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Thu, May 19, 2011 | Center for Security Policy | By Frank Gaffney, Jr.

U.S. President Barack Obama delivers a speech about United States' policy on the Middle East and North Africa at the State Department in Washington May 19, 2011. (REUTERS/Jim Young)

Obama’s Muslim Outreach 2.0: Doing business with the Muslim Brotherhood

President Obama’s latest paean to what he calls “the Muslim world,” delivered at the State Department today, was an exercise in whistling past the graveyard of real and growing dangers and a litany of misleading statements that borders on official malpractice. Its most important upshot is this: The United States is now prepared to do business with the Muslim Brotherhood.

While Mr. Obama did not use those exact words in his Muslim Outreach 2.0 speech, that was surely the practical effect of his effusively depicting the so-called “Arab Spring” as a welcome expression of democratic sentiment throughout the region. By so doing, he studiously ignored the reality on the ground in virtually every country in the Middle East and North Africa now undergoing political turmoil: Islamists associated with or akin to the totalitarian, salafist Muslim Brotherhood are poised to be the principal beneficiaries of any balloting that ultimately occurs in Egypt and Tunisia – and, perhaps in due course in, Syria, Yemen, Tunisia, Libya, Bahrain and beyond.

Mr. Obama seeks to provide the putative, newly minted “democracies” with tangible evidence of his commitment to their future success. He declared that the United States would give up to a billion dollars in debt relief to Egypt and economic, trade and technical aid to the Egyptians and Tunisians. Other nations stand to get similar treatment if only they replace their present autocrats with new ones – provided the latter are prepared to come to power via elections.

With such a policy, the United States stands to compound the mistake now being made in Libya – where al Qaeda operatives, former Guantanamo Bay detainees and other Islamists are already being given “non-lethal” and “humanitarian assistance” and U.S. political support. Without knowing precisely who are likely to be the beneficiaries of such assistance, we run the very considerable risk that we will effectively be arming, as well as legitimating, our enemies.

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