Here’s the thing. Cautiously or not, you don’t talk to Islamo-Nazi terrorists. Period.
US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton cautiously welcomed Sunday the Muslim Brotherhood’s involvement in political dialogue in Egypt, saying Washington would “wait and see” how talks develop.
“Today we learned the Muslim Brotherhood decided to participate, which suggests they at least are now involved in the dialogue that we have encouraged,” Clinton told National Public Radio (NPR) from Germany.
“We’re going to wait and see how this develops, but we’ve been very clear about what we expect.”
Mark Levin weighed in on this earlier this morning:
Hillary Clinton is welcoming the Muslim Brotherhood in discussions about a new Egyptian government. The Mubarak government is reaching out to it as well. I wonder what those who invoke the American Revolution and other disconnected historical events to justify their blind support for events in Egypt — which they can neither accurately define or explain — think about this. Actually, my guess is they’re unmoved by this knowledge as they are motivated by doctrine and ideology, not reason and experience. They’ll downplay it and the Muslim Brotherhood’s effectiveness. But for the rest of us, it is important to pay attention to history, experience, and facts. To support these events as a democracy movement is to miscomprehend the words democracy and movement.
We all hope this turns out well. Who among us would not? And there’s no doubt that democracy is preferred to tyranny and that an untold number of Egyptians seek democracy. But now is not the time to throw prudence and caution overboard but, rather, to embrace them more firmly. The tyranny of totalitarianism, of the sort that took power in Iran and Gaza during the last “democracy movements,” demands it. While the situations are not identical, they’re close enough. Moreover, it is hard to imagine the Obama administration competently handling this extremely difficult matter when it has demonstrated incompetence in matters of far less complexity and import. Indeed, the president’s amateurism has already revealed itself in his public statements.
But I really like the way Salim Mansour candidly puts it (emphasis mine):
Extremely distressed by the crew in Washington, and in most European capitals. Media is so corrupted by left-leaning thinking that there is not much of an analysis to be expected in the media that is now competing with facebook, twitters, etc. The dumbing down of thinking is itself a huge problem the West is facing now as it tries pathetically to undertstand/explain politics and history of other cultures when it no longer has faith in its own civilizational values. I despair, and so I follow Samuel Pepys who confined himself to his diaries while London burned and I am trying to devote my time to reading and writing of my own (that of course I might not be able to publish, and even if published few will read).
I am more convinced now, as I wasn’t when Paul Kennedy wrote about the rise and fall of great powers, that the West has gone over the tipping point in its terminal decline. That intelligent people, or people who claim to be intelligent, (I have in mind the talking heads in the U.S. media such as Chris Matthews or Fareed Zakaria) cannot make the difference between the sham of the Muslim Brotherhood talking about freedom and democracy and the generic thirst in man to be free. These are the people who have like the Bourbons learned nothing and forgotten nothing. They are glibly about to put the Lenins of our time into trains heading for Moscows of our time, they find nothing odd that they are pushing for the Muslim Brotherhood to be taken into governing when everything needs to be done to keep the Muslim Brotherhood out even as one carefully negotiate the long historic transition of Arab societies from tribal autorcracy and military dictatorships to representative rule and constitutionally limited government.