The opinion piece authored by Reuel Marc Gerecht, a former CIA analyst serving as a senior fellow with the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), suffers not only from wrong assumptions, but is also filled with factual mistakes.
Gerecht laments, “Egyptian liberals since the coup d’état against Mohammed Morsi, have an impression that the Muslim Brotherhood’s ‘moment’ in Egypt lasted 12 months-after a long prelude that began in the 1920s.” This impression is wrong if one would listen to the leaders of the liberal, secular, and democratic movement in Egypt. If Mr. Gerecht had listened carefully to Egypt’s vast Arabic language network on free TV and immersed himself in bloggers’ analyses, he would have avoided writing his piece in the prestigious Wall Street Journal. Most Egyptian analysts who were part of the revolution- not the coup, as the former CIA member keeps calling it- know all too well that the Islamists were not uprooted from Egypt, even though their regime was dismantled. Gerecht’s warnings are in vain, for most Egyptians are alert and are bracing for the counter revolution.
The FDD fellow claims: “Conventional wisdom says that the Brotherhood was founded in opposition to British imperialism and Westernizing secular dictators.” This is the wrong interpretation of history. The Ikhwan were launched after the Ottoman Caliphate was destroyed by secular Turks. British occupation of Egypt started circa 1888, and the Brotherhood was founded in the mid-1920s, forty years later, with the desire to bring back the Caliphate. Removing the British from Egypt was not just a goal of the Ikhwan, but of most Egyptians. The Wafd party was the first secular patriotic movement to demand an end to British colonialism, a la the American Revolution. Geretch espouses the argument of the Brotherhood to explain why popular discontent grew against the regime: “The Brotherhood immolated itself after just a year of grossly incompetent government.” However, most Egyptians rose against the Islamists because of the suppression of basic freedoms. Read the signs held by thirty million demonstrators on June 30 and July 26; it was not about bread and jobs, it was about fascism and oppression.
The author admits that “countless Egyptians who had voted for Brotherhood candidates and its constitution turned against the Islamist group in massive demonstrations” and that “there is also little doubt that many in the Muslim Brotherhood were shocked by the size of these rallies.” However, he denies that the Brotherhood “has been routed by marches that we now know were planned by the tamarrud (rebellion) movement and the military.” In his neo-Orientalist view of Egypt and the Arabic tradition in U.S. bureaucracies, he sees Egypt’s poor “in the vast slums of Cairo” as only able to find a sense of community under the mosques. Geretch and a whole generation of failed Middle East studies in the United States are unable to make the basic distinction that Islam and Islamism are two different concepts. The poor may go to the mosque, but everything depends on who is in the pulpit, a Salafist or a Sufi.
Gerecht slams Egypt’s young liberals as he slammed Iran’s youth in 2009. He writes, “This is not Facebook Cairo, where alienated, deplorably educated, unskilled youth express their anger online and show their own kind of community by staging street protests.” The former intelligence officer dismisses the online kids because he thinks that “local clerics, let alone the cultish, secretive godfathers of the Brotherhood” have more influence among the poor and the lower middle class. On June 30 and July 26, Gerecht and his intellectual companions were proven utterly wrong. The masses listened to their youth inasmuch as they listened to the preachers. Islamologues in the West missed the coach on this one.
Gerecht claims that: “In these precincts the poor, the Egyptian army, the security services, and the police-all unreformed since the fall of Hosni Mubarak-are viewed suspiciously, if not with hostility. The newfound love affair between the army and Egypt’s secular liberals, who in a year’s time came to the conclusion that they needed the military to check Islamist power, will likely do nothing to diminish the skepticism that Egypt’s devout have for army officers and their associates.”
The analytical mistake goes deeper, as many researchers have parroted the assertions of the Edward Saids and John Espositos of America, in that by nature the poor are drawn to religious figures and thus even more to the fundamentalist ones. In the mind of Western apologia, Arab and Egyptian poor have no judgment of their own, and perhaps no instincts. In the reality lived on the ground in Egypt, ordinary people make a clear distinction between regimes and armies. The poor are the army. Moreover, in his assessment, Gerecht, like most Western admirers of the Islamists, dismisses 30 million Egyptian citizens who protested the Ikhwan. The country’s liberals do not appear to outnumber the Islamists, but this silent majority of Egypt is the greatest of all forces in the nation. Once it moved against the Brotherhood, the latter shrunk to their real size.
More dangerously in his article, Gerecht accuses the army and security services of being the origin of Mohammed Morsi’s “problems.” He goes ballistic against the enemies of the Islamists: military, police, business elite, and Mubarak era remnants, the very “enemies” identified by the Muslim Brotherhood propaganda internationally. It is awkward that the former CIA analyst uses the exact narrative of the international Ikhwan network and their friends in Western media.
Geretch directs his ire toward the Saudi cash, afraid of populist Islamism, and warns that an economic Judgment Day will crumble the post-Morsi regime. He imagines the poor rising against the new victors and projects Egypt’s lower classes as “supporting Islamist causes.” His wild approach becomes even more so as he wonders if “the secular crowd is economically more adept than the Muslim faithful.” He writes, “Socialism has been a hard-to-kick drug for Egypt’s legions of nominally college-educated youth, who came of age expecting government jobs. Capitalism has probably got firmer roots among devout Muslims, where Islamic law teaches a certain respect for private property.” Pouring Islamist propaganda from the playbook of the Muslim Brotherhood, the CIA expert on Islamism seems to have confused his subject matter for a cause to defend.
Gerecht sees the worst coming after the reasonable Brotherhood are removed. He believes that the “Salafis are new-age fundamentalists who may gain at the Brotherhood’s expense.” Geretch represents a newer generation of fascination with the Islamist movement, as some Cold war analysts were fascinated with Trotsky and Mao. He cannot fathom that a secular revolution is happening. For Gerecht and those like him, Arabs cannot become part of liberal secularism as this is a domain reserved for the West only. Of course he is exceedingly wrong, and events on the ground are proving that point.
In conclusion, he renders an apologist sentence: “But only the deluded, the naïve and the politically deceitful-Western fans of the coup come in all three categories-can believe that Islamism’s ‘moment’ in Egypt has passed. More likely, it’s just having an interlude.” From his ivory tower, Reuel Gerecht loses tremendous intellectual credibility as none of his assertions work. His main prediction is that the Islamists will come back; no one argues that they will try. Gerecht tries to demolish well-established facts witnessed by the world to verify his wrong assertions, a deadly mistake for a presumably shrewd analyst.
We have been accustomed to reading highly strategic material on Egypt and the Middle East from FDD’s pens over the years, including Michael Ledeen, seasoned expert on the region; Sebastian Gorka, scholar on Jihadi tactics; Egyptian-born Khairi Abaza; who has great ties to the secular and liberal parties in Egypt and Walid Phares, who predicted the Arab Spring and its evolution in his book published in 2010.
Reuel Gerecht seems to be a striking example of apologia among his present and past colleagues, and we have yet to find a rational explanation for this exception.
_____________________________________________
http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/print/pro-islamist-advocacy-campaign-hits-the-wall-street-journal#ixzz2cQZgiI9A