Analyst's note: How long will it take for our federal gov't "leaders" to understand that the Muslim Brotherhood, and its many associates operating here in the United States even within our top gov't offices, does not really do "bridge-building?" I encourage you to read The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America written by Andrew C. McCarthy.
A few weeks ago, amid the “Arab Spring” giddiness, a Shiite mosque opened in Cairo. This was big news. Among Egypt’s 80 million people, there are only a few thousand Shiites. It’s a 90 percent Sunni country, with even Christians vastly outnumbering the Shia. So, in their euphoria over the mosque’s inauguration, Shiite clerics heralded this Husseiniya (as Shiite mosques are known) as a symbol of rapprochement. The mosque would bridge the sectarian divide: a Shia center in this bustling Sunni city, yet a house of worship, thus emphasizing what unites rather than divides Muslims in one of Islam’s most important nations.
Andy McCarthy
Such stories were once the hallmark of the Arab Spring narrative. “Democracy” was in the air. The corrupt, cancerous, pro-American dictator was gone. With their yearning hearts now sated by freedom, Egyptians would pull together, the light of liberty guiding them to prosperity.
The stories are different now. The Husseiniya was shut down last week. Yesterday’s euphoria is melting into today’s harsh reality. In Cairo, home to the Muslim Brotherhood and the sharia jurists of ancient Al-Azhar University, “democracy” has meant the rise of Sunni supremacists. Turns out they don’t do bridge-building. Their tightening grip has translated into brutalizing dhimmitude for Christians and increasing intolerance of Shiism — which the Sunni leaders perceive less as Islam than as apostasy, an offense that sharia counts as more grievous than treason.
[....] When democracy promotion becomes more about processes than principles, it clothes anti-democrats like Erdogan in the raiment of democratic legitimacy. This is self-defeating. It empowers pretenders to obstruct or reverse the progress of liberty.
Moreover, the notion that democracy is procedural, not substantive, and therefore that sharia needn’t be repealed for liberty to flourish, is not changing Islamic society for the better; it is changing our society for the worse. Islam is not budging on sharia-based suppression of speech it deems offensive — particularly speech that examines or challenges Muslim strictures. But we are forfeiting free expression in craven appeasement of Islamic supremacism. When we send our troops overseas, for example, it is to defend our way of life. Consequently, when Senator Graham suggests that free speech — our way of life — should be curtailed so that dubious Islamic nation-building projects are not derailed by mercurial Muslim violence, it is not democracy promotion. It is democracy destruction.
It is the sort of thing that happens in the Arab Spring, when Egyptian Shiites buy the rhetoric but the Muslim Brotherhood wins the elections. [....]
