ANALYSIS: The Obama Administration Courting Of Youssef Qaradawi

Thanks to Will at THE OTHER NEWS:

On September 12 2001, the day we started our efforts to understand and monitor the Global Muslim Brotherhood, we could never in our darkest imagination have possibly considered that the White House of the United States  would be used to host a meeting with a close associate of Global Brotherhood leader Youssef Qaradawi. 

In those days, we naively thought that exposing the Brotherhood’s profound and enduring ties to terrorism, religious hatred, and anti-Americanism would be sufficient to forever bar its consideration as any kind of partner for those who care about human rights and liberal democracy. 

Yet, as we posted earlier, we woke up yesterday to discover that Sheikh Abdallah Bin Bayyah, a close associate of Qaradawi, had recently visited the White House, possibly carrying a letter from Qaradawi, where he met with senior White House officials and representatives of other government agencies including an aide to President Obama and US OIC Envoy Rashad Hussain. 

How exactly had things progressed so far that the White House was meeting with a representative of an organization that once called for attacks on US troops in Iraq and whose leader has spewed forth vile anti-Semitism and anti-Americanism, not to mention sitting together on a board with a Saudi who in turn is close to groups supporting both Hamas and Al Qaeda? 

Although the meeting at the White House with Sheikh Bin Bayyah was a shock, even to us, in retrospect it should not have been given that everything the Global Muslim Brotherhood Daily Watch and its predecessor publication has reported over the years.

While space and time unfortunately do not permit a complete analysis of how these things have come to pass, it is instructive to note that the Obama Administration’s policy toward the Global Muslim Brotherhood has evolved over two distinct, but related tracks. Israeli analyst Barry Rubin has adroitly summarized the foreign policy track, a US alliance with the Muslim Brotherhood which he labels the “Obama Doctrine”:

Here is what I wrote in October 2010. The leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, Muhammad al-Badi, had just given a sermon calling for the overthrow of Egypt’s government, which happened four months later, and a jihad against the United States, a country he considered weak, foolish, and retreating from the Middle East. I declared that this was:
‘One of those obscure Middle East events of the utmost significance that is ignored by the Western mass media, especially because they happen in Arabic, not English; by Western governments, because they don’t fit their policies; and by experts, because they don’t mesh with their preconceptions.’
Two and a half years ago, who would ever have thought that the United States would enter an alliance with the Muslim Brotherhood? There were hints in President Barack Obama’s Cairo speech, yet now it is clear that this is the new basis for regional security sought by the Obama Administration.
For all practical purposes the closest allies to the United States are no longer Israel, Saudi Arabia, and a moderate Egypt but an Islamist Egypt, an Islamist regime in Turkey, and the Syrian rebels led by the Brotherhood.
And literally every mainstream media outlet, every expert who speaks in public, every Democrat and the majority of Republican politicians still don’t realize that this is true.”
There have been in American history the Truman Doctrine (help countries fight Communist takeover), the Nixon Doctrine (get local middle-sized powers to take part of the burden of the Cold War from the United States), the Carter Doctrine (defend Gulf Arab states from Iranian aggression), and the Reagan Doctrine (go on the offensive against Soviet expansionism). Now we have the Obama Doctrine:

GO READ THE WHOLE THING.