ANOTHER BLUNDER – AT 8:31 A.M. ET: Once again the Obama administration has made an international concession without demanding a thing in return.   Anything to be the nice fella on the block, especially when the block is populated by Islamists.   From Reuters:

WASHINGTON - The United States has decided to resume formal contacts with the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, a senior US official said on Wednesday, in a step that reflects the Islamist group's growing political weight but that is almost certain to upset Israel and its US backers.

It may also upset a number of true democracy fighters in Egypt, who have been trying to limit the Brotherhood's influence.  Once again, we've undercut the very people sticking their necks out for freedom.  Obama must get a great kick out of this.

"The political landscape in Egypt has changed, and is changing," said the senior official, who spoke on condition of anonymity. "It is in our interests to engage with all of the parties that are competing for parliament or the presidency."

The official sought to portray the shift as a subtle evolution rather than a dramatic change in Washington's stance toward the Brotherhood, a group founded in 1928 that seeks to promote its conservative vision of Islam in society.

I love the polite description.  The Brotherhood has a profoundly fascist history, was an ally of Adolf Hitler, and today, despite a public smile, is considered by most observers to be an extremist Muslim organization.  To recognize this group without getting public commitments in advance is appeasement in the extreme.  We must be uneasy about Obama's constant groveling in the Muslim world.

Under the previous policy, US diplomats were allowed to deal with Brotherhood members of parliament who had won seats as independents -- a diplomatic fiction that allowed them to keep lines of communication open.

Where US diplomats previously dealt only with group members in their role as parliamentarians, a policy the official said had been in place since 2006, they will now deal directly with low-level Brotherhood party officials.

There is no US legal prohibition against dealing with the Muslim Brotherhood itself, which long ago renounced violence as a means to achieve political change in Egypt and which is not regarded by Washington as a foreign terrorist organization.

But other sympathetic groups, such as Hamas, which identifies the Brotherhood as its spiritual guide, have not disavowed violence against the state of Israel.

And the Brotherhood has never distanced itself from that violent policy.  They're shrewd operators, and we should have nothing to do with them until they make very definite commitments, and do so before TV cameras.  The Israelis, in particular, will take this as a sign from Obama that they're very much alone.  True seekers of democracy in the Arab world will take it as a sign that it's business as usual for Washington's "realistic" diplomats.  Yuch.

June 30, 2011