President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi of Egypt deserves a Nobel Peace Prize, along with the Presidential Medal of Freedom award, for saving Egypt from a human rights catastrophe.
By MIKE EVANSMIKE EVANS (left) meets with Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi in Cairo earlier this year.(photo credit: Courtesy)
President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi of Egypt deserves a Nobel Peace Prize, along with the Presidential Medal of Freedom award, for saving Egypt from a human rights catastrophe.On January 25, 2011, thousands of protesters packed Tahrir Square in Cairo. As a result, Muslim Brotherhood member Mohamed Morsi was elevated to the role of president. He was ousted by Sisi in 2013.The world watched in horror as what was called the Arab Spring swept through Egypt like a tsunami.Millions of demonstrators took to the streets in every major city across the Middle East. More than 90 police stations were set alight. This was the same protest that invaded Syria, creating a human catastrophe, and costing the lives more than 250,000 people with almost six million refugees from a population of 18 million.What would be the condition of the world if that had happened in Egypt with a population of 100 million? Without a doubt, the war on terror would have been lost. A disaster beyond anyone’s imagination would have materialized in the Middle East and soon threatened the world. Likely, between 30 million and 40 million refugees and more than a million deaths would have been the immediate result.Egypt is an immensely strategic location as it borders Israel, Libya and Sudan, and shares maritime borders with Greece, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and Turkey. The Muslim Brotherhood, al-Qaeda, ISIS, and other terrorist groups would be waging war, using Egypt as a staging area.There is only one man is responsible for preventing an Islamic State and a civil war in Egypt, and that’s Sisi. For him to take on the Muslim Brotherhood in his own country was one of the most courageous acts of leadership in human history; indeed, an Arab Winston Churchill moment.The United States was asleep when the Muslim Brotherhood was recruiting and fund-raising on its shores.Sheikh Omar Abdel-Rahman, the blind cleric who masterminded the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993, was a member of that group. In 2001, the ringleader of the September 11 attacks was Muhammad Atta, also a member of the Brotherhood.He helped hijack American Airlines Flight 11, the plane that crashed into the North Tower of the World Trade Center.Where else in the Middle East can a Muslim ally with such moral clarity be found; one who will stand up so strongly, not only to the Brotherhood but to aggressively initiate a reeducation program in the mosques and schools of Egypt? Where could one find an ally such as this who is fighting a war of terror against ISIS in Sinai with Israel? Or a Muslim ally who has mobilized hundreds of thousands of his countrymen as policemen to defend Christians even with their own lives? During the 2017 Christmas celebrations, Sisi assigned troops outfitted in combat gear to protect worshipers at churches in Cairo and towns across Egypt.Egypt’s defense of Christians has been a major blow to ISIS and its supporters. One only has to look at what happened to the Christian population in Iraq when that terrorist organization came to power in some areas. Christians were annihilated, as they were in ISIS-controlled areas of Syria. More than one million Christians have fled that country because of targeted Christian persecution.What happened in Iraq and Syria was an absolute holocaust. The brutality suffered by Christians in those countries was unspeakable.DESPITE ALL that Sisi has done, the US State Department and the liberal- left media continue to slander him. They falsely claim that he is not a defender of human rights. Can you name the last time a pro-Western Muslim leader was treated in such a manner? It was Muhammad Reza Pahlavi, the shah of Iran. A liberal-left president who believed that weak US allies were in America’s best interests did everything humanly possible to undermine the shah.I personally interviewed dozens of diplomats and virtually every major Iranian concerning the matter – including former diplomat Ardeshir Zahedi and Farah Diba Pahlavi, the widow of the shah. Included in the list were former French president Valery Giscard d’Estaing, and US Gen. Robert “Dutch” Hauser, the deputy commander in chief of the US European Command who was dispatched to Iran to try to stabilize the country.D’Estaing told me Jimmy Carter thought the radical ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini was a cleric who would be good for human rights and stated his own reaction: “We were humanly shocked by the way Carter spoke, because we knew at the end it would lead to the torture or the killing of the shah. And he [Carter] was not embarrassed at all; no, no, he spoke very lightly of a man that we supported very strongly... He [Carter] was a bastard of conscience, a moralist who treats with total lightness the fact of abandoning a man that we had supported together.”When I interviewed Her Majesty Farah Pahlavi in March 2008, I was shown her guest book with an inscription: “Thank you for all your wonderful hospitality.” It was signed, “President Jimmy Carter” and “Rosalynn Carter.” Princess Ashraf, Pahlavi’s twin sister, put her impressions of the president on paper. She wrote, “I looked at his pale face. I thought his smile was artificial, his eyes icy – and I hoped I could trust him.”Yet again, it was apparent that neither Carter nor his advisers were fully apprised of the growing unrest.Washington put pressure on the shah to ease his control and allow more political freedom. This prompted the release of more than 300 political prisoners, relaxed censorship, provided freedom of religion, and overhauled the court system, which had the unforeseen side effect of allowing greater freedom for opposition groups to meet and organize.In my interview with Queen Farah, she related that the shah was concerned about Carter’s demands for human rights concessions, tying them to foreign aid and threatening to withhold spare parts for military aircraft. Her husband said to her, “Who knows what sort of calamity he [Carter] may unleash upon the world?” And, she said, the shah was concerned that his worst nightmares would come to pass: The USSR would invade Afghanistan; Iraq would take advantage of a weakened Iran and invade; and Khomeini would be successful with his call for an Islamic Revolution in Iran.The same liberals who forced the shah out of power are still operating today. Sadly, they have a difficult time seeing moral issues clearly. They reject absolute standards of good and evil or right and wrong. In their worldview Man is capable of perfection, human nature is on a path toward enlightenment, and the concept of original sin is primitive.Those same humanists believe the lie that bad actions must be blamed on societal, psychological or economic circumstances. Moral relativists despise those who understand the nature of evil. Secular humanists make excuses for evil, or worse, deny its existence, or coddle it by refusing to confront it. Consequently, they feed it. Terrorists kill the body; God-hating, humanist, liberal Leftists kill the soul. They see jihadists not as terrorists, but as freedom fighters, little George Washingtons who simply need tolerance and support.The writer is a #1 New York Times bestselling author with 80 published books. He is the founder of Friends of Zion Museum in Jerusalem of which the late president Shimon Peres was the chairman.
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