Jonah Goldberg uses his editorial space at USA Today to expose their readers to a potentially huge story that’s being embargoed by the MSM cocoon. “Egyptian president (and strongman) Gen. Abdel Fattah al-Sisi delivered a possibly epochal speech at Al-Azhar University on New Year’s Day.” Al-Sisi, Jonah writes, “called for a ‘religious revolution’ in which Muslim clerics take the lead in rethinking the direction Islam has taken recently. Sisi is exploring potentially “uncharted territory” Goldberg adds. But, “What is clear, however, is that this is a big deal:”
Al-Sisi is doing exactly what Westerners have been crying out for since at least Sept. 11, 2001, if not before that. And yet his speech has been almost entirely ignored by the mainstream media. The commentators and analysts at PJ Media have been all over the story, but there’s been silence from The New York Times, Washington Post, the news networks and other major outlets.
Why? No doubt part of the explanation is that he gave his speech on New Year’s Day, when most outlets are hung-over, following football not the foreign press. But another part of the explanation probably has to do with the fact that al-Sisi isn’t the kind of authentic Muslim reformer many Westerners wanted.
Indeed, he’s too western for some and clearly too autocratic for many (his treatment of the press is outrageous). They wanted the Muslim Brotherhood to succeed in Egypt, not be brought to heel by an Arab Pinochet. Moreover, al-Sisi sees Israel as a de facto ally in their shared battle against Muslim extremism, and that muddies the narrative that Israel is the cause of Middle East extremism, not the victim of it.
Whatever your own view of the man, and whether you think he’s sincere, al-Sisi’s efforts to combat Muslim extremism — militarily and rhetorically — deserve closer attention, if not now then after the images from Paris fade.
Related: As Twitchy notes, CNN’s “Sally Kohn, who after the #CharlieHebdo killings in Paris compared the attack to ‘Christians or Jews killing in name of religion,’ doesn’t want an entire religion blamed for the actions of just a few:”
Shot & chaser. cc: @TwitchyTeam & @sallykohn pic.twitter.com/OQeRxQq3XB
— DirkaMuhammedJalen (@GOPMommy) January 7, 2015
Ahh, the peaceful majority — they’re rather irrelevant whenever their more bloodthirsty totalitarian leaders have declared war on civilization, as Brigitte Gabriel brilliantly noted last year:
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