We Are (Almost) All Realists Now

As Brendan O’Neill, occasionally of TAC, explains, the Muslim Brotherhood is very largely a British creation. It retains excellent Foreign Office links to this day; in Egypt as in many other places, we Britons have long and rightly played both sides of the street. But then, we are all realists now. Well, almost all of us are, anyway.

Some of Ahmadinejad’s voters may not like the reserved Jewish, Armenian, Assyrian and Zoroastrian representation, although I do not know that for certain, but neither he nor any other figure of any significance proposes to abolish it. If Hezbollah ever seriously believed in velayat-e faqih as the basis of the state, then it long ago ceased to do so, at least if the exercise of that guardianship was to be confined in practice to Shi’ite or even to Muslim clerics and scholars, and instead more than accepted that Lebanon was Lebanon.

It is by no means unknown for Christians to vote, and even to stand, for Hamas, and they do not really have anywhere else to go now that Fatah’s sell-out of Christian Jerusalem has been exposed. The formal ideology of Hamas would be changed as much as that of Hezbollah was by alliance with The Twelve Tribes of Christian Palestine: Greek Orthodox, Latin Catholic, Armenian Orthodox, Coptic Orthodox, Syrian Orthodox, Melkite Catholic, Ethiopian Orthodox, Maronite Catholic, Anglican, Lutheran, Syrian Catholic, and Armenian Catholic. Quite how much practical change would really be required is altogether a different question. The same can be said of any equally reality-accepting deal with Israel, were any such deal on offer from the reality-deniers, of whom more anon.

And what of Hamas’s parent, making Hamas British intelligence’s grandchild, the Muslim Brotherhood? Incidents from its prehistory and from its ancient history are picked out and then wildly misrepresented, as are effusions from its louder-mouthed internal dissidents, while features of Mubarak’s Egypt, some of which can also be said of America, of Britain and of numerous other places (for example, the availability of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion), are bizarrely blamed on the outlawed opposition. But representative figures from the commanding heights of the party have made it perfectly clear what the Brothers realistically accept as the future of Egypt. And that, combined with the examples of Iran and Hezbollah, and increasingly the example of Hamas, strongly suggest that the Coptic interest could be included and taken account of in a polity obviously including and taking account of, but just as obviously not dominated by, Al-Ikhwān.

Leaving only the Crazies. Those who continue to defend the removal of the protection of Christian Mesopotamia, which stands on the brink of wholesale destruction as a result. Those who back the Saudi proxies in Lebanon. The utterly uncompromising Islamists who run the NATO, and putatively EU, member-state of Turkey, together with their secular ultranationalist rivals, whose equal hostility towards the ancient indigenous Christians is positively Mubarakesque. Those who, at the behest of those Turks in both categories, of Mubarak, and of the Gulf despots, want to nuke Iran, although they routinely pretend to be concerned at single deaths there. Those who want to subject the Christians in Syria to the same fate as those in Iraq. And the ruling coalition that recalls the old joke about why there could not be an alliance between the Herstigte Nasionale Party and the Conservative Party of South Africa: “The HNP wants to drive the Bantu into the sea, but the CP will not allow Bantu on the beaches”.

So, one fourth of the Egyptian Parliament to be elected on a constituency basis, one fourth on a proportional basis, forty-five per cent (an equal number of men and women) to be nominated by the General Guide of the Muslim Brotherhood, and five per cent (an equal number of men and women) to be nominated by the Coptic Patriarch. No legislation could be introduced unless sponsored by at least one MP from each of those four categories, nor could it be enacted without the approval of all four of the General Guide, the Patriarch, and the first and second-placed candidates in a direct Presidential election, termed the President and the Vice-President but enjoying exactly equal powers. Why not?