The Foreseeable Consequence of the “Arab Spring”

“The people of Egypt have spoken. Their voices have been heard and Egypt will never be the same. By stepping down, President Mubarak responded to the Egyptian people’s hunger for change, but this is not the end of Egypt’s transition. It’s the beginning.”
Barrack Hussein Obama, president and inadvertent prophet.

We’ve been skeptical of the so-called Arab Spring since the very beginning. Months ago we pointed out that the Muslim Brotherhood was assuming a leadership role in the demonstrations and the follow on ruling claque. Given the general state of political development in the Arab we were doubtful that anything favorable, or even desirable, would emerge from street demonstrations taking place in societies where there is no legal political opposition.

Now we have an idea of what the Arab Spring will look like.

A group of Egyptian political activists have announced plans to set up a local version “of the Nazi party,” an Egyptian newspaper reported on Thursday.

Citing a leftist Egyptian news portal, the Al-Masry Al-Youm daily said that “the party’s founding deputy is a former military official,” and that the party would be aimed at bringing “together prominent figures from the Egyptian society.”

The report cited founding member Emad Abdel Sattar as saying that the unestablished party “believes in vesting all powers in the president after selecting him or her carefully,” and that “preparations are under way to choose the most competent person to represent the party.”

The Arab world has had a long romance with Nazi philosophy. When one looks at the Nasserite and Ba’ath movements one is struck by the similarities: rule by a strong man, government control of business and industry, extreme nationalism, scapegoating minorities, etc. During World War II, Nazi parties sprang up throughout that region of the world. The Grand Mufti of Jerusalem openly allied with Nazi Germany and appealed to Hitler for help in evicting Jewish settlers. Rick Atkinson documents in An Army at Dawn how the Arab population in North Africa cheered the fall of France, not because of hope of independence but because of the popularity of Nazism. The Young Egypt Movement adopted many of the trappings of the Original Nazis^TM including a street brawling “Green Shirt” organization. In the aftermath of World War II, dozens of Nazi war criminals sought refuge in the Arab world, so many, in fact, that when the Haganah captured Haifa in 1948 one of the terms of the truce was that all Nazis had to be turned over to the British military. Werner von Braun’s V-2 colleagues found a welcome in Egypt. Mein Kampf remains a bestseller in the Arab world.

All of this was foreseeable but none of it mattered to this administration whose foreign policy resembles nothing so much as a schoolyard bully groveling to perceived superiors but taking the lunch money of the weaker. But as I noted in my earlier piece on Egypt and the Muslim Brotherhood, the life of a liberal seems to be a series of unpleasant surprises.

Though Mubarak’s Egypt was no garden spot of democracy there is no hint that the successor regime in Egypt will be any more democratic but every sign it will be hostile to our interests in the Middle East and quite probably it will abrogate the Camp David Accords in the process.

So Obama was right. Egypt will never be the same. Great job, Mr. President, I hope you’re proud of what you accomplished here. Allahu akbar. Seig heil. Whatever.