On the day that President Mohammed Morsi, the Muslim Brotherhood’s brutal tyrant who had presided over the torture and mass rape of protesters, was overthrown by popular protests, a statement was issued by the White House.
The statement said, “The United States does not support particular individuals or political parties” and then went on to urge that the voices of “those who have supported President Morsy” must also be heard.
Obama was once again contradicting himself. Either the United States was not in the business of telling Egypt whose voices should be heard or it was. Obama wanted to insist that it was and that it wasn’t at the same time. He wanted to have his bloody tyrant on the throne and his myth of democracy too.
On the same day, State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki, a former Obama spokeswoman, said, “We haven’t taken sides and don’t plan to take sides here.”
Psaki also vigorously denied that Secretary of State John Kerry was hanging out on his yacht, despite a CBS producer photographing him aboard the boat, saying, “Any report or tweet that he was on a boat is completely inaccurate.”
Two days later, Psaki admitted that Kerry had been on the boat. A week later, Psaki implicitly admitted that her bosses were taking sides by warning that further arrests of Muslim Brotherhood members would endanger US foreign aid to Egypt.
Psaki was actually following up on an earlier warning by Obama to Egypt’s government “to avoid any arbitrary arrests of President Morsy and his supporters.” Obama had not issued any such warnings after the overthrow of Mubarak. Nor had he said anything about Morsi’s arrest and torture of protesters.
Muslim Brotherhood leaders had set off a storm of violence as their followers rampaged through Christian neighborhoods murdering and maiming. Churches and cathedrals were targeted and a priest was shot to death.
The Associated Press headlined the story describing Muslim atrocities against Christians as a “backlash” for their protests against Morsi. It would be difficult to imagine the wire service headlining a story about the KKK bombing a black church after Obama’s victory as a “backlash,” but the Muslim Brotherhood, like so many Islamist hate groups, has the media on its side. The Muslim KKK can count on the AP and DC.
Violence against Christians and even other Muslims followed in the wake of fiery speeches by Muslim Brotherhood leaders urging their followers to martyrdom. “They treated us like infidels. They were chanting ‘Allahu Akbar’ as they were shooting us,” one Egyptian eyewitness said.
These atrocities were not just an outraged response to Morsi’s fall. The Muslim Brotherhood resorted to violence when in power and when out of power.
Obama’s people never threatened Morsi with the loss of foreign aid for arresting activists from other parties, but arresting Muslim Brotherhood members clearly crosses whatever passes for a red line in the White House.
Obama had not told Morsi what to do even while the Muslim Brotherhood regime was using torture to extract confessions from protesters while videotaping the results; a practice that one would think the Nobel Peace Prize winner would be opposed to after all his self-righteous speeches about Gitmo.
However White House press secretary Jay Carney continued to warn against the arrests of Muslim Brotherhood leaders and members. “If you’re arresting individuals from one group or one party, you’re working against yourself if your effort is to be inclusive as you make this transition back to a civilian, democratically elected government.”
Morsi’s government had abandoned all pretense of inclusiveness early on. The coalition that brought him down is far more inclusive, including even a rival Salafist party. The only major group missing is the Muslim Brotherhood. And so at the White House and State Department “inclusive” has become code for mandatory Muslim Brotherhood participation.
Mere days before Morsi’s fall, Obama said, “Our position has always been, it’s not our job to choose who Egypt’s leaders are.” By “always” he must have meant two years because that was how long ago he had told Mubarak to step down.
Forgetting all that business about not taking sides or picking leaders, Jen Psaki admitted, “We have been in touch with members of the Muslim Brotherhood. We want them to be a part of the process moving forward.”
Morsi’s power grab last November in which he claimed near absolute power led to no condemnations from the White House. There were no calls urging the new government to include Mubarak supporters.
A report from Egypt said that Anne Patterson, Obama’s ambassador to Egypt, called Egyptian General Abdul Fatah al-Sisi and ordered him to release all the arrested members of the Muslim Brotherhood, warning him that the alternative would be a civil war resembling the one in Syria.
Considering that Obama has chosen to arm and support the Muslim Brotherhood rebels in Syria, such a warning carries with it some rather ominous overtones.
Patterson had previously told Coptic Christians, the community with the most to lose under the rule of the Muslim Brotherhood, not to protest against Morsi. Shortly after Patterson’s demand, Jen Psaki echoed her with a call to free Morsi and suggested again that foreign aid hinged on Morsi’s freedom and the Muslim Brotherhood’s participation in Egyptian politics.
Obama and his entire cabinet had no inkling how to deal withy Egypt, Syria or Iran. He just flounders around without the usual front guys to write things to make him look neutral and above the fray with these tyrants. The only thing stopping Obama from being one of them is that, so far, we still have a Congress, however incompetent.
I've never seen in my lifetime, a president so ill equipped to deal with foreign policy and no one that surrounds him had any kind of inkling how to deal with these countries either. Hillary spent the entire time she was secretary of state on one pleasure trip after another, but did she ever accomplish anything?
Obama is worse than someone just blowing with the wind. He can't even make up his mind which way the wind's blowing.