Obama submits to Brotherhood, asks for suppression of anti-Islam video
President Barack Obama has bowed to the Muslim Brotherhood’s demand that the federal government suppress a satirical video of Islam’s prophet, Muhammad.
Tommy Vietor, a spokesman for the National Security Council, told the Washington Post that the White House has “reached out to YouTube to call the video to their attention and ask them to review whether it violates their terms of use.”
The request complies with the Sept. 13 demand and threat by the brotherhood, which now governs the Arab’s world’s largest country, Egypt.
“Hurting the feelings of one and a half billion Muslims cannot be tolerated, and… we demand that all those involved in such crimes be urgently brought to trial,” according to an English-language statement on the brotherhood’s website.
The brotherhood’s demand included a threat of additional violence during Obama’s re-election campaign.
“The people’s anger and fury for their Faith is invariably predictable, often unstoppable,” said the website.
That violence could deeply damage Obama’s election chances, just as similar Islamist violence in Iran sank President Jimmy Carter’s re-election effort in 1979.
The same demands were pushed Sept. 13 by Egypt’s new Islamist president, Mohamad Morsi, who Obama helped put in power.
The video-makers “are not accepted, not by people in Egypt nor other Arab and Islamic countries, nor by their own people,” Morsi declared at a televised event in Brussels, Belgium.
“I affirm that the American people reject this and I’ve called on them to declare their rejection of them, at the same time with our rejection of those bad practices that bring harm and not benefit,” he claimed to his audience in Egypt, Europe and Washington.
Obama’s re-election campaign is being held hostage by Morsi, said Michael Rubin, an expert on Islamist parties at the American Enterprise Institute.
In response, Obama should repeatedly declare the First Amendment bars U.S. government action against Islam’s critics, and should also threaten to cut off much-needed financial aid to Egypt, Rubin said. (EXPERT: ‘Obama is hostage to Morsi’)
Obama and his aides, including Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, have begun to say that their hands are tied by the First Amendment, but they also continue to denounce the video as “disgusting.”
The federal denunciation of the video bolsters Morsi’s effort to focus domestic unrest on America, rather than on the performance of his government. (WATCH: The Anti-Muhammad video cited as cause of unrest)
Morsi depends on aid from the United States and other Arab countries, because the country’s 82 million people are wracked by unemployment, poor education, food shortages and corruption.
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