Remember President Obama’s outrage in 2011 when American soldiers at Bagram Air Force Base in Afghanistan burned copies of the Koran? Never mind that angry protesters retaliated by setting fires and killing 30 people, four of them Americans. Never mind either that the holy books had reportedly been used by Taliban prisoners to write and send messages (h/t @AmyMek).
A contrite Obama clicked his heels, bowed toward Mecca, and dashed off a letter of formal apology, vowing to “hold those involved accountable.”
So what has Obama’s response been to the burning of 47 Coptic Christian churches in the recent “skirmishes” in Egypt? The next sound you hear will be that of crickets chirping.
If you’re not sufficiently outraged by this obscene double standard, you’ll probably reach the boiling point when you learn that the burnings have the blessing of the Muslim Brotherhood. That’s the same Muslim Brotherhood whose jailed leaders the administration is now pressuring the Egyptian government to release.
The Investigative Project on Terrorism (h/t Weasel Zippers) has obtained a memo in Arabic originally posted on Facebook by the Muslim Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party that calls for incitement against Egypt’s Coptic Christian population and gives its seal of approval to the torching of the Christian houses of worship. IPT notes:
The memo’s discovery comes a week after leading Freedom and Justice Party politician Abdul Mawgoud Dardery appeared at a press conference at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. and said that Egypt was a model for Christian-Muslim relations.
‘The Pope of the Church (Coptic Pope Tawadros II) took part in the ouster of the first elected Islamist president. The Pope of the Church charges Islamic Sharia with underdevelopment [and] stagnation,’ the memo … said amid other accusations. ‘After all of this do people wonder why they burn churches? Burning houses of worship is a crime.
‘And for the Church to adopt a war against Islam and Muslims is the worst crime. For every action is a reaction.’…
Brotherhood supporters in the city of al-Saff have been drawing check marks on houses owned by Copts to mark them for arson….
Islamists rationalize their attacks on the largely defenseless Coptic community, saying they are counterattacking the Copts for having allegedly endorsed the crackdown.
‘When Pope Tawadros comes out after a massacre to thank the military and the police, then don’t accuse me of sectarianism,’ Mamdouh Hamdi, a Brotherhood supporter, told the New York Times.
These actions increasingly support the conclusion that the Copts’ fear that the Muslim Brotherhood is a terrorist organization and not the benign political force its defenders have made it out to be.
Obviously, the Copts are mistaken. Just ask Obama’s Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper. Right around the time of the Koran burning incident at Bagram, Clapper described the Muslim Brotherhood as a “largely secular” group that “has eschewed violence and has decried Al Qaeda as a perversion of Islam.”
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