An excellent article from the Hudson Inst. With thanks to Larwyn’s Links
by Khaled Abu Toameh
February 11, 2011 at 5:00 am
http://www.hudson-ny.org/1877/arab-dictators-radical-islam
For decades, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and other Arab dictators used to tell Americans and Europeans that if they did not support them, the result would be Muslim extremists coming to power.
This is why these dictators never took drastic measures against Islamic fundamentalist groups in their countries. Even though Egypt and some Arab countries occasionally cracked down on these groups, they always made sure that the Islamists would stay around.
In Egypt, for example, the Muslim Brotherhood organization had been outlawed for many years. However, this did not stop the organization and its supporters from operating under different labels.
In Jordan, similarly, the authorities played a cat-and-mouse game with Islamist groups and their followers. One day the Muslim Brotherhood in the kingdom would be good guys, on another day they would be bad guys.
This pattern gave the Muslim Brotherhood a chance to grow and win over more supporters, as the local people became more and more disgusted both with their dictators and the Western governments who supported them
Instead of focusing their attention on the Islamists, Arab dictators chose to chase secular reformists, liberals, democrats, newspaper editors and human rights activists; by suppressing the emergence of these people, the Arab dictatorships paved the way for the rise of radical extremists.
This is the reason the Islamist groups in the Arab countries are much more organized than the pro-democracy Facebook youth who launched the popular uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt.
Unlike the Islamist groups, the anti-government demonstrators in Egypt and Jordan still do not have leaders. Mohammed ElBaradei, who enabled Iran to build up its nuclear program by misrepresenting it to the West, has not succeeded in presenting himself as a charismatic leader of the opposition in Egypt.
For the rest of this article, please click the link at the top.
The situation is fairly simple here.
All Arab (read ‘Islamic’) dictatorships support anyone who enables them to maintain power via the koran and sharia law. When they allow groups like the Muslim Brotherhood to ‘keep the peace’, they are re-affirming the Muslim dictate that Islam rules by terror. That way, they save money by not having to enlarge their military of police forces to quell internal dissent.
This support is behind closed doors, or at least the doors of the OIC meetings that happen once every few years.
What they demonstrate to the rest of the world is indifference at best, tolerance at worst, of the excesses of imams, clerics, ayatollahs and mullahs.
In any event, they crave power and maintain it through the Islamist bullies that stalk the streets of the Muslim world for victims.
Is it any wonder that they are also indifferent or tolerant of terrorist activity outside their own countries?
The fact that most Muslim countries harbour terrorists of one sort or another and that leaders such as Khadaffi willingly accept people like the Lockerbie bomber should put the west on alert that something is not right with the Muslim world and we should be wary of any immigrants who come from it.
May the west prevail.
All we have to do is get the entire population of Canada, Britain and the US to read the article and understand what is happening. I know that isn’t going to happen.