be made part of the Record, however I will highlight some of the key points and would be happy to answer questions.

In keeping with the “seasonal” depictions of the situation in Egypt, such as “spring of this” or “winter of that,” I would venture to say that Egypt, indeed the region, is entering – at least for the short- and medium-term – a harsh summer with little to be seen in its arid deserts beyond thirst, agony and mirage.

In my testimony, I will touch more on the general political situation in Egypt and its projected evolution, because it is only by understanding the overall picture, that we can fully understand the implications and consequences for the Copts.

TAHRIR-II

In order to better understand the admittedly confusing situation, let me begin with what happened during Tahrir-II.

On Friday Nov 18, 2011, hundreds of thousands of Islamists-mainly Muslim Brotherhood and Salafists-set out to protest the inclusion of the term “civilian” to describe the future state. This term was mentioned in a document on constitutional principles that have been in the works for months. The term “civilian” is generally understood to mean “non-religious and non-military,” but Islamists loathed the possibility that it might be understood to mean “secular.” This, despite the fact that the text of Article II of the old Constitution in which Islam is the religion of State and the principles of Sharia the main source of legislation, was still upheld by the document. This same new document gave the Army a special, almost supra-state, status. Just hours after the November 18 march, the government caved to pressure and removed the contested term.

The next day, the docile government turned into a lion, when a sit-in by some 150 protesters from the families of the injured revolutionaries demanding treatment by the government, was brutally disbanded by the anti-riot forces. Furious at the attack and more so at the apparent complicity between the Military and Islamists, crowds poured into Tahrir Square. As the oppression increased, the crowds became even more determined and aggressive, trying to attack and burn the Ministry of Interior building. The majority of the anti-government slogans were directed at the SCAF and its Chief, al-Moushir (Field Marshal) Tantawi, calling for his ouster and trial. At least 38 people were killed and thousands wounded.

THE ORIGINAL SIN: THE MILITARY’S OBSESSION WITH POWER

To try and understand the full picture, we need to go back to what the Military did when they took over governing Egypt last February. It was a manifestation of what I like to call the even-older “Original Sin” that bred what we are in today and will continue to do unless redeemed – that “original sin” is the Military’s attachment to power since 1952. Ever since that date, they have enjoyed unparalleled power; apart from a unique position of behind-the-scenes authority, all the presidents, many prime ministers, ministers, governors and heads of public organizations have come from their ranks. Coupled with that are the huge financial and economic interests (estimated by some to reach 30-40% of Egypt’s economy) with which the military is involved The Army’s budget is beyond any scrutiny and the Army’s ranks can be only judged before military tribunals.

The stakes for the Military are high and however they may deny it, numerous acts show their intention to hold on to that unique position.

For the Military, it is almost unavoidable that the they enter into alliance with the Islamists while at the same time – in a twisted form of machination – use them to scare Egypt’s citizens, and the World, to justify the need for the Military’s very strong role in maintaining peace and stability. Whether or not SCAF or other military lean towards the Brotherhood is not important, but the issue of the alliance is what is important.

It is fair to claim that both the Military and the Islamists have a strategic interest in working together. Why is that?

The generals know that there are strategic imperatives for the U.S., whatever the U.S. Administration’s political party:

Maintain U.S. interests in Egypt; after all huge sums have been invested there. By one account, what Egypt has received since the Camp David agreements is about the same as the entire Marshall Plan (both in current dollars) devoted to rebuild several western European countries after WW-II (it appears to roughly be about 85 billion);
Maintain the security of Israel and the peace treaty;
Not allow a military regime to rule in Egypt – at least in appearance.

The generals are also aware and are proponents of a fourth strategic element, specific to the current Administration, which is to operate with a policy of open arms towards Islamist parties, as long as those parties come to power through the “ballot box.” I will touch on this point a bit later in my testimony.

The generals are certainly not interested in directly “governing” Egypt. A country with so many chronic problems, not to mention the chaos created after January and the new rebelliousness of the people, makes it more of a liability for them to be involved in the country’s day-to-day governing. They are, however, intent on maintaining the power and authority the Army has enjoyed over the past six decades.

On the other hand, while the Brotherhood is known to have reassured the U.S. in contacts over the past few years of its intentions regarding the above-mentioned American policy imperatives, it knows well that an alliance with the military is useful, at least in the short term.

In order to further improve their hand, the Military has reverted to the usual scare tactics, in which Mubarak had excelled for decades. They raised the possibility of some truly disturbing situations in which only the Military can be trusted to maintain peace and stability, such as:

1. Islamists cannot be trusted – (and we must ask, when was the last time they upheld their commitments and promises anywhere they took over? Note – they DO uphold promises to enforce Sharia so perhaps better to ask “when did they uphold their promises for transparency, freedom, and democracy”);

2. An Islamist rule in Egypt will only represent strategic depth to Hamas. Any planned, or even unplanned, action by a Hamas zealot could drag Egypt into war with Israel, unless the Army is there to calm things;

3. An uncontrolled Islamist regime could lead to hazardous and adventurous regional activities (remember Iran);

4. Radicalization as a means to survive by diverting the people’s attention, especially if it fails internally to resolve daily-life problems. As a hint for future repetitions, please note the recent case from Friday November 25, 2011, when the Grand Imam of Al-Azhar mosque lead thousands from Hamas, the Brotherhood, Jamaa Islameya and Azhar scholars in a big rally “in support of Al-Aqsa Mosque” and denouncing Israeli “attempts at Judaization of Jerusalem.” (Note that there was nothing particular in the news that warranted such a rally).

And if these were not enough reasons to appreciate the need for the Army to reign in the unbridled Islamists, the Military threw in some extra factors to emphasize the above-mentioned “potential” risks with real, actual ones. The Military:

1. Released from prison thousands of Islamists, including the killers of Sadat, and turned them into instant heroes on state-owned TV stations;

2. Allowed thousands of Jihadists, who had lived in exile for years, to enter Egypt;

3. Encouraged the most radical factions of Salafists (literally “ancestral;” an offshoot of Wahabis) to surface and even dominate the scene;

4. Even though the existing laws prohibit the creation of political parties based on religion or race, no less than 15 out of 31 newly created parties after January 25, 2011, are Islamist in ideology;

5. Adopted a roadmap for political transition that was devised by, and in the interest of, the Muslim Brotherhood. For example, it was the request of the revolutionaries and many intellectuals to start with working on a Constitution, as a consensual charter taking into account the interests of all the nation’s segments. Instead, the Military started with the parliamentary elections, whose partisan winners – widely expected to be the Islamists – would monopolize writing the Constitution to their own advantage;

6. Implicitly encouraged terror campaigns against the Copts and even took part in them directly, such as in the October Maspero massacre;

7. Raised anti-Americanism and the xenophobic tone, blaming foreigners of all kinds of wrongdoings.

Meanwhile, the Military also sought by all means to strangle the few active NGOs by accusing them of receiving “illegal” funds from abroad, particularly from the U.S. and the E.U., at a time where Islamists are reported to have received over a billion pounds from some Gulf countries over a few months.

In sum:

With the “Original Sin” of the Military’s attachment to power over six decades fully in action, it is unimaginable that the Army in Egypt will relinquish willingly the powers it wields and turn into simply another army which receives orders from civilians. It is worth noting that on February 8, 2011, just before toppling Mubarak, General Omar Soliman, for years in charge of the Intelligence Services, and his newly appointed Vice President, told the various political forces: “either dialogue, or face a coup d’État.” That intriguing expression may hold a key to better understanding the “Original Sin.” The Military would stop short of nothing in order to maintain their special status.
It is unimaginable that the Brotherhood, and other Islamists, will miss this golden opportunity to take over Egypt at such a time when they are finally nearing triumph in their global campaign, spearheaded from Qatar (the de facto regional headquarters of the Brotherhood, where its propaganda arm-al-Jazeera TV-is based) across the Sunni Near East and North Africa.
The other forces, be it the original revolutionaries, the Copts, liberal and secular Muslims, or simply average people who are wary of an Islamist or a military rule, are quite fragmented.

POSSIBLE FUTURE SCENARIOS

This Tahrir-II episode of the revolution shows that the Egyptian people are starting to realize the formidable challenge ahead with the Military-Islamist alliance. If a large portion of the population is willing to accept an Islamist regime (for reasons outside the scope of this testimony) the majority are increasingly loath to swallow the alliance.

That’s the crux of the matter, and the outcome of this bras-de-fer will influence the future of Egypt, and the region, for years.

Egypt’s dilemma now is that the options appear rather bleak:

A Military-Islamist ruling alliance, is the most probable outcome with a “civilian” façade after “democratic” elections, thus presenting a more appealing face to the U.S. and the West;
A power struggle, in the short term, in which the Islamists (who dominate the “street”) benefit from the latest gaffes by the Military, leading to a purely “civilian” Islamist regime with the West indifferent, as long as the ruler remains allegedly “civilian.” In this scenario, the army might eventually take a subdued role – but after ideological (and physical) “cleansing” (à la Iran);
An extended power struggle, with the possible entry into a cycle of coup d’etats.

ISLAMIST AND CHRISTIAN POLITICAL PARTIES

Mr. Chairman, at this point, I would like to focus on the West’s seeming obsession with the idea that democracy equals a “ballot box,” irrespective of whether the foundations and the environment of democracy are in place.

I would like simply to comment on one statement made by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in her Keynote Address at the National Democratic Institute’s 2011 Democracy Awards Dinner on November 7 of this year. After explaining how the U.S. works with many different governments, she asked the question, “How will America respond if and when democracy brings to power people and parties we disagree with?” and then she answered,

“We hear these questions most often when it comes to Islamist religious parties. Now, of course, I hasten to add that not all Islamists are alike. Turkey and Iran are both governed by parties with religious roots, but their models and behavior are radically different. There are plenty of political parties with religious affiliations-Hindu, Christian, Jewish, Muslim-that respect the rules of democratic politics…”

I respectfully disagree with the Secretary. Any objective study on the history and evolution of the Christian parties (such as Germany’s Christian Democratic Party, headed by Angela Merkel) in Europe and some other parts of the world, shows clearly that their founding principles revolve around a commitment to particular values such as human dignity, justice, equality, social responsibility and effective citizenship, thus putting these parties on the conservative part of political spectrum.

However, none of these Christian political parties advocate the establishment of a local or international “Christian State or Caliphate.” In looking at several mainstream “Christian” parties in Europe and South America, none of them demanded that a Christian version of Sharia be the source of the country’s Constitution. None of them sanction violence to advance their goals, speak in the name of God, adorn their programs with biblical verses, or a chain of referrals or edicts. None of them set women lower than men, discriminate between citizens based on belief, or demand to impose a Jizyah on non-Christian citizens. None of them use logos of a bible embraced by two crossing swords. None would interfere in what people eat or drink or how they dress. None would enforce a penal code where the condemned may be whipped, lapidated or have their limbs amputated.

Here is but one, out of many, recent illustrations which give a more accurate reflection of who Islamists really are. On the Friday after the fall of Mubarak, Youssef El Qaradawi, the Qatar-based prominent Egyptian Islamic preacher and spiritual leader of the Brotherhood, descended on Tahrir Square in a Khomeini-like show of force, to preach to the victorious believers. To his credit, he appeared conciliatory towards the Copts, trying to calm their anxieties. But that was in February. On his November 18, 2011, Friday address, he, according to CNN Arabic, urged Egyptian electors not to “vouch for a secularist, an agnostic, or those who don’t accept Allah as their God, Islam as their religion and Mohamed as their prophet.” So much for democracy, liberty, and basic freedoms.

This is not a call for mobilizing armies to fight Islamist parties whenever they take over. But it is a reminder that we need to be vigilant when these parties take over.

At the very least, the international community must hold them fully accountable to fundamental principles of human rights which are universal, and to take them to task when they fail to respect those rights. This is not out of a utopian, altruistic view, but from down-to-earth sense of preservation of the basics of civilization.

THE COPTS: SIMPLY COLLATERAL DAMAGE?

This brings me to the question: Where are the Copts in all this? The following may be telling.

On October 24, 2011, the Coptic Pope Shenouda III “met with” (according to the local media) or was “summoned by” (according to sources close to him) Egypt’s ruling military council for an urgent meeting at the Ministry of Defense. The ailing Patriarch, age 88, whose fortieth anniversary in office was celebrated November 14, 2011, was told to come alone.

At the meeting, the Pope was berated by the top three generals. After the meeting, the Pope would not say much but the official declaration emphasized “putting Egypt’s interest above all.” I, like many Copts, thought it was likely the generals had bullied him.

If the Generals truly want to quiet the situation, why don’t they address and try to resolve Coptic grievances?

Copts, as we all know, have been subjected to systemic discrimination for years, often accompanied by sectarian attacks. The general reaction pattern was to swallow their pain and humiliation, groan in private, take refuge in prayer, and depend on the church’s clergy to beg the authorities on their behalf.

The October 9, 2011, Maspero massacre, which will be covered in more detail by another colleague, claimed 27 deaths and 300 injured. Despite overwhelming evidence, the Military continues to deny any responsibility for the violence and in a press conference on October 12, 2011 – just three days after the massacre – even praised the performance of its soldiers as well as the state media’s performance. Of course they never regretted, let alone apologized for, the heinous act. In fact, 28 Copts are still imprisoned and are “under investigation,” for these attacks, which amounts to nothing less than keeping them as hostages as a means of future blackmail.

Since it’s February takeover, the Army vowed never to shoot at citizens. It largely has kept to its promise, (up until the events of November 19-22, 2011, referred to above), despite numerous cases when huge demonstrations went out of control, or even when mobs cut roads, attacked public buildings, churches, or other Christian-owned properties.

So the Maspero massacre can only be interpreted as an escalation to intimidate further Coptic protest. This brings us back to the Generals’ hurried meeting with the Coptic Pope. They were clearly trying to achieve three objectives.

First, by dealing directly-and only-with him, the Military gives the Copts a taste of their status in an Islamic state where they will be treated as a minority religious community (“dhimmis“) rather than as a large portion of Egyptian citizens with a grievance.

Second, that the Copts’ religious “chief” will be held responsible for the acts of his people and hence is expected to control them, or else. By the same token, this is intended to intimidate the Copts (inside Egypt and in the Diaspora) since they do not want to place their elderly spiritual leader in danger.

Third, the Copts should put “Egypt’s interest above all” by shutting up and not doing anything – however legitimate – that can be used as a rationale by Islamists to attack them.

However, and despite such singling out, Copts are aware that they are not only defending their own rights but also participating in a battle, alongside secularist and liberal Muslims, to stop Egypt from “democratically” turning into an Iran-like or Taliban-like state. In fact, given the above-mentioned background, one could warn the Copts, “Behind you is the Military; before you, the Islamists.”

Thousands of Christians have fled the country since the revolution. Others are determined to remain in their ancestors’ homeland and to resist the advance of Islamists.

As for the international community’s attention to the issue, it is important to realize that the Copts may not be seen to represent much strategic importance. They have no oil, and don’t represent a security threat that would warrant appeasing them! Hence, apart from occasional sympathetic statements, the world is likely to turn a blind eye and consider the oppressed Copts as mere collateral damage.

RECOMMENDATIONS

Instead of supporting the military and/or embracing the Islamists, there must be a “Alternative Way.”

Constitution: We urge the U.S. Government and the international community to press Egypt to ensure that its commitments to international human rights norms are upheld in the foundational sections of the new Constitution and are not undermined by any subsequent articles or passages. It would be extremely dangerous if “democracy” were used as a pretext to impose stipulations that defy those international norms, such as imposing Taliban-like laws on all Egyptians.

NGOs: The international community must support the liberal and secular forces in Egypt. The NGOs and emerging political parties should be assisted through adequate training programs as well as through appropriate funding. In this regard, the Egyptian authorities must stop their tactic of choking NGOs operating with transparency, while turning a blind eye to massive amounts of money channeled from certain Gulf countries to Islamist and Salafist groups in Egypt.

Implementation of Justice:

We strongly urge the U.S. Government to press the Egyptian authorities to prosecute perpetrators of violence before, during and after the uprisings and the historic events in Egypt this year, including the Maspero massacre and the excessive violence at Tahrir square during November. Further, the extensive contacts between the U.S. and Egyptian militaries should emphasize the importance of prosecution of military personnel involved in Maspero.
We also urge the U.S. Government to ban visas and travel to the U.S. for any government official involved in torture. While this may be difficult to implement immediately, the U.S. could assist in setting up a mechanism that would allow for victims of violence to report the names of their torturers. With the proper instruments and processes in place to allow for confirmation that a government official is indeed involved in torture, the U.S. could easily implement a visa ban against these officials similar to that in the International Religious Freedom Act of 1998.
We strongly urge the Egyptian authorities to stop arresting both Christians and Muslims when Christians and their property are attacked and instead bring the real perpetrators to justice.

Foreign Aid: While we welcome efforts to help Egypt in its current economic situation, we believe that unconditional aid would be a strategic error. Financial and military aid should be linked to Egypt’s human rights record in terms of constitutional stipulations, laws and practices over the short and medium terms. We urge the U.S Government, European governments and others in the international community providing financial aid to Egypt to tie that aid to Egypt’s upholding and protecting fundamental human rights norms now and in any new Constitution.

Please note, that we believe all international aid should support democracy, freedom and fundamental human rights.. For instance, the G-8 summit held in May 2011 in Deauville in France was marked by the “Deauville Partnership” with the people of North Africa. As a start, $20 billion was pledged in support for Tunisian and Egyptian reforms after the Arab Spring.

Furthermore, France’s ex-Prime Minister Edouard Balladur, was charged by the G8 Presidency to follow-up on the issue. In an article dated November 14, 2011, he reports that $30 billion would be earmarked for Egypt alone over the period 2011-2013. However, he adds an astonishing remark, which sounds like a guideline by the G8 leaders, “Obviously, there shouldn’t be through the (Deauville) Partnership any attempt of political tutelage over the aid- receiving countries, which would be doomed to fail.”

The simple question is why should the U.S. and the international community pours in such colossal sums without even seeking the least guarantee to respect the principles of human rights – especially towards minorities?

Special Envoy: We support and strongly urge the passage of S. 1245, after the adoption of H.R. 440, which provides for the appointment of a Special Envoy for minorities in the Middle East. We also strongly urge the Administration to appoint someone to that position who is highly qualified and has the stature needed to ensure the issues related to minorities are included in the highest level of the U.S. Government’s policy and diplomacy, particularly during this historic transition in Egypt and other countries in the region.

The U.S. and international community must stop appeasing Islamists and instead hold them accountable when they abuse human rights. This means to publicly and strongly condemn abuses, and not hesitate to impose sanctions when issues are not addressed or corrected.

Mr. Chairman, Egypt is at crucial crossroads. The U.S. needs to lead the international community in helping Egypt go in the right direction. It is in Egypt’s own, and everybody else’s strategic interest.

Thank you for giving me the opportunity to provide this testimony to this distinguished commission. Again, I would be happy to answer any questions you might have.

TRANSCRIPT OF ADEL GUINDY’S TESTIMONY

TOM LANTOS HUMAN RIGHTS COMMISSION

DECEMBER 7, 2011

Thank you very much. Thank you also for your leadership and that of Chairman Wolf and Franks and other distinguished congressman who have been giving us unwavering support over the years. I’m honored to be here today and I would like to request that my entire written statement be made part of the record. It’s too long to read. Of course, it’s nine pages long. So I’m going to pick on a few important things which are, I think, are indicative of what’s going on in Egypt. I would start by describing the situation in Egypt, the depiction – in keeping with the depiction of summer of – spring of this and winter of that, I think Egypt is entering into a harsh summer with little to be seen in its Arab deserts beyond thirst, agony, and mirage. The first mirage is what has been – is being hailed as historic transition to democracy. It’s a charade of a democracy. What’s going on in Egypt today. Right from the beginning, by design, in this land here, you start with a Bill of Rights, Constitution to set the rules of the game, and then you build the institutions. In Egypt, by design, the military and the Islamist Brotherhood have reversed the sequence and were intent against the desires and the requests of the revolutionaries and many secularists, politicians, right from the beginning, right from February, to start with a decent constitution and they reversed the sequence to start with elections. That way, the elections, everybody, every kid in Egypt knew that was going to be won by the Islamists. That way they will make the constitution that’s to their liking. So what’s going on today? It’s a charade of a process. Right from the beginning.

Apart from the irregularities in the process itself of the elections, the past, the first – phase one. And in fact, even all along the process, you know, in Egypt, even by law you do not make a party which is based on religious or race a foundation. Fifteen out of the thirty-one newly authorized parties in Egypt over the past ten months have been all religious based, religious based and openly asking for the application of shariah. So that’s the first charade. The second mirage – the second mirage is going into civilian government. Egyptian is going – is entering a phase of an alliance of rule by the military and civilians. The facade will be similar to the liking of the United States and the international community. But the force and the power behind the scenes will be held by the military. There is marriage of convenience, or maybe by conviction. I don’t know. I doesn’t matter at that stage. Between the two groups. And this is going to be the phase of the ruling in Egypt for the next years, so these expectations – and we see op-eds here and there asking for passage from military, civilian – it’s going to happen. There’s no problem at all.

The military are not interested in governing Egypt on a day to day basis. That’s a fact. A non-starter there. Not interested at all. They are interested in the authority and the power which they have held for the past six decades. All the presidents so far came from between them, many prime ministers, ministers, heads of organizations, the economy, the army controls an economy which is about thirty or forty percent of the economic vision. It’s a black economy, it’s a black box without any scrutiny or control of anybody. The budget, it’s out of the scrutiny of the people’s assembly. And they have said clearly, they will maintain that in the future. So the couple – or the alliance of military and Islamists are going to take over Egypt. The road may be rocky over the time. Maybe the balance of power is not clear. Today they both have interest in working together in joint – in rule – in governing Egypt for the next few years, but you don’t know, we don’t know. In fact, one prediction is that the Islamists will control the street, may feel strong enough at one point to subdue the army, which is the same situation that happened in Iran, in fact, that you subdue the army by doing some kind of, you know, cleansing, ideological or physical. Pledging to have an army under the arms of the Islamists. So we are entering a very rocky period. It’s not a rocky transition towards democracy like some people would like to imagine or think. It’s a rocky downhill process which is not at all encouraging. I think we need to be prepared for what’s going on and do not applaud all of the appearances of democracy in Egypt. Which takes me, I mean, there’s so many theories about why is this alliance between the two – and what the army is, the staff has been doing over the past few months, but for the sake of time, I’ll skip that. I may come back to it if you have any questions. The second mirage is, in fact, the idea that the Islamist parties are just like any other religious parties. You know, why not the Christian parties.

And I quote here your Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, which – when she spoke at the National Democratic Institute’s 2011 Democracy Alliance Dinner, just November 7. She said, it’s a long quote, I’m just going to say – there are plenty of political parties with religious affiliations. Hindu, Christian, Jewish, Muslim, that respect the rules of democracy. The suggestion – I mean, I would very respectfully, but strongly, disagree with that statement. If you take the Christian parties in the world, you know, take the Germany’s Christian Democratic Party and try to think for a second that it has anything to do with a party like the Brotherhood, it’s outrageous, in fact. The history, you know, the movement of Christian parties started early 19th Century. If you look at the history, the evolution, the what they stand for, the current agenda and you compare that with, you know, any Islamist party, it’s like, you know, pretending that sulfuric acid and water are equal because they’re both of them fluids. They are – it’s a day and night. Islamist parties are followers of totalitarian ideology. In fact, it’s even worse than the other totalitarian ideologies the world knew and that during the 20th Century, because they pretend to speak in the name of God. So we – the world needs to be aware that what’s happening there, it’s not democracy. They pretension that these parties will become democratic, I mean, we hear some amazing things like, you know, mainstream Islamists or, you know, moderate Islamists. It’s like talking about, you know, mainstream Nazi party or moderate fascist party. These are equivalent – contradiction of terms there are amazing. I will – then the Copts. Where do the Copts fit in? The whole situation is going into, if it is not a theocratic military, theocratic state, it is a semi-theocratic state. Everybody – you know, what is being called sometimes Tahrir Two, which is the demonstrations that happened in Tahrir over the week from the 19 to the 24, 25 of November, was preceded by enormous demonstration of Islamists on Friday the 18. For what? For one word – you know, people have been working on a kind of a constitution of principles, a document for the past six or seven months, you know, has many things. Sometimes mostly contradictory fact.

But anyway, at one point, at one phrase, sentence, to describe a future state was saying that it’s a civilian state. Civilian – it’s to avoid talking about secular, not only that, but it means non-theological, non-theocratic, rather, non-theocratic and non-military. Okay, with these two meanings in mind, in fact, in the same document, there is also the stipulation which is – which has been in the past, the old defunct constitution about Islam being the religion – the religion of state and the principles of shariah being the main source of legislation. So that’s really in there. Yet the Islamists said, started to worry about the word, or the expression civilian might be construed, as the lawyers would like to say, into the possibility of becoming a secular state and they were, you know, violently, you know, demonstrating in the streets at Tahrir, hundreds of thousands there. Of course, by the evening of that date, the commission, which is a governmental commission deleted that single word or description from the committee and caved in completely. And, of course, the next few days, you know, the [UNCLEAR] government turned to align against the revolutionaries [UNCLEAR] has described before. Where do the Copts fall into that? The Copts, apart from the systematic persecution, in fact, it’s systemic also. And it’s going to be more so when they are treated as dhimmis in an Islamist state. And the gist of that has been given to them again and again over the past six months, not only by the street, by the parties, by the Islamists. By the military council itself when – the way they treated them. And in fact, what happened to [UNCLEAR] Maspero on October the 9, was made to give them a harsh lesson. In fact, the – when the military took over from Mubarak in February the 10 or 11, they committed not to shoot at citizens, never ever. They have largely kept that until the 9 of October. The first time that army shoots and crushes people. And these were the Christians, the Coptic Christians. That happened again on November 25, a story there.

I’ll jump straight to the recommendations and I have six of them. One is the constitution. There must be an assistance by the international community about the inclusion of the adherence – full adherence and acceptance of human rights, norms upheld in the foundation part of the new constitution. The word needs a distance to it. There must be a third alternative. Because, you know, you ask pragmatic governments. We have the army on one hand – on the one hand – and Islamists. Which one. We should – should not be stuck with one or the other. The world must be able to choose to encourage – for the sake of Egypt, for the sake of the world, for the sake of the security of the area, to encourage the liberal, secularist forces in Egypt, which do include the Copts, the Copts are part of that. Part of that movement. There hasn’t been enough. In fact, with so much open doors and channels and discussion and talks between Western countries, especially the US administration and the Islamists has been very, very modest effort to engage with the liberal secularist movements there. Third recommendation is implementation of justice. There’s been very seldom implementation of justice in Egypt. We encourage the authorities there to take it more seriously. The massacre of the Maspero – for example, they basically, not the only, I mean, the majority of those arrested are Copts. The perpetrators are the army. The other thugs on the street were mobilized by the secret police and so on, but yet the only people in jail are twenty-eight Copts, plus a few Muslim activists who have been bravely supporting the cause of the Copts.

We would like to request a – encourage the US government to create a kind of blacklist to ban certain officials who might be identified by victims from entering the United States. This is not difficult. There are usually enough evidence against these people. They can be given the right to defend themselves if that’s required to be fair. But at least that is the least of things to be done so that, you know, you don’t kill somebody and then the next day you get a visa to the States and Europe. The fourth point is about foreign aid. I’m delighted to hear again and again the idea of the linkage of aid to performance of human rights. In fact, it’s not only the United States. This applies to the rest of the world. I was amazed to discover a couple of weeks ago that the G-8 in its meeting in France in May has started working on a package of aid for our spring countries and they gave an ex-prime minister of France the duty of investigating the subject and he presented his report in the G-20, at the G-20 meeting in France two, just three weeks ago, during which he’s talking about allocating about twenty billion dollars, or thirty billion dollars to Egypt over the next three years. And not only that, I mean, he’s – he makes an astounding statement. You know, not only that people don’t want or hesitate to link aid to any constraints, he makes a commitment to the opposite. He says, obviously, there shouldn’t be through that partnership any attempt of political tutelage over the aid-receiving countries which would be doomed to fail. I found that flabbergasting.

Okay, the next point is the special envoy, the HR-40 has been adopted and we strongly recommend that as well for the five to be adopted to. And the last one is the US enter – I mean, the international community must stop appeasing Islamists and instead hold them accountable when they abuse human rights. Once again, Mr. Chairman, thank you very much and I repeat it’s in the interest in Egypt and the world that Egypt be guided properly in the right direction in the next few years. Thank you very much.

Adel F. Guindy is President of the Board of Coptic Solidarity. He is also President of Solidarité Copte (France), is a Member of the Board of Directors of the Middle East Freedom Forum (USA, Egypt), Le Monde Copte (France) and Egyptian Democratic Solidarity (Egypt).

Previously, he had a long international management career with a large technology company in the energy sector.

Cynthia Farahat: Jihad and the War on Egypt’s Coptic Christians

December 8, 2011Center for Security Policy

Cynthia Farahat testified before the Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission in the House of Representatives. Reps. Frank Wolf and James McDermott presented "Under Threat: The Worsening Plight of Egypt’s Coptic Christians."

Cynthia Farahat is an Egyptian political activist, writer and researcher. She co-founded the Liberal Egyptian Party (2006-2008) and served as a member of its political committee. In 2008-2009, she was program coordinator and program officer at the Friedrich Naumann Foundation for Liberty in Cairo, a multi-national free market think tank. She was a founder of the Masr El-Om (Mother Egypt) Party and was a member of its political committee (2004-2006).

Other witnesses included Kathy Fitzpatrick (Deputy Assistant Secretary, Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor, U.S. Department of State); Nina Shea (Director, Center for Religious Freedom, Hudson Institute); Dina Guirguis (Member, Egyptian American Rule of Law Association); Adel Guindy (President, Coptic Solidarity International); and Raymond Ibrahim (Middle East specialist and Associate fellow, Middle East Forum).

The following is Ms. Farahat’s testimony for the record and, below, is a transcript of her comments at the hearing.

Cynthia Farahat: Testimony before the Tom Lantos Commission, December 7 2011. Click here for a PDF of his testimony for the record.

TESTIMONY OF CYNTHIA FARAHAT

TOM LANTOS HUMAN RIGHTS COMMISSION

Thank you Chairman Wolf and Chairman McGovern for organizing this important hearing. I am very pleased to have the honor of testifying in front of the Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission today about the current status of Copts in Egypt.

I am an activist and writer in Egypt, and have been involved in the political process for nearly a decade. I am a Copt. I addressed the crowd at last year’s protests in Cairo’s Tahrir Square and have participated in Coptic demonstrations in Maspero.

With my colleagues I helped found two political parties: first, the Masr El-Om (Mother Egypt) Party in 2004, and then the Liberal Egyptian Party in 2006. Both were dedicated to the values of secularism, human rights, capitalism, the rule of law, and rejection of pan-Arabism and Islamic imperialism. This platform was controversial with the Mubarek regime for many reasons, but the most important was the conscious rejection of the application of Islamic law and jurisprudence, shariah and fiqh, in the state’s affairs. The Liberal Egyptian Party was rebuffed by the regime and rejected as a legal entity twice in court, putting these important ideas outside legal discourse in the country. As a consequence of my activism, I have been living in fear and under constant threat and harassment, from the Mubarek regime and its subsequent military junta and from Salafist jihadists who were as threatened by classical liberalism and freedom as the rulers themselves.

The ideas I dedicated my life to promoting are articulated best in America’s founding documents, in the writings of Thomas Jefferson, and in the Enlightenment works that, in turn, inspired them. The regime’s opposition to these concepts-summed up in a word, liberty-also unlocks the reasons for the persecution of Copts.

The large and educated minority of Copts in Egypt is the biggest obstacle for Islamists to turn Egypt into another Iran or another Saudi Arabia. Through propaganda and acts of state violence the governing body of Egypt, the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF), has attempted to manufacture[1] a violent conflict between Coptic Christians and Muslims. With the full power of the state, media and the military at their disposal, however, any such "civil war" will be one-sided tragedy; it will be a massacre of Christians at the hands of the state, its vast paid militia and Salafis sympathetic to the cause.

At present, SCAF has imprisoned 12,000 civilians in military court for political crimes. Meanwhile, the regime has freed of hundreds of convicted terrorists from prison, like Col. Aboud al-Zomor,[2] the mastermind behind the Sadat assassination, and Badr Makhlouf,[3] the Emir of al-Gama’a al-Islamiyya of Qena that was convicted with murdering tourists in a 1993 terrorist attack. This double standard sends a message that advocating for freedom and equality for Copts and other minorities in Egypt will have severe consequences.

MASPERO & THE WAR ON THE COPTS

In contrast to the terrorists released, among those imprisoned were liberal dissidents like Maikel Nabil Sanad, a Coptic blogger and political activist, and Alaa Abdel-Fattah, a secular Muslim pro-freedom blogger who was previously imprisoned by Mubarak’s regime in 2006. He has been our ally for years, and has written hundreds of posts on his blog to support freedom of speech and religion for Copts and Bahai’s.

As a secular Muslim, Abdel-Fattah was a more serious target of the regime. Under the dictates of shariah, he is considered a traitor and apostate from Islam, and the appropriate punishment is death. Abdel-Fattah was at the protests in Maspero on behalf of equality for Copts. Outrageously, he might be facing murder and terrorism charges-as the regime is trying to frame the massacre of dozens of Copts in Maspero on him.

Michael Mosad was, like myself, a liberal Coptic political and human rights activist. I knew him well. He was one of the people killed by the Egyptian military at Maspero on 9 October 2011. He was at the protest with his fiancé, Vivian, and the newly engaged couple was terrified. Suddenly, she said she did not feel Michael’s hand in hers. She then saw him caught in the wheels of a military vehicle that drove onto the pavement and ran him over. His skull was fractured and his legs were nearly severed from his body. As she sat next to him crying and calling for help, soldiers gathered around Michael, brutally beating and kicking his motionless body. Vivian threw her body over his to protect him. She begged them to stop, but military officers beat and cursed her; they called her an infidel, "Christian sons of dogs," and worse.

Nawar Negm, a Muslim political activist who was in the protest to support Copts said the peaceful protestors were being randomly shot at, and that organized mobs in civilian clothes started attacking Christians.[4] The mobs were backed by soldiers whom she saw checking the hands of protestors for crosses before brutally beating them, as many Egyptian Christians tattoo crosses on their hands.

Another Muslim photographer, Ali Khalid, who was at the site and was shot in the face said, "I have seen death with my own eyes, at the hands of the people who claim to be the protectors of the country."[5]

Bothayna Kamel, another courageous Muslim woman, and a prominent TV presenter and journalist in Egypt who was among the protestors, witnessed the horror herself. She said:

As the attack on the protest started I went to hide with a priest and Muslim and Christian protestors inside a nearby building where Al-Hurra TV station’s office is located. We hid inside the office, and I could hear the police and army soldiers attacking the building as they were screaming ‘Allahu Akbar’ and dragging protestors inside the building. Don’t tell me these were Islamic organizations or Salafis; the military and police have the same bigoted minds. After they left the building and we felt it was safe to leave the office, we saw the blood of protesters who were beaten by soldiers screaming ‘Allahu Akbar,’ covering the floors and stairs of the building. To get out of the building safe, you had to tell the police and the army, ‘I’m a Muslim who believes in one God’-otherwise they attack you.[6]

This was happening as the military police attacked the Jan25 television station and terrified the broadcaster, who screamed hysterically on air as they confiscated the video footage that was shot of the protests[7]. Minutes later, an extremely gruesome video[8] of murdered Copts in the entrance of Jan25 station emerged on YouTube. Some of the protestors were dead; others were dying.

Even after the killings, the SCAF and its media machine was intent on flaring tensions. That evening, the regime’s state-run television incited Muslims to converge on Maspero and ‘defend’ the Egyptian army against the gathering of unarmed Christians: "The Egyptian army is under attack from Coptic protestors, and we urge the honorable citizens to go to Maspero and aid the army." [9]

In order to justify their war crime against the Copts, Egyptian officials later claimed [10]to CNN that Copts killed 12 army troops. This propaganda was also repeated by official state TV as the army was massacring Christians in the street. Not only didn’t he army not convict the criminals responsible for the murder and torture of Copts at Maspero, the Egyptian army held a press conference claiming their soldiers were not armed, and that the armored vehicle used to crush Copts beneath its treads was stolen by a protestor. In other words, the regime’s spin amounted to a theory in which Coptic protestors stole an armored vehicle, ran themselves over, and shot themselves. I’m sure the regime would also give credence to the farcical possibly floated by the Al-Fagr newspaper, blaming the massacre on Israelis.[11]

The Coptic Christians at Maspero were killed with live ammunition, and with weapons the military probably acquired through its average of $2 billion in annual military aid from the United States.[12] A massive shipment of 21 tons of tear gas was just sent to Egypt from the US before the elections.[13] These weapons are not used by the military against militant Islamists who are trying to subvert and destroy our country, institute shariah law, and inflame the broader Middle East; these weapons are used against the allies of the United States of America, the Copts and the secular moderate Muslims.

Like the regime’s hostility toward classical liberalism, the persecution of Coptic Christians in Egypt is deeply embedded in the ideological foundation of the current military oligarchy, which shares history, doctrine and personalities with the Muslim Brotherhood. While the Muslim Brotherhood does not formally or organizationally rule Egypt, its ideas have ideologically controlled the country for nearly sixty years since the overthrow of the monarchy by the July 1952 coup d’état (euphemized as the "July Revolution").

The fear of Islamists seizing power in Egypt and the situation worsening for Copts and the whole region, assumes that the Muslim Brotherhood does not already wield power yet may be able to hijack the current political unrest. In fact, this situation already exists; both the Mubarak regime and the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) have subtly colluded with Islamists against Copts for decades. The real question, then, is not whether the Muslim Brotherhood and other militant Islamic groups will seize power but whether it will continue to hold it, either directly or by proxy.

In 2005, Mubarak allowed eighty-eight Muslim Brotherhood members into parliament as a useful tool for scaring the Western governments into thinking that democracy in Egypt would inevitably bring the Islamists to power.

THE MUSLIM BROTHERHOOD & THE EGYPTIAN REGIME[14]

Not only does the Egyptian constitution since 1971 make the shariah "the principal source of legislation,"[15] but the Free Officers (as the perpetrators of the 1952 putsch called themselves) were closely associated with both the Muslim Brotherhood’s military wing or "secret apparatus" (Nizam al-Khass) and the Young Egypt Society (Misr al-Fatat), a nationalist-fascist militia established in 1929 by religiously-educated lawyer Ahmad Hussein. Both Egyptian presidents hailing from the Free Officers-Gamal Abdel Nasser (1956-1970) and Anwar Sadat (1970-1981)-received their early political schooling in the Young Egypt Society. The Young Egypt Society transformed into the National Islamic Party in 1940.

The Muslim Brotherhood spread its xenophobic and militant ideas through its magazine, al-Sarkh’a (Scream), which combined vicious attacks on Western democracy with praise for Fascism and Nazism and advocacy of the implementation of shariah rule. In a famous letter, Hussein invited Hitler "to convert to Islam." This outlook was shared by the Muslim Brotherhood’s publication, al-Nazir, which referred to the Nazi tyrant as "Hajj Hitler." The Brotherhood’s founder, Hassan al-Banna, was also an unabashed admirer of Hitler and Mussolini. As late as 1953, Anwar Sadat, whose pro-Nazi sympathies landed him in prison during World War II, wrote an "open letter"[16] to Hitler in a leading Egyptian newspaper. He applauded the genocidal tyrant, pronouncing that the leaders of the Axis Powers, "guided their peoples to unity, order, regeneration, power, and glory."

The Young Egypt Society’s attempted assassination in 1937 of Egypt’s democratically-elected liberal prime minister, Mustafa Nahhas, got the organization banned. In the 1940s, the officers took their radicalism a step further by collaborating with the Muslim Brotherhood’s military wing. Some even joined the Brotherhood themselves; Nasser himself reportedly joined in 1944. In his memoirs, Khaled Mohieddin, a fellow Free Officer claimed that Banna had personally asked Nasser to join the Brotherhood, recounting how he and Nasser swore allegiance on a gun and a Qur’an.[17]

This background has continuing relevance because it forms the DNA of the regime that has ruled Egypt from 1952 to the present day; this military oligarchy has pursued means and goals that originated in the Muslim Brotherhood and the Young Egypt Society.

Moreover, the Young Egypt Society’s Islamic-socialist and fascistic ideas are very much alive and well today. In 1990, the party was reestablished and granted a license to work as a legal entity by Mubarak’s regime that has long been considered an ally of the west. This organization’s approval by the state could not be in starker contrast to the rejection of my own Liberal Egyptian Party and its pro-freedom platform.

Following Hassan al-Banna’s murder on February 12, 1949, by government agents in retaliation for the assassination of Prime Minister Nuqrashi Pasha a few weeks earlier, the military and civilian wings of the Muslim Brotherhood split. Nasser proceeded to form the Free Officers movement, which mounted the 1952 coup. In the coming decades, the military regime and the Brotherhood would maintain a strenuous relationship interrupted by occasional outbursts of violence and terrorism-notably a 1954 attempt by the Brotherhood on Nasser’s life-and repressive countermeasures by the regime including mass arrests and sporadic executions. But this should be understood not as a struggle between an autocratic, secular dictatorship and a would-be Islamist one but a struggle between two ideologically similar, if not identical, rival groups, hailing from the same source.

Indeed, the symbiotic relationship between the jihadist ideologues and the current regime continues, as it has from 1952. For example, the SCAF has revealed alarming extremism last summer when they publically consulted with Salafi jihadist Mohammed Hassan on how to deal with Copts instead of prosecuting their attackers. Hassan is known in Egypt for inciting Mujahedeen in Gaza to kill Israelis before killing themselves in suicide attacks.[18]

A WELL-EXECUTED DRAMA: USING THE MUSLIM BROTHERHOOD AGAINST THE WEST

Given the shared history and entwined ideological affinities of the Muslim Brotherhood and the military regime that has ruled Egypt since 1952, it is hardly surprising that both Mubarak’s regime and the SCAF would persecute the Coptic community with religiously motivated enthusiasm. The world often wonders why secularists, liberals and Copts are unorganized in Egypt; this situation exists because we-not the Brotherhood-were under daily threats and state security surveillance, and our parties banned from politics. Meanwhile, the regime cynically empowers the Brotherhood and other Salafi jihadist groups against which it can play out a drama meant to both oppress moderate and liberal opposition internally, and to frighten western governments from the prospect of a peaceful transition of power to a civilian government.

This well-executed drama is not new, and its contours should be familiar to all Americans in two different contexts: the United States’ relationships with Pakistan and the Palestinian Authority. In both these cases, "moderate" leaders pose as allies, using the threat of a more radical replacement to coerce the US for support and funding. In both countries too, there exists a seamless spectrum of potential coercion-from "radical" to "moderate" to "ally"-that is based on political expediency rather than on ideology. And the constant refrain is the demand for more American money and support.

Broadly speaking, the template with which these nations play the US is based on the decades-long the myth of the secular Turkish military’s ability to maintain constitutional, secular and pro-west governance in that country amid threats from Islamist groups. The failure of the Turkish military to stem the tide of the slowly encroaching Islamism of the AKP owes to the fact that, over time, the sympathies of the military will invariably shift; there is no guarantee subsequent generations will feel the same commitment to secular rule that their predecessors had. In Egypt, the situation is even worse. As we have seen, the military regime since 1952 is ideologically committed to oppose secularism and is bound by shariah, specifically as it relates to the treatment of minorities or dhimmis.

There is overwhelming evidence that Egypt’s military is, at present, enacting this play at American expense. Last week, former Ambassador Marc Ginsburg reported that the SCAF has been directly funding the Muslim Brotherhood’s efforts in the current parliamentary elections. As the regime receives billions in military aid and assistance from the United States, this collusion between so-called "allies" and the Muslim Brotherhood is a deeply cynical act, and one that betrays the true intentions of the regime. The thought that the empowerment of the Muslim Brotherhood is occurring, albeit indirectly, through the largess of the American taxpayer is shocking, and should cause a re-evaluation of these transfer payments.

As Ambassador Ginsburg also points out,

The military leadership has not only channeled financial support to the Islamists, it has also secretly collaborated with Salafists who have attacked Copts throughout Egypt in a show of support for more punitive discriminatory acts against Egypt’s Coptic minority to curry further favor with Salafists."[19]

CONCLUSION

In conclusion, three things must happen in order for the Coptic Christians to stand a chance of seeing their present human rights situation in Egypt improve significantly:

First, the United States should cease all American aid to Egypt until there is demonstrable, verifiable evidence that the Egyptian government is allowing non-Muslim religious minorities in Egypt to exercise the freedom of speech and religion without fear of intimidation or reprisal.

Second, the Obama administration should explain and possibly reevaluate its vetting process for foreign national employees of or advisors to American embassies, particularly in Egypt, where Egyptian nationals loyal to the military regime have used their embassy positions to deny Coptic religious asylum requests to the United States.

Third and finally, the United States must avoid legitimizing the joint effort by the Muslim Brotherhood and Egypt’s ruling military regime to use "blasphemy" laws against non-Muslim minorities in Egypt, and therefore should decline to meet with the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) to discuss any agenda to apply "blasphemy" laws globally under the guise of confronting "Islamophobia."

TRANSCRIPT OF CYNTHIA FARAHAT’S TESTIMONY

TOM LANTOS HUMAN RIGHTS COMMISSION

DECEMBER 7, 2011

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. It’s an honor to be able to testify today in front of the Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission about the status and plight of Copts in Egypt. I’m a Coptic classic liberal political activist. I’m also a writer and researcher in Egypt. I just came to the US last month. I’ve been involved in a political process for over a decade. And I’ve addressed the protestors in Tahrir Square and also I’ve been involved in Maspero protests. To be able to discuss the plight of Copts and why they are – why they are persecuted in Egypt, I would have to ask the question who are the current rulers of Egypt? Who are the Supreme Council of Armed Forces? What is their ideology and are there – are they are secular autocrats like they like to give the impression to Western governments? Or is it something else? What I claim here – and these are all historic facts – that the current military oligarchy originates from the Muslim Brotherhood organization. In 1952, the free officers perpetrated a coup detat against the Egyptian monarch. The free officers were the branch of the military wing of the Muslim Brotherhood organization. They only split after the death and the assassination of Hassan al-Banna, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood in 1949. Before that, they were members of the Muslim Brotherhood, including the first president of Egypt, the actual first president of Egypt, Gamal Abdel Nasser. He was a member of the Muslim Brotherhood and in ’44, he joined and swore allegiance to Hassan al-Banna on a Koran. This is the founding father.

This is according to Khaled Mohieddin, a fellow free officer and also previously a member of parliament in Egypt. This is according to his own biography. These are the founding fathers, almost ninety people that perpetrated the 1952 coup detat were members of the Muslim Brotherhood. This is the reality of the basis of the current ideological foundation of the Egyptian army and the regime and the oligarchy that has had control for over six decades, sixty years of this, this is what we are having. And it was inevitable that shariah law becomes part of the constitution. In 1971, President Sadat introduced shariah law to the constitution and now I think it’s, qualifies to say that Egypt is a constitutional theocracy and it’s not a modern state. The consequences were that Copts are no longer, according to shariah law, identified or defined as citizen. I have an Egyptian passport, but I’m not a citizen. The concept of citizenship is a Western concept that does not apply to us in Egypt. I’m a woman and I’m a Copt. I’m a fourth-class citizen in Egypt. A first-class citizen in Egypt is the Sunni male, Muslim male. The second-class is the Sunni female. The third-class is the Coptic male. And fourth-class is the Coptic female.

And that’s why none of the people that committed crimes, none of the criminals that committed crimes against Copts were prosecuted in any way. Because it is against shariah law and that’s a fact. It’s not an opinion. To persecute someone for – a Muslim, for killing, raping, torturing, or vandalizing the property of a non-Muslim or a dhimmi. So this is our legal status. And this has been happening under the Mubarak’s so-called moderate regime, an ally of the West, and it’s now happening now. It was only inevitable that they take their radicalism a step further and start killing Copts in the street in front of TV cameras with live ammunition and running them over with armored military vehicles they probably got from the United States of America. One of my friends was in the protests. I was supposed to go there on the ninth with him. And with other people. What happened was my friend was there. Michael Mossad [PH], with his fiance, Vivian, and they were walking. And he felt, when he started – when the army started attacking Maspero and they saw them screaming, Allahu Akbar, like they are going on an Islamic fatwa and an invasion, they got scared and they decided to leave. But he called his family and he told them, I’m going to die tonight. And I want to – I want to say goodbye. Because I’m going to get killed tonight. That’s what happened to my friend. He got on the pavement and then they turned around to leave, but what happened was the armored vehicle got on the pavement to intentionally run him over and they did run him over and almost severed his legs from his body and crushed his skull. And as he – as Michael was lying there, breathless and dying, his fiance kept screaming for help, asking someone to come and help him, or – what happened was, the military started beating him up. They kept beating up his motionless body and beating her up and spitting on her and calling her an infidel and so much worse.

At the same time, while this was happening, I was watching Egyptian television where a military official would say, they would talk about the Copts and he would say, the Christian sons of dogs. We are, according to the state, the Christian sons of dogs. That’s how the state defines us. And this is the current ally of the United States of America. So that’s the situation and that’s what happened in Maspero. Bussein Akamel [PH], a moderate Muslim and secular Muslim TV personality and journalist in Egypt said that she was in Maspero and I also know her, she was there and as she got terrified of the attacks by the military, she went to hide inside the building of Alhurra TV channel. What happened was, she said the military started attacking the building while screaming Allahu Akbar, dragging Christians inside the building and beating them and torturing them. And then when she said the screams stopped and we felt we were safe to get out of the building, she said we were walking in blood of Copts and to get out of the building or safe, you had to say I’m a Muslim who believes in one Allah. That was a jihadist attack. This looks like a jihadist attack. It doesn’t look like military trying to protect or stabilize a situation. That was religiously inspired. After that, also Nawad Enigen [PH], she is a Muslim political activist and also a TV personality, she stated that she saw the military checking the hands of Copts for crosses before attacking and torturing them in the street. They kept around, checking the hands of protestors, because most Copts put crosses on their hands. And there are people in this room, there are Copts in this room with crosses in their hands who wouldn’t have passed this test of the military. It’s something that was also happening. This was the situation at Maspero and it was even so much worse. If I had more time, I could even write a book from the amount of testimonies and my personal friends and my losses. My personal loss that day.

What I would – I would like to add that right now, currently, the Egyptian regime, military regime, is transforming into a Pakistani model. We are now approaching another Pakistan in Egypt. It is going to be inevitable unless there are serious measures taken to dismantle the current status quo. Saudi Arabia and Qatar are now funding Salafi jihadists and the Muslim Brotherhood. And the US is now currently funding the military that has evidently funded the Muslim Brotherhood in the past elections. As former ambassador Marc Ginsberg states in his article last month, that he confirms evidence that the military is funding Salafi jihadists, the al-Qaeda style jihadists and the Muslim Brotherhood. Obviously, from money that might have come from the USA. And also they have brokered a deal with Salafi jihadists. Now to force the West – the equation is, they want to force their Western, so-called, allies to choose either between the military dictatorship or between the Islamists. That’s the equation. Although that’s not the reality of things. Tahrir Square was filled with moderate and was filled with secular Muslims. There are six million Sufis that are formally cooperating with Copts that could be better alternative instead of this vicious equation. Right now, the equation is, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the Muslim Brotherhood Salafi jihadists, Egyptian military and the US on one side. And now the Copts and seculars, moderate forces, moderate Muslims, are on the other. And I think the US has always been our ally and this is not part of the equation that they should be. When President Bush’s administration suggested that they might condition aid, our lives became immediately better in Egypt. It was like someone clicked on a button and the world looked totally and entirely and completely different. What happened was, Mubarak had to leverage, because that’s how America gets leverage. And by giving us more freedom. What we did was, we started co-founding secular political parties that called for – that were against Islamic imperialism and against theocracy and pro-free market and human rights. In this atmosphere, we were able to work. Because that’s how countries reform to better ideas and modern ideas. When secular Muslims and moderate Muslims and Copts are getting death threats, how are we going to spend – how are we going to spread our ideas? Not everyone can tolerate getting messages like the messages and the death threats I used to get. That’s not an atmosphere that was – that is open to spread ideas of reform and modernity. So that’s the current situation now.

What we would like to ask and my condition – sorry – my conclusion of this is, America should look at the plight of Copts as a national security issue. We’re America. It’s not only a humanitarian crisis, but these are the true allies of the United States and true believers of the ideas and – the beautiful ideas that this country stands for. These are the true allies. In conclusion, three things must happen in order for the Coptic Christians and moderate Muslims to stand a chance of seeing their present human rights situation in Egypt improve significantly. First, the United States should seize all American aid to Egypt until there is verifiable evidence that the Egyptian government is allowing non-Muslim religious minorities in Egypt to exercise the freedom of speech and religion without fear of intimidation. Second, president Obama’s administration should explain and possibly re – sorry, reevaluate its vetting process of foreign national employees or advisers of American embassies, particularly in Egypt where Egyptian nationals, loyal to the regime have used their embassy positions to make it hard for Copts to apply for religious asylum and requests to the United States from the American embassy in Cairo out of fear of being targeted by Egyptian state security. Third and finally, the United States might – must avoid legitimizing joint effort by the Muslim Brotherhood and Egypt’s ruling military regime to use blasphemy law against non-Muslim minorities in Egypt and therefore should decline to meet with the Organization of Islamic Cooperation

[1] http://www.danielpipes.org/9388/copts-pay-the-price

[2] http://english.ahram.org.eg/NewsContent/1/64/7445/Egypt/Politics-Aboud-and-Tarek-ElZomor-amongst-released-prisoners.aspx

[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrorism_in_Egypt

[4] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zo51tpAWg

[5] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SWuC3N9Vpvg

[6] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sbo-IhyxODE

[7] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DvPWB-ThuhI

[8] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=41PzqZ49kbE

[9] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E7m08JJdxao

[10] http://edition.cnn.com/2011/10/09/world/meast/egypt-protest-clashes/index.html?hpt=hp_t2

[11] http://www.elfagr.org/Detail.aspx?nwsId=68173&secid=1&vid=2

[12] http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/01/29/us-egypt-usa-aid-idUSTRE70S0IN20110129

[13] http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/blogpost/post/egypt-dock-workers-protest-us-tear-gas-shipments-to-egypt/2011/11/30/gIQACr4gCO_blog.html

[14] A more in-depth treatment of the relationship between the Egyptian military regime and the Muslim Brotherhood can be found in "The Arab Upheaval: Egypt’s Islamist Shadow," Middle East Quarterly, Summer 2011. http://www.meforum.org/2887/arab-upheaval-egypt-islamist

[15] http://www.egypt.gov.eg/english/laws/constitution/chp_one/part_one.aspx

[16] Open letter from Anwar Sadat to Adolf Hitler, al-Musawwar (Cairo), Sept. 18, 1953.

[17] Khaled Mohieddin, Memories of a Revolution (Cairo: American University of Cairo Press, 1995), p. 45.

[18] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1odMl2_wBBs

[19] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/amb-marc-ginsberg/unholy-alliance-egypts-mi_b_1109534.html

Raymond Ibrahim: Shariah, Dhimmitude & the Copts

December 8, 2011Center for Security Policy

Raymond Ibrahim testified before the Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission in the House of Representatives. Reps. Frank Wolf and James McDermott presented "Under Threat: The Worsening Plight of Egypt’s Coptic Christians."

Raymond Ibrahim is a Middle East and Islam specialist, is a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center and an Associate Fellow at the Middle East Forum. A widely published author, best known for The Al Qaeda Reader (Doubleday, 2007), he guest lectures at universities, including the National Defense Intelligence College, briefs governmental agencies, such as U.S. Strategic Command and the Defense Intelligence Agency, provides expert testimony for Islam-related lawsuits, and has testified before Congress regarding the conceptual failures that dominate American discourse concerning Islam.

Other witnesses included Kathy Fitzpatrick (Deputy Assistant Secretary, Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor, U.S. Department of State); Nina Shea (Director, Center for Religious Freedom, Hudson Institute); Dina Guirguis (Member, Egyptian American Rule of Law Association); Adel Guindy (President, Coptic Solidarity International); and Cynthia Farahat (Egyptian political activist).

The following is Mr. Ibrahim’s testimony for the record and, below, is a transcript of his comments at the hearing.

Raymond Ibrahim: Testimony before the Tom Lantos Commission, December 7 2011. Click here for a PDF of his testimony for the record.

TESTIMONY OF RAYMOND IBRAHIM

TOM LANTOS HUMAN RIGHTS COMMISSION

Since the year 641, when Muslims invaded Egypt, the Copts-Egypt’s Christian, indigenous inhabitants-have been subject to persecution, discrimination, and over all subjugation on their homeland (etymologically, the word "Copt" simply means "Egyptian").[1] The result is an Egyptian culture and mentality that sees Copts as second-class citizens, or, in Islamic legal terminology, Dhimmis-"infidels" who are tolerated as long as they embrace their inferior status.

Whole books and treatises have been written on the treatment of Dhimmis (for instance, Ibn Qayyim’s authoritative 8^th century Ahkam Ahl al-Dhimma, or "Rulings for Dhimmis"). The idea of subjugating non-Muslims, aptly coined "Dhimmitude," comes from Quran 9:29: "Fight those who believe not in Allah nor the Last Day, nor forbid that which Allah and His Messenger have forbidden, nor follow the religion of Truth [Islam], from the People of the Book [Christians and Jews], until they pay the Jizya [tribute] with willing submission, and feel themselves utterly subdued."

The so-called Pact of Omar,[2] a foundational text for the treatment of Dhimmis, offers an idea of how this Quranic decree manifested itself in reality. In order to maintain their Christian faith, among other things, conquered Christians had to agree to the following:

We shall not build, in our cities or in their neighborhood, new monasteries, churches, convents, or monks’ cells, nor shall we repair, by day or by night, such of them as fall in ruins or are situated in the quarters of the Muslims … We shall not manifest our religion publicly nor convert anyone to it. We shall not prevent any of our kin from entering Islam if they wish it. We shall show respect toward the Muslims, and we shall rise from our seats when they wish to sit. We shall not seek to resemble the Muslims… We shall not display our crosses or our books in the roads or markets of the Muslims. We shall use only clappers in our churches very softly. We shall not raise our voices when following our dead… We shall not bury our dead near the Muslims. We shall not build houses overtopping the houses of the Muslims.

During the colonial era and into the mid 20th Century, as Egypt experimented with westernization and nationalism, Christian persecution was markedly subdued. Today, however, as Egypt all but spearheads Islam’s resurgence-giving the world key figures and groups such as Sayyid Qutb, Hassan Bana, the Muslim Brotherhood, and al-Qaeda’s Aymen Zawahiri in the process-that is, as Egypt reclaims its Islamic identity, the Copts find themselves again under persecution.

Today, popular Muslim preachers on Egyptian TV openly condemn Christians, publicly calling for the return of Dhimmi status; Copts and their churches are almost always attacked on Friday, immediately after the weekly mosque sermons and to cries of "Allahu Akbar!" demonstrating the Islamic pedigree of the attack.

None of this is surprising when one considers that even Egypt’s Grand Mufti himself, often touted in the West as a "moderate," recently classified all Christians[3] as "infidels," or kuffar,[4] a term that immediately positions Copts as enemies to be suppressed.

Aside from the fact that practically every week an account of Muslims attacking Copts emerges-whether the destroying of churches, the killing of Copts for wearing crosses, the abducting, raping, and force-converting of Coptic girls-perhaps nothing exemplifies their plight as the following governmental, that is, institutionalized, stipulations:

According to the Second Article of the Egyptian Constitution,[5] Sharia law-which is based on the anti-Christian words of the Quran and prophet Muhammad as contained in the Hadith-is "the principal source of legislation"; and since Dhimmitude is part and parcel of Sharia law, expectations for Copts to behave as subdued, second-class citizens, or Dhimmis, becomes implicit. For instance, and in accordance with the aforementioned stipulations of the Pact of Omar, it is next to impossible for churches to be built.

The Egyptian government likewise makes it next to impossible for Muslims to convert to Christianity (apostasy is a crime under Sharia). Among the more popular cases are Mohammad Hegazy[6]: he tried formally to change his religion from Muslim to Christian on his I.D. card-in Egypt, people are identified by their religion, again, as stipulated in the Pact of Omar -only to be denied[7] by the Egyptian court. Conversely, it takes mere days for Christian converts to Islam to change their religious I.D.

Most recently, several aspects of the Maspero massacre revealed the Egyptian government’s inherent hostility to its Christian citizenry:

Soldiers screamed "Allahu Akbar!"[8] and cursed "Infidels" as they approached and attacked Coptic protesters; a video of an Egyptian soldier boasting that he shot a Christian in the chest is greeted by the crowd around him with "Allahu Akbar!"[9]; and after the incident, Dr. Hind Hanafi, president of the University of Cairo, recommended separating wounded Christians from wounded Muslims admitted into the hospital, thereby institutionalizing religious discrimination, even in hospitals.[10]

Aside from these formalized aspects, Egyptian officials are notorious for turning a blind eye to Muslim mob attacks on Christians and their churches. In fact, it is this governmental complacency-or complicity-regarding attacks on Christians that that caused Copts to demonstrate at Maspero in the first place, before the government, including through the use of snipers, death squads, and tanks that intentionally ran over protesters, initiated the bloodbath that followed.

Anyone familiar with Muslim doctrine and history, especially as it applies to Egypt and the Copts, will find none of the above surprising; rather, the treatment of Copts in the Medieval era and their treatment today demonstrate great continuity-from the destruction of churches to the subjugation of Christians.

However, because there was a lull in this animosity, from the colonial era when Islam was on the wane, to just a few decades ago, most Westerners, deeming events closer to their time and space more representative of reality, ignore the continuum of history and doctrine dealing with persecution, and thus fail to comprehend what is otherwise so obvious and open for the world to see. This is exacerbated by the fact that the articulators of knowledge-the media, academia, and apologists of all stripes-in the name of multiculturalism and political correctness, have made uncomfortable truths all but unknowable.

In short, the evidence of Muslim persecution of Christians in general, persecution of Egyptian Copts in particular, is overwhelming-doctrinally, historically, and current events. What is lacking is a Western paradigm that can accept-and act upon-this evidence.

APPENDIX A

The following two reports discuss the Maspero Massacre and the events leading up to it, namely, the destruction of yet another Coptic Church, and provide proper context to the plight of Egypt’s Copts.

Report 1: Egypt-Destroying Churches, One at a Time

What clearer sign that Egypt is turning rabidly Islamist than the fact that hardly a few weeks go by without a church being destroyed, or without protesting Christians being attacked and slaughtered by the military?

The latest chaos in Egypt-where the military opened fire on unarmed Christians and repeatedly ran armored vehicles over them, killing dozens[11]-originates in Edfu, a onetime tourist destination renowned for its pharaonic antiquities, but now known as the latest region to see enraged Muslims destroy a church.

This church attack is itself eye-opening as to the situation in Egypt. To sum, St. George Coptic Church, built nearly a century ago, was so dilapidated that the local council and governor of Aswan approved renovating it, and signed off on the design.

It was not long before local Muslims began complaining, making various demands, including that the church be devoid of crosses and bells-even though the permit approved them-citing that "the Cross irritates Muslims and their children."[12]

Coptic leaders had no choice but to acquiesce, "pointing to the fact that the church was rebuilt legally, and any concessions on the part of the church was done for the love for the country, which is passing through a difficult phase."

Acquiescence breeds more demands: Muslim leaders next insisted that the very dome of the church be removed-so that the building might not even resemble a church-and that it be referred to as a "hospitality home." Arguing that removal of the dome would likely collapse the church, the bishop refused.

The foreboding cries of "Allahu Akbar!" began:[13] Muslims threatened to raze the church and build a mosque in its place; Copts were "forbidden to leave their homes or buy food until they remove the dome of St. George’s Church"; many starved for weeks.

Then, after Friday prayers on September 30, some three thousand Muslims rampaged the church, torched it, and demolished the dome; flames from the wreckage burned nearby Coptic homes, which were further ransacked by rioting Muslims.

This account of anti-church sentiment in Egypt offers several conclusions:

First, the obvious: animosity for churches, demands that they be left to crumble, demands to remove crosses and stifle bells, are an integral part of Islamic history and dogma.[14] That church attacks in Egypt always occur on Friday, Islam’s holy day, and are always accompanied by religious cries of "Allahu Akbar!" should be evidence enough of the Islamist context of these attacks.

Because there was a lull in this animosity from the colonial era to just a few decades ago, most Westerners, deeming events closer to their time and space more representative of reality, incorrectly assume that church toleration is the rule, not the exception in Islamic history, which has more frequently been draconian to churches, and is back: "the Muslim Brotherhood announced immediately after the revolution that it is impossible to build any new church in Egypt, and churches which are demolished should never be rebuilt, as well as no crosses over churches or bells to be rung."[15]

This is also why Muslim authorities are complacent, if not complicit. According to witnesses, security forces, which were present during the Edfu attack, "stood there watching." Worse, Edfu’s Intelligence Unit chief was seen directing the mob destroying the church.[16]

As for the governor of Aswan, he appeared on State TV and "denied any church being torched," calling it a "guest home" (a common tactic to excuse the destruction of churches[17]). He even justified the incident by arguing that the church contractor made the building three meters higher than he permitted: "Copts made a mistake and had to be punished, and Muslims did nothing but set things right, end of story."[18]

Equally telling is that perpetrators of church attacks are seldom if ever punished. Even if sometimes the most rabid church-destroyers get "detained," it is usually for show, as they are released in days, hailed back home as heroes (this, too, goes back to Muslim dogma).

This year alone has seen the New Year church attack, which left 23 dead;[19] the destruction of the ancient church of Sool,[20] where Muslims "played soccer" with its sacred relics; the Imbaba attacks,[21] where several churches were set aflame; and now Edfu, wherein, as usual "none of the attackers were arrested."[22]

Indeed, three days after Edfu, Muslims attacked yet another church.[23]

Aware that they are untouchable, at least when it comes to making infidel Christians miserable, anti-Christian Muslims have a simple strategy: destroy churches, even if one at a time, safe in the knowledge that, not only will they not be prosecuted, but Egypt’s military and security apparatus will punish the infidel victims should they dare to protest.

Report 2: Egypt’s Massacre of Christians: What the Media Does Not Want You To Know

Western media coverage of the recent massacre of Coptic Christians in Cairo, Egypt-in which the military killed dozens of Christians and injured some 300-was, as discussed earlier, deplorable.[24] It merely repeated the false propaganda of the complicit state-run media, without checking facts. Since then, further proofs of the lies and brutality surrounding the massacre have emerged; they are compiled in the following report which consists of facts and videos from Arabic sources-many of which have not appeared in the Western media.

This report documents: 1) the activities of the Supreme Military Council of Egypt and de facto ruler; 2) the lies and duplicitous tactics of both the Military Council and its media mouthpiece, Egyptian TV; and 3) the anti-Christian sentiment pervading all aspects of this incident.

The Egyptian Military

Along with a new report by Magdi Khalil asserting that the day before the planned march, a "death squad" of snipers hid atop buildings and shot at protesters, armored vehicles intentionally chased after and ran over protesters, killing and mutilating many.[25] Videos captured by witnesses included:

o A high-speed armored vehicle willfully plowing over unsuspecting Christian demonstrators.[26]

o Another armored vehicle chasing protesters, and a soldier opening fire into the fleeing crowds.[27]

o High-speed armored cars running amok in the middle of the crowds, including chasing protesters on the curb, as well as soldiers beating protesters.[28]

o More eyewitness testimony attesting to the brutality of the massacre, and they are many, and the victims include Muslims. Videos: 1[29] 2[30] 3[31] 4[32] 5[33]

The Tactics of the Military Council (or "War is Deceit")[34]

After the incident and notwithstanding crushing evidence, Egypt’s Military Council held a news conference wherein senior official, Mahmoud Hegazy,[35] spun lie after lie: he stated that the military would "never, never" run over civilians; that the very idea was "impossible, impossible!" and "Shame on those who accuse the Egyptian military of such things!… Never has our military run over a single person, not even when combating the Enemy [Israel]."[36]

Hegazy portrayed the Christian protesters as the aggressors, attacking and killing "honorable" soldiers. To prove his point, he showed an image of a protester on top of a stalled armored vehicle, throwing a rock at the soldier inside, and a video of a military vehicle-that he claimed was hijacked by a protester-driving wildly into the crowd.

Hegazy’s deceit lies in the fact that the "hijacked" vehicle running amok, and the one stalled and attacked by a protester, were one and the same vehicle: Al Dalil revealed that both vehicles had the same identification number.[37] In other words, when the vehicle in which a soldier was chasing and running over protesters finally stalled, the protesters then attacked it. Egypt’s leaders willfully manipulated the footage to exonerate themselves and portray the Copts as violent aggressors.

Several eyewitnesses, including Muslims, further stated that, to hide the "evidence," they saw soldiers hurling the mutilated bodies of those run over into the nearby Nile River.[38]

As Copts have long suspected, the "thugs" (al-baltagiyya) who always appear in protests attacking Christians seem to be men whom the military uses to create an excuse to open fire and exercise brutality. Muslim eyewitnesses say they saw the thugs coming with State Security:[39] Al Dalil showed a video clip of a soldier exposed dressed as a civilian, interspersed among Coptic protesters, and other videos showing the thugs cooperating with the military.

A video[40] might offer the greatest proof: Days before the massacre, when Copts were protesting the destruction of their latest church,[41] around 20 Egyptian soldiers and security personnel captured a protester and mercilessly beat him (while calling him an "infidel," to put the beating in context).[42] Mixed among the military (camouflage uniforms) and security (black uniforms) is what appears to be a plainclothes civilian, who proceeds to stab the Christian protestor in the head with a knife several times; the victim later received 20 stitches. The plainclothesman is most likely a member of the military or security, dressed as a civilian for stealth purposes, otherwise he would not have been able to move among them so casually.

The Role of the Egyptian State Media (or "War is Deceit")[43]

"Egyptian TV"-demonstrating, unsurprisingly, that state-run media always serve dictatorial regimes-merely propagated the lies of the Military Council.

Even as armored vehicles were mowing down Christian protesters, Egyptian TV broadcast footage of reporters saying, "Help, the Copts are killing our heroic, patriotic soldiers and burning Qurans!" One segment on Egyptian TV had an outraged reporter condemning Christians-"as if they were the Israeli enemy"-for killing "our noble protectors [soldiers], who never once fired a single shot."[44] As a result, many Muslims took to the streets brutally attacking Christians and their property.

Egyptian TV also lied by saying three soldiers died at the hands of Copts: officials at the TV station later confessed to making it up.[45] That, however, did not stop a barrage of op-eds in Egypt blaming the Christians for their own massacre.[46]

Due to Egyptian TV’s misinformation, several Egyptian reporters unequivocally condemned it. Anchorwoman Dina said: "I am ashamed that I work at this despicable TV channel… Egyptian TV was effectively calling for civil war between Muslims and Christians… Egyptian TV has proven that it is a slave to those who rule." Another news anchor, Mahmoud Yousif, announced that he "washes his hands of what Egyptian TV is broadcasting."[47]

Anti-Christian Hate

Although it should be clear that anti-Christian sentiment fueled this latest Muslim slaughter of Christian minorities, a few specifics follow:

Soldiers screamed "Allahu Akbar!" and cursed "Infidels!" as they approached and attacked the protesters[48]-which of course is not so unexpected when one considers that, even in olden times and in movies, the Egyptian military was called the Jihadiyya (the organization that wages holy war).
A video of a soldier boasting that he shot a Christian in the chest is greeted by the crowd around him with "Allahu Akbar!"[49]
After the incident, Dr. Hind Hanafi, president of the University of Cairo, recommended separating wounded Christians from wounded Muslims admitted into the hospital, thereby institutionalizing religious discrimination, even in hospitals.[50]

Conclusion

A massacre at this level never occurred during the thirty-year reign of ousted president Hosni Mubarak, and yet Mubarak is being charged with "crimes against Egyptians." What about the Military Council? It has committed greater crimes-even though it has been in charge for less than a year. Saddam Hussein was condemned by the international community for using chemicals on his own people; where are the international community, the media, and the so-called human rights groups when it comes to a government running over its own civilians with armored vehicles and having "death squads" of snipers shooting at them?

Finally, if this report testifies to crimes against humanity, consider what it says about diplomacy: If Egyptian leadership lies and deceives to suppress its internal "infidel" citizens-whose "crime" was to object to the continual destruction of their churches[51]-how credible can it be to external "infidels," such as the U.S.?

APPENDIX B

The following list of articles and reports by the author further discuss the plight of Egypt’s Copts:

TRANSCRIPT OF RAYMOND IBRAHIM’S TESTIMONY

TOM LANTOS HUMAN RIGHTS COMMISSION

DECEMBER 7, 2011

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I’m taking somewhat of a different approach. I think one of the best things to begin to understand the situation for the Copts and how it’s being exacerbated is – excuse me – is to establish context, for starters. And the fact is, what we are hearing about tonight – or today, I’m sorry – is about a phenomenon that has been going on for about fourteen hundred years. This is not something new. The sort of – and so the key to understand to where we are today is to establish the continuity from former centuries past. And the amazing thing is, when you look at history – and this is my field, history and doctrine, when you look at these two – especially history, you will find that what happened to the Coptic people when Islam invaded Egypt in the 7th Century, and as recorded by reliable Muslim historians, medieval Muslim historians who had no great love for the Copts, when you look at these texts, you will find that they are identical to what is happening today. And there’s – I mean, it’s – the parallels are just outstanding how just identical they are. And I’ll just give you some examples. Of course, there’s the attacks on Copts in general. That has been going on. Attacks on churches. I was reading the other day from a medieval source, a primary source from a Muslim who talked about in one emir’s reign in that time they destroyed three thousand churches. Abduction of girls. Christian girls and rape. And forced conversions. Plunder as expectations from second-class citizen Copts, taking what’s called the jizya, collective punishment.

All of these have past precedents for fourteen hundred years and are well documented in Islam’s own historical texts. Now when you look at that and you bring it to today and we fast forward to the 21st Century and what we’re seeing today, to me, this is the key. Now you understand that this is not an aberration. What we’re seeing. This is not something strange. But rather part and parcel of Islamic history, especially in Egypt. And I’m mentioning to you Islamic primary sources and I think that’s important because these are not sources that were written by, you know, polemicists or Christians or non-Muslims, but by Islam’s own most authoritative and revered historians and theologians. And they make it unequivocally clear that Islam, from its entrance into Egypt, decimated the Coptic people and their churches and all but their civilization. There were a few, of course, times when it was better and then it would get worse. And, you know, one guy – one, for example, person, he’s known as Al-Maqrizi and he’s one of the most popular and authoritative historians of Egypt, medieval Egypt. And he, again, while you read it and you see that he’s a very faithful Muslim and he has no great sympathy for the Copts, he is so objective and he declares all of these points that we are talking about today. So the reason I bring this to you, again, is to show that the continuity is there. This is nothing new. This is nothing strange. Now we come up to – I mentioned a little bit of history, I’d like to quickly discuss some doctrinal issues.

The word dhimmi, which was not known before, but has become somewhat famous nowadays and including a new coinage of it, which is dhimmitude – and I think that’s all good, because these words need to come out in the open. I think it’s also a little bad, because they’ve been somewhat taken out of context and popularized inaccurately, but the word itself in fact is integral to Islamic law. The word dhimmi. And from the beginning of Islam’s entry into Egypt and the other non-Muslim territories, dhimmi is a person, a non-Muslim, who of course does not accept Islam, wants to maintain their religious identity, in this case the Christian Copts, but to do so, they have to accept several debilitating and humiliating circumstances. And this goes to the Koran. The Koran itself, Koran 9, surah 9, verse 29, says to Muslims, fight the people of the book – and these, of course, include Jews and Christians – until they pay the jizya, which basically means tribute, to their overlords, until they pay the jizya with willing submission and feel themselves utterly subdued. Now this is the Koran and to Muslims, the infallible word of God that transcends all time and is applied back then in the era that I’m discussing and to many Muslims today applies to today and needs to be upheld vis a vis people like the Copts, non-Muslims. So what it ultimately means is – this concept of dhimmi is someone who does not want to become a Muslim, who willingly has to accept second class citizen status, and whose rights ultimately depend on the goodwill of the Muslim overlords.

And another seminal treatise that was written and goes back and it’s called The Pact of Umar, named after either the first khalif or probably another khalif by the same name, but this pact, again, when you read it, it was what Christians had to sign in order to not be molested and destroyed. And among the things that it says is number one, we cannot – we Christians cannot build or repair our churches. We cannot practice our religion openly. We must show respect to Muslims. We must not offend Muslims. It even says we shall rise from our seats when they wish to sit down. All of this was enforced then, all of it is coming back now in strong force. Now, all of it has been now, for example, the issue of churches in Egypt. As you see, there are always being attacked, they are always being destroyed. As far as the government is concerned, it’s like pulling teeth just to try to get a permit to repair a church. And again, this goes to this. These pacts and these doctrines, which are so little known in the West and which seem to be just some – you talk to people about it, they hear these words and they think these are just some sort of throwback from ancient history, they’re really not that relevant today, but they’re immensely relevant to those and to the practitioners of the faith who think of these as divine institutions of their religion. And then there’s another aspect to all of this. I’ve discussed the historic and the doctrinal aspects of keeping Copts and others, non-Muslims, suppressed. But there’s a word that’s not well known at all and it was coined – in a few decades ago – and it’s called Islamicate. And what Islamicate means is that just because Islam teaches, let’s say X, Y, and Z, but as a culture, a Muslim need not necessarily be a religious or a pious Muslim to start doing these things. Because they become ingrained and permeate the culture. So seeing a Copt as, for example, a second class citizen, whether you’re a secular Muslim or not, these sorts of things feed into the culture and the worldview of the general populace of Egypt. And so the radical Muslim, of course, will be more hostile and more fierce. But even the general Muslim or the people in the military who do not identify themselves as radicals, because of the fourteen hundred years of these institutionalized forms of discrimination, these ideas have become just part of the worldview of so many people in Egypt, unfortunately. And, but usually it became into sort of discrimination.

But now as you see these Islamist parties, not just the Salafists, who are getting, you know, lots of, I think, twenty percent of the vote, and what are they doing? They’re going beyond little things like just discrimination. And now they want to reinstitutionalize things like the jizya. Which again goes back – this goes back to that Koranic verse I read, which says fight them until they pay tribute. Jizya means paying tribute, which is a way of acknowledging that you are a second class citizen and you’re buying your life. Because you’re paying for it, you’re being blackmailed. And so now these people who are being voted into the new government of Egypt, the Salafists, are calling openly for the return of jizya. And of course, it’s not just a matter of money, but with the return of jizya comes all of these other aspects of quote/unquote dhimmitude. To be expected of Copts. Which includes no more churches at all whatsoever. No more – you have to hide your religious identity. No crosses in public. And so forth. And all of these other types of debilitations. Now, and then you have the Brotherhood. The Brotherhood, of course, the problem is, I think there’s so many people who see the Brotherhood and the Salafists as sort of, you know, one’s moderate and one’s radical. That’s, of course, a joke. The Muslim Brotherhood – a better way to see it, or to give you an American analogy is you can think of them as the Muslim Brotherhood are the Democrats and the Salafists are the Republicans. In other words, they’re two faces of the same coin. Because in America, Democrats and Republicans, of course, have different viewpoints. But they are all based on the same source and they’re all based on the same paradigm. And it’s the same for these Salafists and the Muslim Brotherhood. Whatever their little differences are, they all go back and trace their sources to shariah law. Which is not very – which is clear cut what it says. But also, the Muslim Brotherhood are a little smarter than the Salafists. Because they know the game and they know they’re not going to sit up now and start talking about institutionalizing jizya. Or dhimmi status for Copts. They’re not going to say that now. Whereas the Salafists will say it now. But at any rate, now you have these two groups who are about sixty percent – who won sixty percent of the votes. And their opinions of the Copts go straight back to what I was discussing from fourteen hundred years ago. Which is this worldview that they are there to be plundered, kept suppressed, and their churches destroyed. And this is why we’re seeing it all now.

Now I started earlier by saying that somewhat – we’re here having a hearing about a phenomenon that’s been going fourteen hundred years. So why are we having a hearing? Why is this new? It’s new because we – it’s sort of, this goes to somewhat of intellectual history, but if you look at what happened the last two hundred years with the colonial era, when the Western powers invaded and colonized the Muslim world, what happened then is, and this is a fact, that so many of the Muslims turned their back on Islam, in a way. In other words, they were just secular and Islam was something that, you know, was not taken seriously. And this is well known. And a perfect example, of course, is Ataturk, who abolished the caliphate in 1928, I believe, and he, of course, this was the nation which was the head of the Muslim world. So right at the early 20th Century, what you had is Muslims were experimenting with Westernizing and secularizing and modernization and nationalism. This is what happened. Now during that era, yes, Coptic persecution was markedly subdued. And this is also a fact. The discrimination, the subtle things, they were still there. But the sort of wholesale attacks that we’re seeing today were really not that present. Now what this has done, though, because this sort of – or this new approach, went on for a few generations, is it’s created a Western worldview that does not see the earlier precedents or the past history. So now, in history classes, when we discuss – when we discuss the history of the Middle East and Egypt, we just start talking about the Muslim world or from about the 1900s and the 20th Century, where no, there wasn’t a lot of persecution and, if anything, the paradigm is that the West was the evil oppressive force and the Muslim world was not. So this, I think, has created an intellectual hurdle to understand what’s really going on.

And of course it’s exacerbated tremendously by the Western mainstream media, which some of my colleagues have pointed out, never really reports the truth or really equivocates. They use the term sectarian strife. When you have a few thousand Muslims who go burn down a church and they call that sectarian strife, which in my mind, suggests, you know, two equal – equally powerful forces, like Sunnis and Shias killing each other. And that’s not the case. But the media tries so hard to come off neutral. And I even remember during the Maspero massacre where, you know, the tanks were intentionally running down and mowing over Copts and killing them and opening fire, FOX News, which is considered the, you know, the conservative balanced one, was telling us about how soldiers were crying as they watched Copts attack their fellow soldiers. Okay, and so – and then, you know, the holders and articulators of knowledge in the West have completely undermined reality. And the same goes with academia. Academia, especially area studies, seems to exist solely now just to put the best spin on things and to make, you know, if, you know, your area of study is the Muslim world, none of these things that we’re talking about, these historical aspects, these primary sources, Koranic and historical, that I’m quoting, you’ll never hear these. And I know from firsthand experience, I was at Georgetown, for instance, for awhile, and every class was based upon how either the Islamic world has been abused or how, you know, we have to understand them, we have to appease them and this sort of thing. So it is unfortunate that we have all these intellectual hurdles that are making something that is fourteen hundred years old and so obvious to anyone who has studied this and looked at this, it’s unintelligible to us today. And we have to have a hearing to even start talking about it. And it is because of all of these forces, you know, whether they’re intellectual history and sort of anachronisms or whether it’s the mainstream media and political correctness run amok or academia. But this is the situation we’re at. And there’s nothing new. But I think the only – the good news apparently is that we’re still in the early stage. There’s still many Egyptians in Egypt, including Muslims who are not of that variety who are not the Salafists or the Muslim Brotherhood and so we are not exactly in the medieval era where it’s a wholesale massacre. And so I think there is some light at the end of the tunnel. And what needs to be done, of course, is to support and as my colleagues all said, the aid must be conditional upon these sorts of things.

We must identify and support the liberal voices. Because they are our friends. The idea of saying, you know, democracy, using that word and, you know, everything has to stop before that word, is ridiculous. Because what’s being – what’s happening in Egypt is democracy means the people are going to bring the sort of government that they want. And ostensibly that sounds good and fair. But what is – when they bring a fascistic government, you know, Hitler, for instance, the people brought him to power. The people had support for him. So that doesn’t mean we should – what I submit, then, is we should not always be – stand beholden before the word democracy as if it’s this sort of sacrosanct thing. We have to understand it’s a mode of government. But what really matters is what the people themselves do create with this mode once they’re empowered.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copt#Etymology

[2] http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/source/pact-umar.asp

[3] http://www.raymondibrahim.com/10608/top-muslim-declares-christians-infidels

[4] http://www.raymondibrahim.com/10742/grand-mufti-distorts-word-infidel-to-dupe-infidels

[5] http://www.uam.es/otroscentros/medina/egypt/egypolcon.htm

[6] http://www.meforum.org/2631/dissident-watch-mohammed-hegazy#_ftn5

[7] http://archive.compassdirect.org/en/display.php?page=news%E2%8C%A9=en&length=long&idelement=5209&backpage=archives&critere=&countryname=Egypt&rowcur=25

[8] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DKaGr75r34w

[9] http://www.youtube.com/user/thecopticmartyrs?gl=US#p/u/15/qyn2Yow1aN8

[10] http://islamexplained.com/UVG/UVG_video_player/TabId/89/VideoId/791/037—-.aspx

[11] http://news.yahoo.com/24-dead-worst-cairo-riots-since-mubarak-ouster-232452205.html

[12] http://www.light-dark.net/vb/showthread.php?p=4939#post4939

[13] http://www.aina.org/news/20110908193725.htm

[14] http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/source/pact-umar.asp

[15] http://www.theblaze.com/blog/2011/09/20/who%E2%80%99s-in-charge-of-the-holy-sepulchre/

[16] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k8zlWL35PE4&feature=player_embedded#!

[17] http://www.thejakartaglobe.com/home/two-churches-torched-in-indonesia/456930

[18] http://www.light-dark.net/vb/showthread.php?p=4939#post4939

[19] http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-12101748

[20] http://www.raymondibrahim.com/8968/no-revolution-for-egypt-christians

[21] http://www.raymondibrahim.com/9595/muslim-inferiority-complex-kills-christians

[22] http://www.asianews.it/news-en/Attacks-against-Coptic-churches,-part-of-a-plan-to-expel-Egypt%E2%80%99s-Christians-22828.html

[23] http://www.aina.org/news/20111004183833.htm

[24] http://www.raymondibrahim.com/10498/the-egyptian-military-crimes-against-humanity

[25] http://www.dostor.org/opinion/11/october/17/58242

[26] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u1sbJehl-ms

[27] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vo0qxrg0Ink&feature=related

[28] http://www.youtube.com/watch?NR=1&v=gI4T1UUoOt0

[29] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OsP2qqBf-0I

[30] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zo51tpAWgyE&feature=related

[31] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I2tJBygSFys

[32] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YBZ0Xbk8xUQ

[33] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QVZYYzr5WHk&feature=related

[34] http://www.cmje.org/religious-texts/hadith/bukhari/052-sbt.php#004.052.269

[35] http://www.copts.co.uk/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=3358&Itemid=1

[36] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n5TbgK8Mlkk

[37] http://islamexplained.com/UVG/UVG_video_player/TabId/89/VideoId/800/038—-.aspx

[38] http://www.light-dark.net/vb/showthread.php?p=9936#post9936

[39] http://m.elfagr.org/dailyPortal_NewsDetails.aspx?nwsId=8178&secid=10

[40] http://www.youtube.com/user/thecopticmartyrs?gl=US&oref=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fuser%2Fthecopticmartyrs%3Fgl%3DUS#p/u/28/IXYgzHRYRxQ&has_verified=1

[41] http://www.raymondibrahim.com/10492/egypt-destroying-churches

[42] http://www.aina.org/news/2011109123846.htm

[43] http://www.meforum.org/2538/taqiyya-islam-rules-of-war

[44] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E7m08JJdxao

[45] http://bikyamasr.com/45280/egypt-state-television-admits-to-making-up-news-over-soldiers-deaths/

[46] http://www.aina.org/news/20111017175249.htm

[47] http://www.arabnet5.com/news.asp?c=2&id=113867

[48] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DKaGr75r34w

[49] http://www.youtube.com/user/thecopticmartyrs?gl=US#p/u/15/qyn2Yow1aN8

[50] http://islamexplained.com/UVG/UVG_video_player/TabId/89/VideoId/791/037—-.aspx

[51] http://www.hudson-ny.org/2489/egypt-destroying-churches

A predictable fiasco

December 5, 2011Frank Gaffney, Jr.

The Egyptian elections have resulted in a rout for the throngs whose springtime hopes for freedom are now facing the prospect of a nuclear winter at the hands of the Muslim Brotherhood and its fellow Salafists. These Islamists appear to have garnered 60% of the seats in the next parliament and the opportunity to shape the country’s new constitution in line with their ambitions to impose the totalitarian doctrine of shariah nationwide. That will be bad news for the people of Egypt, for Israel and for us.

This fiasco was made predictable in early February when President Obama announced that President Hosni Mubarak had to leave office at once. It was clear even then that the most organized, most disciplined and most ruthless group would prevail in the ensuing, chaotic electoral environment. Apart from the military, in Egypt that group has been the Muslim Brotherhood basically since its founding in 1928.

Press reports indicate that the Obama Administration spent $200 million to help non-Islamist parties organize and compete in last week’s elections. If true, it adds insult to injury. The money was wasted, not only because the liberal and secular elements to whommuch of it reportedly was given, were hopelessly outgunned by the Brotherhood. More importantly, it was squandered because Team Obama, in the person of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, made a point in the run-up to the vote of welcoming the Muslim Brotherhood’s participation in the “political dialogue” in Egypt.

In so doing, the Obama administration not only signaled that it could do business with the Brotherhood. It gave lie to any pretense of concern about the Islamists’ role in the massacre of Coptic Christians (which will be the subject of an important hearing in the House of Representatives’ Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission on Wednesday).

Similarly, the President and his subordinates appear determined to ignore the Brotherhood’s virulently supremacist and jihadist creed. They are also evidently indifferent to the strategic plan issued in 1991 by the MB’s American arm and the phased approach for realizing its goal of “eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within.” (Documents enshrining these ambitions were introduced uncontested into evidence by federal prosecutors in the 2008 Holy Land Foundation terrorism financing trial.)

At the same time, the Obama administration is reaching out to and empowering Muslim Brotherhood front groups as their exclusive interlocutors with Muslims inside the United States. Incredibly, the Department of Homeland Security has recently promulgated guidelines that effectively require all trainers and their training material to be approved by “community leaders” – read, officials of organizations like the Islamic Society of North America and the Council on American Islamic Relations that the federal government has identified as tied to the Brotherhood.

One wonders about the extent to which such fatally flawed policies reflect the influence exercised on senior administration officials by people with deep ties to the Muslim Brotherhood. For example, Secretary of State Clinton’s deputy chief of staff, Huma Abedin, has a mother (Saleha Abedin) and a brother (Hassan Abedin) who have been linked, respectively, to the Muslim Sisterhood and Brotherhood. Could such associations be coloring Mrs. Clinton’s judgment about, notably, the advisability of having the MB come to power in Egypt and the reliability of the Islamist government of our NATO “ally,” Turkey?

Perhaps such influences are also shaping Secretary Clinton’s willingness to engage next week in Washington with the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) in aneffort to bridge differences between the United States and Islamists bent on its submission to shariah. The issue involves one of our most fundamental liberties – freedom of expression. Unfortunately, it is hard to see how this conclave will do anything but impinge upon that constitutionally protected right.

After all, the OIC has been seeking for years to secure worldwide acceptance of its shariah-adherent prohibition on expression that offends Muslims. The Obama administration has already associated itself with a watered-down version of this initiative. Now, it seems intent on finding a way to deny free speech to those who the Islamists depict as “Islamphobes.”

Given this agenda, it is ironic that Vice President Joe Biden has been lately touting the importance of free speech – most recently during a visit to, of all places, Turkey. He seems to epitomize the old saw that “somebody always doesn’t get the word.” Neither the Veep nor Mrs. Clinton (who started her dialogue with the OIC Secretary General Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu in Istanbul in July) seem to have noticed that Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyep Erdogan is in the process of completing the Islamization of his country andsnuffing what is left of independent media that dares to challenge him.

In fact, what is happening in Turkey right now is a roadmap for what is to come in Egypt – and wherever else the Muslim Brotherhood or its ilk come to power. The willful blindness of the Obama administration to the reality that such Islamists are determined to impose shariah at the expense of freedom has – as was predictable and predicted – facilitated that outcome in Cairo. If it persists, such malfeasance will simply substitute the despotic misrule of clerics for the despotic misrule of secular autocrats, to the detriment of the people most immediately affected and, in due course, of America’s as well.

Frank J. Gaffney, Jr. is President of the Center for Security Policy (www.SecureFreedom.org), a columnist for the Washington Times and host of the nationally syndicated program, Secure Freedom Radio, heard in Washington weeknights at 9:00 p.m. on WRC 1260 AM.

The enemy is inside the wire

October 31, 2011Frank Gaffney, Jr.

What would have happened if, during the Cold War, Soviet intelligence had been responsible for training Americans charged with countering communist aggression? Surely, we would not have defeated the USSR. Perhaps, instead, Kruschev’s boast that his nation would dance on our graves would have been realized.

It should, therefore, be profoundly alarming that, today, the Obama administration is entrusting to agents of the Muslim Brotherhood (MB or Ikhwan in Arabic) the responsibility for approving who and what is used in "countering violent extremism" training for our military, law enforcement, intelligence personnel.

The use of the term "countering violent extremism" (or CVE) is, of course, the first clue that the enemy is inside the wire. That euphemism is the term Team Obama allows to be employed in lieu of phrases that actually describe the nature of the principal enemy we face at the moment: Muslims who engage in holy war– jihad– to compel the rest of us to submit to the totalitarian, supremacist political-military-legal doctrine they call shariah.

"Countering violent extremism" is problematic for reasons beyond its lack of clarity about the threat. It also explicitly excludes a facet of the menace posed by shariah that is at least as dangerous to an open, tolerant liberal democracy as the violent sort of jihad: the stealthy insinuation of this doctrine in ways that are non-violent or, more accurately, pre-violent.

The Muslim Brotherhood specializes in this sort of covert warfare, which it has dubbed "civilization jihad." Its skills were honed during decades of operations under a succession of hostile Egyptian governments. Now that the Brothers have achieved– with no little help from President Obama– the overthrow of the last of these under Hosni Mubarak, their true colors are becoming evident. Ask the Coptic Christians who are now being massacred by the putatively "non-violent" Ikhwan.

Make no mistake: Stealthy civilization jihad is every bit as toxic and has precisely the same goals as the sort of holy war we have come to associate with murderous hijackers and suicide bombers of MB spin-offs like al Qaeda.

We know, for example, from evidence introduced uncontested by federal prosecutors in the 2008 Holy Land Foundation terrorism-funding trial that the Brotherhood’s mission here is "a kind of grand jihad in eliminating and destroying… Western civilization from within… by their hands [read, ours] and the hands of the believers so that God’s religion is made victorious over all other religions." We also are on notice that the MB has a five-phased plan for achieving this mission in the United States; the first four phases are stealthy and pre-violent.

Which brings us to the alarming guidelines recently promulgated by the Department of Homeland Security for countering violent extremism training. Under the heading "Trainers should be expert and well-regarded," the DHS directs that a "prospective trainer’s resume be "check[ed] with knowledgeable community leaders." Unfortunately, it appears that, as far as the Obama administration is concerned, such "leaders" are exclusively those associated with organizations that the federal government and the Muslim Brotherhood itself have identified as Ikhwan fronts.

The DHS guidelines also direct that "training should be sensitive to constitutional values." To that end, it requires that "federal, state and local government and law enforcement officials organizing CVE training…review the training program to ensure that:

"It uses examples to demonstrate that terrorists and violent extremists vary in ethnicity, race, gender, and religion.
"Training should focus on behavior, not appearance or membership in particular ethnic or religious communities.
"Training should support the protection of civil rights and civil liberties as part of national security. Don’t use training that equates religious expression, protests, or other constitutionally protected activity with criminal activity."

In other words, Muslim Brotherhood-associated individuals are being afforded the opportunity to veto the use of trainers who might actually understand the nature of the danger its operatives and organizations pose to our country. And those who are allowed to train are not permitted to focus their students on the actual threat emanating from a subset of the Muslim community. Rather, they must promote the notion that there are really no indicators in belief or nationality that can help the authorities apply limited security resources in a sensibly prioritized manner.

Some try to excuse this behavior as nothing more than being "sensitive," "tolerant" or "politically correct." The danger is that shariah-adherent Muslims regard such conduct as submissive— and, according to their doctrine, they are obliged to redouble their efforts to, as the Koran puts it, make us "feel subdued." That means more violence, not less.

That prospect becomes all the greater when one adds into the mix the presence of government officials who are themselves tied to the Muslim Brotherhood and/or its shariah doctrine – including in senior positions in the White House, the State Department and the Department of Homeland Security. Such individuals are products of and greatly facilitate the Brothers’ influence operations and contribute greatly to our failure to date to recognize, let alone counteract, them.

If we would not have won the Cold War had the KGB been able to call the shots here, we surely will not prevail if we allow the Muslim Brotherhood to do the same in the struggle against today’s totalitarian ideology, shariah– a doctrine some have dubbed "communism with a god." Congressional oversight is urgently needed to prevent that from happening.

Frank J. Gaffney, Jr. is President of the Center for Security Policy, a columnist for the Washington Times and host of the nationally syndicated program, Secure Freedom Radio, heard in Washington weeknights at 9:00 p.m. on WRC 1260 AM.

Who lost the world? The unraveling of the globe under Obama’s watch

October 26, 2011Frank Gaffney, Jr.

Conventional wisdom has it that the 2012 election will be all about the dismal economy, unemployment and the soaring deficit. That appears a safe bet since such matters touch the electorate, are much in the news at the moment and have indisputably gotten worse on Barack Obama’s watch.

It seems increasingly likely, however, that the American people are going to have a whole lot more to worry about by next fall. Indeed, the way things are going, by November 2012, we may see the Mideast – and perhaps other parts of the planet – plunged into a cataclysmic war.

Consider just a few of the straws in the wind of a gathering storm:

Muammar Gadhafi’s death last week prompted the Obama administration to trumpet the President’s competence as Commander-in-Chief and the superiority of his "small footprint," "lead-from-behind" approach to waging war over the more traditional – and costly and messy – one pursued by George W. Bush. The bloom came off that false rose on Sunday when Mustafa Abdul-Jalil, the chairman of the National Transitional Council, repeatedly declared his government’s fealty to shariah, Islam’s brutally repressive, totalitarian political-military-legal doctrine.

Among other things, Abdul-Jalil said shariah would be the "basic source" of all legislation. Translation: Forget about representative democracy. Under shariah, Allah makes the laws, not man.

In short, the result of Mr. Obama’s $2 billion dollar expenditure to oust Gadhafi is a regime that will be led by jihadists, controls vast oil reserves and has inherited a very substantial arsenal (although some of it – including reportedly as many as 20,000 surface-to-air missiles – has "gone missing.") This scarcely can be considered a victory for the United States and will probably prove a grave liability.

An Islamist party called Nahda seems likely to have captured the lion’s share of the votes cast in the first free election in Tunisia. While we are assured it is a "moderate" religious party, the same has long been said of Turkey’s governing AKP party. Unfortunately, we have lately seen the latter’s true colors as it has become ever-more-insistent at home on jettisoning the secular form of government handed down by Attaturk and acted ever-more-aggressively abroad. A similar transformation can be expected, later if not sooner, of any shariah-adherent political movement.

Meanwhile in Egypt, the agenda of the Islamists’ mother ship – the Muslim Brotherhood – is being adopted even before elections formally bring it to power. The interim military government has abetted efforts to punish and even kill the Coptic Christian minority. It has facilitated the arming of the Brotherhood’s franchise in Gaza, Hamas, and allowed the Sinai to become the launching pad for al Qaeda and others’ attacks on Israel.

Egypt’s transitional regime also helped broker the odious exchange of over 1,000 convicted terrorists held by Israel for a single soldier kidnapped and held hostage for five years by Hamas. Upon their release, even the convicts with Jewish blood on their hands received heroes’ welcomes even as they affirmed their desire to destroy Israel and called for the seizure of still more Israelis to spring their comrades still behind bars. This does not augur well for either the Jewish State or for our interests.

The increasingly mercurial Afghan president, Hamid Karzai, has announced that – despite the long-running, immensely costly and ongoing U.S. effort to protect his kleptocratic government – in a war between Pakistan and the United States, Afghanistan would side with Pakistan. The magnitude of this insulting repudiation of America is all the greater since Pakistan is widely seen as doing everything it can to reestablish the Taliban in Kabul.

And in Iraq, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has touted his success in thwarting Washington’s belated (and half-hearted) efforts to keep a significant number of U.S. forces in his country after the end of this year. Already, his coalition partner and fellow Iranian cats-paw, Muqtada al-Sadr, is boasting that he will also drive out the American contractor personnel who are, for the moment, expected to provide a measure of security after the military withdraws. In that case, we may well see the mullahs’ agents take over a U.S. embassy for the second time since 1979 – this one the newest, largest and most expensive in the world.

Add to this litany an emboldened and ascendant China, a revanchist Russia once again under the absolute control of Vladimir Putin, a Mexico free-falling into civil war with narco-traffickers and their Hezbollah allies on our southern border and you get a world that is fraught with peril for the United States. Matters are made infinitely worse by the prospect of the U.S. military being hollowed out by reckless budget cuts.

The Republican candidates to succeed Barack Obama are beginning to find their voices on the national security portfolio. They will be formally debating the president’s sorry record in coming weeks. The question the American people will want answered is not only "Who lost the world?" but what will they do to get it back?

The forgotten Christians of the East

October 11, 2011Caroline Glick

On Sunday night, Egyptian Copts staged what was supposed to be a peaceful vigil at Egypt’s state television headquarters in Cairo. The 1,000 Christians represented the ancient Christian community of some 8 million whose presence in Egypt predates the establishment of Islam by several centuries. They gathered in Cairo to protest the recent burning of two churches by Islamic mobs and the rapid escalation of state-supported violent attacks on Christians by Muslim groups since the overthrow of former Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak in February.

According to Coptic sources, the protesters Sunday night were beset by Islamic attackers who were rapidly backed up by military forces. Between 19 and 40 Copts were killed by soldiers and Muslim attackers. They were run over by military vehicles, beaten, shot and dragged through the streets of Cairo.

State television Sunday night reported only that three soldiers had been killed. According to al-Ahram Online, the military attacked the studios of al-Hurra television on Sunday night to block its broadcast of information on the military assault on the Copts.

Apparently the attempt to control information about what happened worked. Monday’s news reports about the violence gave little indication of the identity of the dead or wounded. They certainly left untold the story of what actually happened in Cairo on Sunday night.

In a not unrelated event, Lebanon’s Maronite Catholic Patriarch Bechara Rai caused a storm two weeks ago. During an official visit to Paris, Rai warned French President Nicolas Sarkozy that the fall of the Assad regime in Syria could be a disaster for Christians in Syria and throughout the region. Today the Western-backed Syrian opposition is dominated by the Muslim Brotherhood. Rai cautioned that the overthrow of President Bashar Assad could lead to civil war and the establishment of an Islamic regime.

In Iraq, the Iranian and Syrian-sponsored insurgency that followed the US-led overthrow of Saddam Hussein’s Baathist regime in 2003 fomented a bloody jihad against Iraq’s Christian population. This month marks the anniversary of last year’s massacre of 58 Christian worshippers in a Catholic church in Baghdad. A decade ago there were 800,000 Christians in Iraq. Today there are 150,000.

Under the Shah of Iran, Iran’s Christians were more or less free to practice their religion.

Today, they are subject to the whims of Islamic overlords who know no law other than Islamic supremacism.

Take the plight of Yousef Nadarkhani, an evangelical Protestant preacher who was arrested two years ago, tried and sentenced to death for apostasy and refusal to disavow his Christian faith. There is no law against apostasy in Iran, but no matter. Ayatollah Khomeini opposed apostasy. And so does Islamic law.

Once Nadarkhani’s story was publicized in the West the Iranians changed their course.

Now they have reportedly abandoned the apostasy charge and are sentencing Nadarkhani to death for rape. The fact that he was never charged or convicted of rape is neither here nor there.

Palestinian Christians have similarly suffered under their popularly elected governments.

When the Palestinian Authority was established in 1994, Christians made up 80 percent of Bethlehem’s population. Today they comprise less than 20% of the population.

Since Hamas "liberated" Gaza in 2007, the area’s ancient Christian minority has been under constant attack. With only 3,000 members, Gaza’s Christian community has seen its churches, convents, book stores and libraries burned by Hamas members and their allies. Its members have been killed and assaulted. While Hamas has pledged to protect the Christians of Gaza, no one has been arrested for anti-Christian violence.

JUST AS the Jews of the Islamic world were forcibly removed from their ancient communities by the Arab rulers with the establishment of Israel in 1948, so Christians have been persecuted and driven out of their homes. Populist Islamic and Arab regimes have used Islamic religious supremacism and Arab racial chauvinism against Christians as rallying cries to their subjects. These calls have in turn led to the decimation of the Christian populations of the Arab and Islamic world.

For instance, at the time of Lebanese independence from France in 1946 the majority of Lebanese were Christians. Today less than 30% of Lebanese are Christians. In Turkey, the Christian population has dwindled from 2 million at the end of World War I to less than 100,000 today. In Syria, at the time of independence Christians made up nearly half of the population. Today 4% of Syrians are Christian. In Jordan half a century ago 18% of the population was Christian. Today 2% of Jordanians are Christian.

Christians are prohibited from practicing Christianity in Saudi Arabia. In Pakistan, the Christian population is being systematically destroyed by regime-supported Islamic groups. Church burnings, forced conversions, rape, murder, kidnap and legal persecution of Pakistani Christians has become a daily occurrence.

Sadly for the Christians of the Islamic world, their cause is not being championed either by Western governments or by Western Christians. Rather than condition French support for the Syrian opposition on its leaders’ commitment to religious freedom for all in a post-Assad Syria, the French Foreign Ministry reacted with anger to Rai’s warning of what is liable to befall Syria’s Christians in the event President Bashar Assad and his regime are overthrown. The Foreign Ministry published a statement claiming it was "surprised and disappointed," by Rai’s statement.

The Obama administration was even less sympathetic. Rai is now travelling through the US and Latin America on a three week visit to émigré Maronite communities. The existence of these communities is a direct result of Arab and Islamic persecution of Lebanese Maronite Christians.

Rai’s visit to the US was supposed to begin with a visit to Washington and meetings with senior administration officials including President Barack Obama. Yet, following his statement in Paris, the administration cancelled all of its scheduled meetings with him. That is, rather than consider the dangers that Rai warned about and use US influence to increase the power of Christians and Kurds and other minorities in any post- Assad Syrian government, the Obama administration decided to blackball Rai for pointing out the dangers.

Aside from Evangelical Protestants, most Western churches are similarly uninterested in defending the rights of their co-religionists in the Islamic world. Most mainline Protestant churches, from the Anglican Church and its US and international branches to the Methodists, Baptists, Mennonite and other churches have organized no sustained efforts to protect or defend the rights of Christians in the Muslim world.

Instead, over the past decade these churches and their related international bodies have made repeated efforts to attack the only country in the Middle East in which the Christian population has increased in the past 60 years – Israel.

As for the Vatican, in the five years since Pope Benedict XVI laid down the gauntlet at his speech in Regensburg and challenged the Muslim world to act with reason and tolerance it its dealing with other religions, the Vatican has abandoned this principled stand. A true discourse of equals has been replaced by supplication to Islam in the name of ecumenical understanding. Last year Benedict hosted a Synod on Christians in the Middle East that made no mention of the persecution of Christians by Islamic and populist forces and regimes. Instead, Israel was singled out for criticism.

The Vatican’s outreach has extended to Iran where it sent a representative to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s faux counter terror conference. As Giulio Meotti wrote this week in Ynet, whereas all the EU ambassadors walked out of Ahmadinejad’s Holocaust denying speech at the UN’s second Durban conference in Geneva in 2009, the Vatican’s ambassador remained in his seat. The Vatican has embraced leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood in Europe and the Middle East.

It is unclear what either Western governments or Western churches think they are achieving by turning a blind eye to the persecution and decimation of Christian communities in the Muslim world. As Sunday’s events in Egypt and other daily anti-Christian attacks by Muslims against Christians throughout the region show, their behavior is not appeasing anyone. What is clear enough is that they shall reap what they sow.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

Wilders: “We have started the roll-back operation. We have sent a message to the ideologues of Islam: Dont tread on us!”

September 10, 2011Center for Security Policy

On September 3 Dutch parliamentarian Geert Wilders, leader of the Party for Freedom, addressed an electrified crowd of hundreds of supporters in Berlin. Since 2004 he has gone from an underdog one-man-party to leading the 3rd-largest party in the Dutch parliament and an indispensable partner in the governing coalition of the Netherlands today. In Europe the citizenry do not have the privilege of a 1st Amendment, and Wilders recently triumphed in a "hate-speech" trial brought against him by Muslim Brotherhood-influenced elements who sought to intimidate him into shutting up.

His words are an inspiration to Americans and all free peoples of the West who unapologetically resist Islamization regardless of the consequences, legal or otherwise.

Find his speech embedded below with English subtitles followed by a full transcription:

Part 1:

Part 2:

Part 3:

Transcript:

Thank you for inviting me to Berlin. It is an honour to be here in this beautiful city of Berlin. When I was here last year I emphasized how important Germany is for all of us. We all benefit from a healthy, democratic, self-confident Germany.

Much has happened since my last visit. In the Netherlands we were able to achieve many amazing things. We have successfully started to roll back the process of Islamization in the Netherlands.

We have done so in a peaceful way and through the democratic process. Recently, a deranged narcissistic psychopath from Norway committed a horrible crime. In cold blood he murdered nearly eighty innocent fellow citizens. The assassin pretended to be a concerned European. He said that he had committed his atrocity because “It is meaningless to participate in the democratic process.” But he is wrong! The mass murderer from Oslo murdered and maimed, and he justified his heinous crime by denying – I quote – “that it is remotely possible to change the system democratically.” – end of quote.

But he is wrong! The Oslo murderer falsely claims to be one of us. But he is not one of us. We abhor violence. We are democrats. We believe in peaceful solutions.

The reason why we reject Islam is exactly Islam’s violent nature. We believe in democracy. We fight with the force of our conviction, but we never use violence. Our commitment to truth, human dignity and a just and honourable defence of the West does not allow us to use violence nor to give in to cynicism and despair. We cherish the tradition of Aleksander Solzhenitsyn, Jelena Bonner, Lech Walesa and Ronald Reagan. These heroes defeated a totalitarian ideology by the power of their conviction and without firing a single shot. As the ex-Muslim and Islam-critic Ali Sina said in a reaction to the Oslo atrocity: “We don’t raise a sword against darkness; we lit a light.”

So it is. We lit the light of the truth. And the truth will set us free.

The truth is that Islam can be successfully fought with democratic means. We do so in the Netherlands. You can do so, too, in Germany! Let me tell you what we have achieved in the Netherlands since my last visit to Berlin, less than one year ago. It will encourage you. What can be done in the Netherlands can also be done in Germany.

My party, the Party for Freedom, which has 24 seats of the 150 seats in parliament, supports a minority government of Liberals and Christian-Democrats. We do this in return for measures to restrict immigration, roll back crime, counter cultural relativism, and restore our traditional Western freedoms, such as freedom of speech.

The Party for Freedom has been in this position for less than a year, but we are achieving great things. We have achieved that the Netherlands will soon ban the face-covering Islamic burkas and the niqabs!

We will restrict immigration from non-Western countries by up to 50% in the next four years! We are going to strip criminals who have a double nationality and who repeatedly commit serious crimes, of their Dutch nationality!

The Party for Freedom is bringing a message of hope to the Netherlands. The new policies will place more demands on immigrants. Integration will not be tailored to different groups anymore. There will be a tougher approach to immigrants who disobey the law. Those who lower their chances of employment by the way they dress, will see their access to welfare payments diminished.

We have also achieved that anti-Israeli activities will no longer be funded with Dutch taxes. So-called humanitarian aid organizations that directly or indirectly support anti-Israel boycotts, divestments and sanctions and that deny Israel’s right to exist will no longer get government funding.

The Dutch government will boycott the United Nation’s Durban III meeting against racial discrimination because it has been transformed into a tribunal for accusations against Israel. The government will strengthen our political and economic relations with Israel. Investment rather than divestment will be our policies towards Israel.

We stand with Israel. We love Israel. Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East. Israel is part of our civilization.

My friends, what the Party for Freedom has achieved, shows that it can be done. To borrow a phrase from President Obama: Yes, we can! We can stop the islamization of our societies. The Dutch example shows that we can win. David can defeat Goliath!

Last July, the Dutch government even did something which not a single nation has dared to do before. It spoke out firmly against the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation. The OIC is an international organization of 57 Islamic countries, most of them barbaric tyrannies. This OIC constitutes the largest voting bloc in the United Nation. It had criticised the fact that Dutch judges had acquitted me of all charges of group insult and incitement to hatred and discrimination. But the Dutch government made it clear to the OIC that freedom of speech will not be muzzled in the Netherlands. It told the OIC very bluntly: “The Dutch government dissociates itself fully from the request to silence a politician.” – end of quote. We will never submit to the Islamic OIC bullies!

As you probably know, for almost two years I went through the ordeal of being a suspect in a criminal case. I was dragged to court in Amsterdam on the accusation of hate speech crimes. Last June, this legal charade ended with a full acquittal.

The Dutch people learned through my acquittal that political debate has not been stifled in their country.

My acquittal was a victory for freedom of speech. The Dutch people also learned that they are allowed to speak critically about Islam. They learned that resistance against Islamization is not a crime. They learned that there is hope and that liberation is near.

My acquittal marks the turning of the tide. Not only in the Netherlands, but in the whole of Europe. It is the first breach of the dyke. We have started the roll-back operation. We have sent a message to the ideologues of Islam: Don’t tread on us!

My acquittal has a significance which far surpasses the Netherlands. It has a meaning for the whole of Europe and the free world. My acquittal marks the end of an evolution whereby our civil liberties in Europe are constantly being restricted in order not to offend Islam and anger Islamic fanatics.

My acquittal legitimizes criticism of Islam. It does so also in Germany and everywhere else.

Indeed, why should you Germans not enjoy the same rights as the Dutch! If peaceful and democratic resistance to Islamization is not a crime in the Netherlands, it should not be a crime in Germany either.

So, here is my message to you: Continue your fight for freedom and freedom of speech! Do not let your politicians and judges grant you fewer rights than the Dutch!

Do not let yourselves be intimidated by Islamic or leftist opponents who shriek and yell. Do not let yourselves be intimidated by media who claim that a murderer who has lost his belief in the democratic process has anyhow been influenced by us.

My friends, when I visited you last year, even in my wildest dreams I could not have imagined that we would have been able to influence government policies in the way we have done. That is why I tell you: Never give in to the bullies! Never give up hope. Never despair! You can still turn the tide! One can always turn the tide!

It is true: Germany has been less fortunate than the Netherlands.

When I was here last year, Tilo Sarrazin had just published his book “Deutschland schafft sich ab.” Sarrazin’s book was a bestseller. It hit a nerve. It sold over one-and-a-half million copies. This shows that German society is ripe for change. But politically Sarrazin’s book has changed nothing yet. On the contrary, the German political elite raised the speed of Islamization in Germany. Bundespresident Wulff said “Islam is a part of Germany.” Chancellor Merkel said that multiculturalism is an absolute failure, but she continues to defend Turkey’s entry into the EU. The spread of Islam continues unabated in the German class rooms, on Germany’s streets, through the construction of new mosques, etcetera, etcetera.

Your situation has worsened because you do not have a party – yet – with enough electoral support to influence German politics for the better. Germany needs a rightwing party that is not tainted by ties to neo-Nazis and by anti-Semitism, that is decent and respectable, but also firm. René Stadtkewitz is working very hard to make Die Freiheit as successful as the Party for Freedom in the Netherlands. René, we are here to help you! Because Germany deserves better than what it gets today!

My friends, your country is the political backbone of Europe.

Germany is the most populous country in Europe. Germany is the economic motor of Europe. If Germany is sick, we are all sick.

Last year, I urged you: Stop being ashamed of Germany. It is unfair to reduce German patriotism to national-socialism, just as it is unfair to reduce Russia to Stalinism. Be proud of your country. Only if the Germans have pride in Germany, they will be prepared to stand for Germany and to defend Germany. And you must stand for Germany, just as the Party for Freedom in the Netherlands stands for the Netherlands. We must all stand for the survival of our nation-states because our nation-station states embody the democratic liberties which we enjoy.

Without the nation-state there can be no real national political freedom. That is why we must be good patriots. Patriotism is often branded as fascism. But patriotism is no fascism. On the contrary. Every democrat and defender of freedom must by definition be a patriot. A soul needs a body. The spirit of political liberty cannot flourish outside the body of the nation-state. The nation-state is the political body in which we live. That is why we must preserve and cherish the nation-state. So that we can pass on the liberty and the democracy which we enjoy to our children.

Without a nation-state, without self-governance, without self-determination there can be no security for a people nor preservation of its identity. This was the insight which led the Zionists to re-establish the state of Israel. Theodore Herzl said that there had to be a Jewish state because – I quote – “what we want is a new blossoming of the Jewish spirit.”

Dear friends, we urgently need a new blossoming of the German spirit. For decades, the Germans have been ashamed of themselves. They preferred to be Europeans rather than Germans. And they have paid a heavy price for it. We have all paid a heavy price for it.

Europe is not a nation; it is a cluster of nations. The strength of Europe is its diversity. We are one family but we live in different bodies. Our cultures are branches of a common Judeo-Christian and humanist culture, but we have different national cultural identities. That is how it should be.

Uniformity is a characteristic of Islam, but not of Europe. Islam eradicated the national identities of the peoples it conquered. The Coptic identity of Egypt, the Indian identity of Pakistan, the Assyrian identity of Iraq, the Persian identity of Iran, they were all wiped away, cracked down upon, or discriminated against until this very day. Islam wants all nations replaced by the so-called Ummah, the common identity of the Nation of Islam to which all have to be subservient and into which all national identities have to vanish.

Islam tried to conquer Europe, but never succeeded so far. That is why we Europeans were able to develop our different identities as nation-states. If we want to hold on to these we must stand together against the forces which threaten our identities. Today we are confronted by two dangerous forces: Islamization and Europeanization.

When I was here last year, I spoke at length about the threat of Islam. Today, I want to draw your attention to the threat of Europeanization. By Europeanization I mean the ideology which posits that our sovereign nation-states have to submerge in a pan-European superstate.

The European Union’s Founding Fathers held that in order to avoid a future war in Europe, Europe’s nations, and especially Germany, had to be encapsulated in what the Rome Treaty called “an ever closer union among the peoples of Europe.” Robert Schuman said that the EU’s aim was – I quote – “to make war not only unthinkable but materially impossible.” – end of quote.

The Eurocrats think that nation states in general – and especially Germany, Europe’s largest nation-state – are the problem. They are wrong. The real cause of the Second World War had not been the German nation state – it had been Nazi totalitarianism.

There is nothing wrong with Germany. The cause of the war was the Nazi ideology. The remedy against totalitarianism is not building a superstate. The remedy is introducing more direct forms of democracy at the lowest possible levels. Instead of depriving Germany and other nation-states of their sovereignty, the post-war leaders should have introduced a Swiss-like system in our countries. Small units should have a large degree of local sovereignty. The individual citizen should be given a direct democratic say over his own fate and that of his community.

Instead, the peoples of Europe were robbed of their sovereignty, which was transferred to far-away Brussels. Decisions are now being taken behind closed doors by unelected bureaucrats. This is not the kind of government we want!

We want less bureaucracy! We want more democracy!

We want less Europe! We want to hold on to our sovereignty. We want home rule! We want to remain independent and free! We want to be the masters in our own house!

In December 1991, the Maastricht Treaty called for a single European currency. The Dutch guilder and the D-mark were sacrificed on the altar of European unification. Helmut Kohl sold this project to the German people as – I quote – “a matter of war or peace.” – end of quote. The euro was presented as “an angel of peace” which the Germans had to sponsor by giving up the mark. During the past six decades German politicians have told the Germans that the nation state, and especially Germany, was so dangerous that it had to be emasculated. The Germans had to become Europeans instead of Germans. To achieve this political project, national and monetary sovereignty was relinquished. Economic and national interests were sacrificed on the political altar of so-called Europeanization.

All the countries which joined the euro lost the power to adjust their currency to their own economic needs. They have all suffered as a consequence. The currency of some countries is undervalued, the currency of others is overvalued; they all have to share in carrying the burden of other countries, even if the latter are suffering from self-inflicted policies, corruption or fraud. The European monetary system has allowed some countries to get a free ride at the expense of others, while those who cheat are in a position to blackmail those who have to foot the bill. This charade has to stop!

The European monetary system is deeply flawed. It is also immoral. As Theodore Herzl said “The character of a people may be ruined by charity.” This applies for those at the receiving end of charity, but also for those who donate it. The so-called pan-European solidarity is literally ruining us! Germany has paid enough for Europe already!

The same applies for the Netherlands. Our citizens do not have to pay the debts of others!

My friends, your party Die Freiheit embodies the best hope for Germany. Because your party is the only party in Germany which has the courage to state loud and clear that countries which cannot pay their debts should leave the euro. I fully agree.

My friends, time is running out. We have to act for the sake of democracy and the future prosperity of our children. The former Soviet dissident Vladimir Bukovsky warns that rather than preventing war, the European project makes conflicts more likely. He draws a parallel between the EU and the former Soviet Union which also suppressed feelings of national unity. When economy reality defeated the Soviets’ political project, the suppressed feelings of national identity bounced back with a vengeance and destroyed the Union. Bukovksy fears that if we do not stop the European moloch from expanding the same thing might happen in Europe.

The European leaders state that the only way to solve the current crisis is more European governance. They advocate more powers for Brussels. They are wrong. More Europe only makes matters worse. We have to oppose their attempt of further centralization.

We do not want more Europe! The EU lacks democracy, accountability and transparency. That is why we reject it. We want less Europe! Let us hope that next Wednesday the German Constitutional Court protects national sovereignty.

As a national legislator in the Netherlands I experience day by day how little we still have to say about our own fate. We are expected to rubberstamp laws which have been made by the EU Council of Ministers. The 27 EU commissioners convene behind closed doors with their colleagues. They negotiate in secret and then emerge to announce their agreement and present it. That is how the system works.

Recently, your Chancellor, Frau Merkel, went to Paris. Together with President Sarkozy she announced plans for an economic government of the eurozone.

We oppose this. We want the national parliaments to decide about our economic policies. We do not want to spend our taxpayers’ money on eurozone countries, such as Greece. Let those who have cheated us, who have mismanaged their economy or who have foolishly lived beyond their means, take care of themselves.

Moreover, the EU treaties forbid bailouts.

The Party for Freedom opposes every bail out. The Dutch minority government will never be able to count on our support in this regard. Today its wrongheaded euro policies are supported by the europhile leftist parties. I repeat: We will never support the Dutch government’s approval of the bailouts, not even if the government would lose the support of the left.

We have voted, and we will vote, against every plan to bail out other countries. Sovereign countries have to take care of their own needs. That is what sovereignty is about: freedom and the ability to take care of oneself.

Our peoples resent the fact that they have to pay for others. Our peoples resent the permanent alienation of power from their nation-states. They care about their nation because they care about democracy and freedom and the wellbeing of their children. They see their democratic rights and their age-old liberties symbolized in their national flag.

But there is more. National identity also ties an individual to an inheritance, a tradition, a loyalty, and a culture. National identity is also an inclusive identity: It considers everyone to be equal, whatever his religion or race, who is willing to assimilate into a nation by sharing the fate and future of a people.

My friends, we need to give political power back to the nation-state, in the name of democracy, in the name of freedom, in the name of human dignity. By defending the nation-states we defend our own identity. By defending our identity we defend our liberties. By defending our liberty we defend our dignity.

I urge you: Stand up for the nation-state. Be proud of your country!

In his Farewell Address as American President, Ronald Reagan said that the thing he was most proud of in his presidency was – I quote – “the resurgence of national pride that I called, ‘The New Patriotism.’” – end of quote.

Europe needs new patriotisms. Europe needs dozens of new patriotisms. We need True Finns, and True Danes, True Frenchmen, and True Irishmen, True Dutchmen, and, my friends, we need True Germans!

Reagan said that we had to teach our children what our country is, what it stands for and what it represents in the long history of the world. He said that Americans need – I quote – “a love of country and an appreciation of its institutions.”

Reagan’s words apply to us, Europeans, too. We need a resurgence of national pride, a love of country and institutions. Our national parliaments are our democratic institutions. We must defend them.

Ladies and gentlemen, dear friends, I have said enough. It is time to act. We must make haste. Time is running out for Germany, for the Netherlands, for all the other great nations of Europe. As Ronald Reagan said: “We need to act today, to preserve tomorrow”.

Here is a short summary of five things which we need to do in order to preserve our freedoms.

First, we must defend freedom of speech. It is the most important of our liberties. Second, we must end cultural relativism. Our Western culture is far superior to other cultures. Third, we must stop Islamization. More Islam means less freedom. There is enough Islam in Europe already. Immigrants must assimilate and adapt to our values. Fourth, we must restore the right to decide about our own money. We should not pay the debts of others. The survival of the euro should not be used as an excuse to reward countries which have shown that they were not worth to belong to the eurozone. Fifth, we must restore the supremacy and sovereignty of the nation-state. Our nations are the legacy which our fathers bestowed on us and which we want to bestow on our children. We are the free men and women of the West. We are the true men and women of the West. We do not stand for a superstate. We stand for our own country.

You stand for Germany. I stand for the Netherlands. Others stand for Switzerland, Denmark, Finland, France, Spain, and all these other beautiful freedom-loving nations of Europe. Together we represent the nations of Europe. Together we stand.

We will stand firm. We will survive. We will defend our freedoms. We will remain free.

Thank you very much.

The Muslim Brotherhood’s growth in America has expanded greatly since the 1990s, with their stated goal “that their work in America is a kind of grand Jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and ‘sabotaging’ its miserable house by their hands.” The Muslim Brotherhood’s plan to impose Shariah and censorship in America reaches into our media, our government, our military and law enforcement, our textbooks and our colleges. Anyone who openly opposes the Muslim Brotherhood – that would be well over 200 million Americans, according to polls – has been labeled an “islamophobe” by the leftwing media.

Enough is enough. Americans across the nation have started pushing back against the Muslim Brotherhood’s trademark intimidation and threats. The Center for Security Policy is tracking these efforts to expose and to eliminate the Muslim Brotherhood’s influence over how we talk and think, how we govern ourselves and enforce our laws, and how we make our own plans for our children’s future of freedom under the Constitution, not enslavement under Shariah law.

We call it The Rollback.