Conservatives have been strangely divided about the revolution in Egypt. Some conservatives have praised the popular uprising while others have said we must stand behind Mubarak. Then there’s Glenn Beck. He’s turned his crazy up to 11, talking about a “caliphate” taking over Europe and linking it to his favorite enemy, progressives.
Beck has come under criticism for his doomsday vision of the potential fallout from the Egyptian revolution. He has warned that the world is “being divvied up” by the “uber left” and the “Islamicists,” and that what was formerly “Ancient Babylon” could emerge as the new seat of “evil” and center of the new caliphate.
His chalkboard of truth has told him this is true because of the following:
“1. Groups from the hardcore socialist and Communist left and extreme Islam will work together because they are both a common enemy of Israel and the Jew.
2. Groups from the hardcore socialist and Communist left and extreme Islam will work together because they are the common enemy of capitalism and the western way of life.
3. Groups from the hardcore socialist and Communist left and extreme Islam will work to overturn relatively stable countries, because, in the status quo, they are both ostracized from power.”
Having Glenn Beck as the top conservative “intellectual” on Egypt is driving the neocons crazy. Mainstream conservatives like Bill Kristol are finally speaking out against Beck’s nuttiness.
But hysteria is not a sign of health. When Glenn Beck rants about the caliphate taking over the Middle East from Morocco to the Philippines, and lists (invents?) the connections between caliphate-promoters and the American left, he brings to mind no one so much as Robert Welch and the John Birch Society. He’s marginalizing himself, just as his predecessors did back in the early 1960s.
Nor is it a sign of health when other American conservatives are so fearful of a popular awakening that they side with the dictator against the democrats. Rather, it’s a sign of fearfulness unworthy of Americans, of short-sightedness uncharacteristic of conservatives, of excuse-making for thuggery unworthy of the American conservative tradition.
It was not so long ago, after all, when conservatives understood that Middle Eastern dictatorships such as Mubarak’s help spawn global terrorism. We needn’t remind our readers that the most famous of the 9/11 hijackers, Mohammed Atta, was an Egyptian, as is al Qaeda’s number two, Ayman al Zawahiri. The idea that democracy produces radical Islam is false: Whether in Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, the Palestinian territories, or Egypt, it is the dictatorships that have promoted and abetted Islamic radicalism. (Hamas, lest we forget, established its tyranny in Gaza through nondemocratic means.) Nor is it in any way “realist” to suggest that backing Mubarak during this crisis would promote “stability.” To the contrary: The situation is growing more unstable because of Mubarak’s unwillingness to abdicate. Helping him cling to power now would only pour fuel on the revolutionary fire, and push the Egyptian people in a more anti-American direction.
We’re talking about Bill Kristol here, who’s right as often as a stopped clock. He’s right that Beck is of the Bircher wing of conservatives but he’s nuts if he thinks Republicans can distance themselves from him now. Sorry guys, you own him and his crazy word games.