Freedom Line Blog

Below is one of the latest cartoons from two-time Pulitzer Prize-winner Michael Ramirez.

View more of Michael Ramirez’s cartoons on CFIF’s website here.

Below is one of the latest cartoons from two-time Pulitzer Prize-winner Michael Ramirez.

View more of Michael Ramirez’s cartoons on CFIF’s website here.

If the dire predictions about Egypt’s impending descent into Islamic government turn out to be true, it would behoove Americans to read up on the group most likely to run the show.  The Muslim Brotherhood can claim quite a few firsts in its 60+ year history.  Among the lowlights:

• Assassination of Egypt’s Prime Minister in 1948
• Creation of the founding documents of modern political (i.e. radical) Islam
• Spawned other terrorist groups including Hamas, al Qaeda, and Palestinian Islamic Jihad

The Muslim Brotherhood is for the kind of radicals who want to end Egypt’s peace treaty with Israel and institute Sharia law as the measure of justice.  For a full account of the Brotherhood’s history and actions, click here.

H/T: Discover the Networks

Trying to wrap your head around the fast-breaking events in Egypt? Unsure as to whether this is a triumph for liberal democracy or a dark new chapter in the spread of militant Islam? You could do worse than turning to two of the most sagacious pundits in the land, David Warren and Andy McCarthy (the latter a former federal prosecutor who handled several cases relating to Islamic terrorism).

In the Ottawa Citizen, Warren perceptively writes:

While I recognize that support for “democracy and freedom” is substantial, within each Arab national society — that the middle class is not a nothing; that each economy depends on it — I doubt this “faction” can prevail. Worse, I think we are watching its final, hopeless bid for power.

The key fact, in Egypt (paralleled in Yemen and elsewhere), is that the Muslim Brotherhood has not declared itself. The Islamists could put vastly more people on the street. They could subvert the loyalties of policemen and soldiers, who already resent the moneyed middle class. They could generate just enough heat to make large districts of Cairo and Alexandria, now simmering, boil over.

But instead, they are playing neutral, watching those policemen and soldiers put the demonstrators down, while most of Egypt remains quiescent.

For this is not their revolution, and for the moment they are content to watch the autocratic regime, and its frustrated middle class, weaken each other. Their moment will come when Mubarak totters.

Equally insightful — and grim — McCarthy writes at National Review:

History is rarely a Manichean contest between good and evil. It’s not a choice between the pro-Western shah and Iranian freedom, but between the shah and Khomeini’s ruthless Islamist revolution. It’s not a choice between the pro-Western Musharraf and Pakistani freedom, but between Musharraf and a tense alliance of kleptocratic socialists and Islamists. Back in the 1940s, it was not a choice between the British-backed monarchy and Egyptian freedom, but between the monarchy and a conglomeration of Nasserite pan-Arab socialists, Soviet Communists, and Brotherhood Islamists. And today, the choice is not between the pro-American Mubarak and Egyptian freedom; it is a question of whether to offer tepid support to a pro-American dictator or encourage swift transition to a different kind of tyranny — one certain to be a lot worse for us, for the West at large, and for our Israeli ally: the Muslim Brotherhood tempered only, if at all, by Mohamed ElBaradei, an anti-American leftist who willfully abetted Iran’s nuclear ambitions while running the International Atomic Energy Agency.

History is not a quest for freedom. This is particularly true in the Islamic ummah, where the concept of freedom is not reasoned self-determination, as in the West, but nearly the opposite: perfect submission to Allah’s representative on earth, the Islamic state. Coupled with a Western myopia that elevates democratic forms over the culture of liberty, the failure to heed this truth has, in just the past few years, put Hamas in charge of Gaza, positioned Hezbollah to topple the Lebanese government, and presented Islamists with Kosovo — an enduring sign that, where Islam is concerned, the West can be counted on to back away even from the fundamental principle that a sovereign nation’s territorial integrity is inviolable.

Both pieces deserve to be read in their entirety — and both serve as chilling warnings of what may be to come.

Over at the Investigate Project on Terrorism, an extensive investigative study has revealed that a close associate of Imam Faizal Abdul Rauf (the Muslim leader spearheading the Ground Zero Mosque project) has openly and aggressively claimed that the United States secretly perpetrated the 9/11 attacks on its own people.

Faiz Kahn, who helped found the American Society for Muslim Advancement (one of the groups pushing the mosque), and lead prayers at Imam Rauf’s mosque at least as recently as December, is a radical even by the exalted standards of the 9/11 truthers:

On June 3, 2006, Khan spoke at a 9/11 truth summit called “Revealing the Truth/Reclaiming our Future” in Chicago. In his remarks, he acknowledged that there is a militant Islamist movement, but “the most logical explanation” for 9/11 is that the hijackers were “working for us” in furtherance of a corporate-controlled schemes involving gigantic stock trades, billions of dollars in heroin sales and interest in Caspian Sea resources.

See the website for video that includes some of the most despicable lies you’ve yet heard about what really happened nine years ago.

Eric Holder may be unwilling to identify radical Islam as a driving force behind the recent surge in terror threats to the United States, but American special forces aren’t so hesitant.  The Economist reports that the American military is engaging in joint operations in the west African countries of Burkina Faso, Mali, Mauritania, and Senegal to combat the growing presence of “Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb” (AQIM).

Tuned-in Americans understand that in places like Somalia, radical Islam has found a fertile breeding ground for creating converts out of oppressed, deprived young men and women disgruntled with their lot in life.  It is logical that a place so close to the Middle East, only a short boat ride from Yemen, and so lacking in governance is a training ground for terrorists.

But American intelligence has been keeping an eye on the Sahel for some time.  The Sahel is a stretch of grassland that runs just south of the Saharan Desert, through the aforementioned west African countries.  It is an area subject to extreme drought and is only sparsely populated by tribal people.  Away from the attention of governing authorities, terrorist organizations from countries like Algeria have been able to set up training camps and are attempting to unite a coalition of jihadist organizations that have become increasingly problematic in the region.

Our support goes out to the American servicemen charged with the difficult task of training local forces to combat this growing threat to the security of free people.

In one of the more bone-chilling videos I’ve watched in a long time, a member of the Muslim Students Assocation (MSA) at UC San Diego tells Jewish conservative commentator David Horowitz that she supports genocide against his people.   The video posted on The Daily Caller shows Horowitz asking a simple question of the young woman:

“The head of Hezbollah has said that he hopes that we [Jews] will gather in Israel so he doesn’t have to hunt us down globally. For it or against it?”

The student coolly replies:

“For it”

This is at an American university, coming from a very American sounding voice.  UC San Diego is actually in La Jolla, CA, one of the ritziest zip codes in the country.  Where did this young woman learn to hate Jews with such intensity?

Obama’s foreign policy has consisted of traveling the globe, apologizing to the Muslim world and scolding Israel.  Anyone noticed all the love we’ve been getting back?  Instead, we’ve spawned our own Jihad Janes.  Continuing down this path only emboldens radical Muslims and their sympathizers, some where we’d least expect them.

In an interview with CFIF, Brigitte Gabriel shares her remarkable story told in her book, Because They Hate:  A Survivor of Islamic Terror Warns America.  Ms. Gabriel also discusses ACT! for America, a non-profit issues advocacy organization she founded to educate millions of uninformed citizens about the threat of radical Islam to world peace and U.S. national security. 

Listen to the interview here.