The Obama-Brotherhood Love Affair Heats Up

FrontPage Magazine/ Stephen Brown

It’s official, now. The Obama administration’s admiration for Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood (MB) is indisputably mutual.

The Egyptian English-language newspaper, Daily News Egypt, reported on Wednesday that the MB “hails” its new ties with the United States after a meeting between the head of the MB’s political arm, Mohamed Morsi, and Deputy Secretary of State William Burns at the MB’s Cairo headquarters. After the Wednesday meeting, Morsi said relations between their two countries “must be balanced” and, in apparent reference to Israel, stated past US behavior has been “biased and not in its interest.” The MB, Morsi maintained, wants Washington to adopt “a positive position concerning Arab and Muslim causes.”

“It [the meeting] was an opportunity to hear from and to reinforce our expectations that all major parties will support human rights, tolerance, rights of women and will also uphold Egypt’s existing international obligations,” said State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland.

This top-level diplomatic meeting occurred almost simultaneously with the news that the MB has swept approximately 25 of the 50 individual seats up for grabs in the third round of voting for Egypt’s parliament, which the MB is expected to dominate. In this final round, the MB received 35.2 percent of the votes, while the hard-line Salafist Al-Nour Party got 27.5 percent and seven seats. Between them, the two Islamist parties captured 70 percent of the vote in the election’s first two rounds.

The results of the Burns-Morsi get-together actually contained no great surprises for those who believe the Democratic Party’s support of the Arab Spring is opening doors for the Islamists to seize power and establish sharia law in countries across the Middle East and North Africa. The Obama White House has been “reaching out” for several months now to the MB (Some believe his outreach started in the earliest days of his presidency when he invited MB members to his Cairo speech). Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has admitted the White House has been in contact with the MB since last June.

Last November, Clinton, in an address to the National Democratic Institute, stated the US would be willing to work with any party in the Middle East that supports fundamental values such as “freedoms of speech, religion, association and assembly.” More >>