Islamists have to eat? We don’t see the necessity.

The following quotation comes from a characteristically well-informed and interesting article by Spengler (David P. Goldman). It was published about a year ago, while the Muslim Brotherhood was in power in Egypt, and its leader Mohamed Morsi was president.

The Obama administration is so deeply invested in the notion that the Muslim Brotherhood embodies the future of Islamic democracy that the imagination strains to identify a circumstance that might persuade the White House to abandon its support for the new Egyptian regime. …

Why, then, would President Morsi bite the hand that is trying to feed it? His undisguised contempt for American perceptions and neglect of diplomats’ security are a profound embarrassment to the White House …  Morsi has made it harder, if not outright impossible, for Obama to deliver the proffered aid package, which Egypt desperately requires.

The answer well may be that no one can govern Egypt. Even Islamists have to eat. Since the fall of Mubarak the country’s foreign exchange reserves have fallen from $35 billion to $15 billion, but less than $7 billion of that sum constitutes liquid and spendable cash-less than two months’ worth of imports.

He goes on to explain, with facts and figures, that Egypt was in dire economic straits. “Roughly half the population subsists on less than $2 a day.” It is even poorer now.

The dissonance between the reality on the ground in Egypt and Washington’s narrative has already become grating. In the coming weeks it is likely to become intolerable.

The Egyptian military, led by the defense minister General Abdul Fatah al-Sisi , declared Morsi unseated on 3 July 2013 and imprisoned him. Yesterday they attacked encampments of Morsi protesters. Over 500 dead and over 3,000 wounded have so far been reported.

Yesterday, Spengler wrote at PJ Media:

I do not have anything new to say about Egypt; I said it all a year ago and more. Failure is an option in Egypt. The denouement is inevitable and therefore of minor analytic interest. But I should like to ask a question:

Suppose the German military had overthrown the democratically-elected leader of Germany and massacred his loyal followers, say, in 1936? The world, presumably, would have condemned the blatant use of force against an elected leader even if, hypothetically, a third of the German population already had taken to the streets to demand Hitler’s ouster.

He is supposing that “the world” is mourning with the Muslim Brotherhood because of Morsi’s supporters being slaughtered. We very much doubt that “the world” is shedding a single tear, while we’re sure that the Obama administration is shedding many (figuratively speaking).

Then Spengler says:

The Muslim Brothers are Nazis bearing a crescent rather than a swastika. 

And with that we wholly agree.

In the case of the Muslim Brotherhood, a useful reminder is to read once again Paul Berman’s 2007 New Republic essay and his 2010 book, The Flight of the Intellectuals, which expanded it. Archivists have brought to light the wartime German Foreign Ministry broadcasts that created modern Islamist ideology and in particular its ferocious Jew-hatred.

Here again we have an objection to make. The Jew-hating broadcasts happened for sure, but Islam did not need the Nazis’ advice to begin hating the Jews. The Koran insists upon it.

… Here is one citation from Berman’s essay worth pondering:

There is nothing especially novel or bizarre in noticing that al-Banna displayed an eager interest in the aesthetic cult of death.

Al-Banna was the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood.

… [He] came up with a double phrase about the importance of death as a goal of jihad—“the art of death” (fann al-mawt) and “death is art” (al-mawt fann). This phrase became … a famous part of al-Banna’s legacy.

The Spengler’s quotation from Berman goes on to include quotations  from “the classic history of the Muslim Brotherhood, The Society of the Muslim Brothers, by Richard P. Mitchell, which appeared in 1969″.

Stringing together his own paraphrases with al-Banna’s words, Mitchell wrote: “The Qur’an has commanded people to love death more than life” (which, I might add, is a phrase that we have heard more than once in terrorist statements during the last few years, for instance in the videotape that was made by the Islamist group that attacked Madrid in 2004). And al-Banna continued, in Mitchell’s presentation: “Unless the philosophy of the Qur’an on death replaces the love of life which has consumed Muslims, they will reach naught. Victory can only come with the mastery of the art of death.” 

Spengler writes and quotes all this to explain why the Muslim Brotherhood deserves no tears. And about that we again wholly agree with him.

But it also needs to be pointed out that al-Banna was plainly talking nonsense – could not have thought through what he was propounding. (Logic is against the ideology of Islam.) Even if he really believed in that paradise that Islam promises Muslims (or at least male Muslims), as an instruction to all Muslims it makes no sense at all to make death the goal of jihad, to “love death more than life”. Why strive for Islam’s domination over the whole world if it is better that all Muslims die rather than live? Why fight the jihad? Why try to survive? Why eat? 

Morsi would not have saved Egypt from starvation. The princes of Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States may do so by subsidizing the regime of the military. But if the Muslim Brothers die, whether from bullets or hunger, who but Obama, Hillary Clinton and John Kerry will regret their departure to that sky brothel of the Prophet’s lewd imagination?