The Editorial Board Of The New York Times Hates El-Sisi As Much As It Hates Netanyahu

Here.

Possibly that isn’t to be dismissed as cold comfort. It’s telling, that tous-azimuths incomprehension. Islam is something that the Editorial Board of the New York Times just can’t handle, can’t being to understand. They lack the knowledge, of Islam and of the universe, that would allow them to comprehend and bleakly recognize that  the Jihad against Israel admits of no solution — not a one-state, two-state or n-state solution — but the forces of Islamic darkness can be held at permanent bay, if Israel  remains not only militarily strong but is seen to be such, and that requires that it not be pushed back to the 1949 Armistice Lines. And they cannot figure out, having invested so much enthusiasm and hysteria in the “Arab spring” (which “Arab spring” was merely a series of uprisings and revolts against corruption and the old order, in this country and then in that), that the West, and the best people in the Muslim Arab lands, should wish not for “democracy” but for enlightened despots who can constrain Islam. Ataturk and Bourguiba were the two greatest leaders of Muslim lands, because they constrained Islam by every means they could, and helped to create a secular class in both countries. El-Sisi, who is an Egyptian patriot, knows, as Ataturk and Bourguiba did, what Islam as a political and social force can do, recognizes that it has to be constrained, and is trying to do it. He is following the prescription of Taha Husain, whose doctrine of Pharaonism meant, roughly, that Egypt, the country of Egypt, was to be the focus of attention and loyalty for people living in that country, and not dangerous Islam, nor dangerous Pan-Arabism, which is not an alternative to but really a subset of pan-Islamism.

This is beyond the editorial board of The New York Times. They are not well-prepared. They live within their mental cliches and don’t know how to break out of them.