Clarion Project launches a new campaign to demand the Muslim Brotherhood be designated a terrorist entity in the United States.
Who is the Muslim Brotherhood?
The Muslim Brotherhood (Al-Ihkwan al-Muslimun) is a Sunni, pan-Islamic organization based in Cairo, Egypt whose ultimate aim is the re-establishment of the global Islamic caliphate and the implementation of sharia as state law. Founded in Egypt in 1928 it is the oldest Islamist group in the world and along with Jamaat e-Islami in Pakistan and India, the most influential.
During World War II they backed the Nazis against the British. They were provided with a printing press by the Third Reich to print Arabic copies of Hitler’s book Mein Kampf and the notorious anti-Semitic forgery Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
They see Islam as a holistic system of life that must be implemented at every level. This includes the brutal hududpunishments such as amputations and the death penalty for adultery and blasphemy. However, they are aware that such ideas are unpopular so they seek first to Islamize the society through education. Although the group officially renounced violence in 1971, that seems to have been a practical decision. The group still believes that armed jihad is a legitimate way to achieve its goals when the time is right.
Following that they would implement their policies step-by-step, under their doctrine of gradualism. After the Egyptian revolution the group came to power in an election which attempted to implement this vision. It was deposed after one year because of their tyrannical policies.
They have branches in approximately 80 countries worldwide including the United States.
Is the Muslim Brotherhood Involved in Terrorism?
They have been the leading source of inspiration behind terrorist organizations such as al-Qaeda and its offshoot the Islamic State. Founder Hassan al-Banna and ideologue Sayyid Qutb wrote extensively on the importance of armed jihad. Qutb is also credited with the idea of modern political understanding of jahilliya, which holds that any government which does not implement sharia as state law is in a state of un-Islamic ignorance and should be opposed.
Osama bin Laden’s mentor, Abdullah Azzam, and the mastermind of 9/11, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, were both members of the Muslim Brotherhood before they joined al-Qaeda.
The Muslim Brotherhood branch in Gaza, Hamas, is a terrorist organization which glorifies attacks on civilians and seeks to violently eradicate the state of Israel and commit massacres against the Jews living there.
Muslim-Brotherhood-linked entities in America and other countries have raised money for Hamas. The most famous case of this was the Holy Land Foundation Trial in 2007.
What are other governments doing about the Muslim Brotherhood?
The Muslim Brotherhood has been banned in Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates as a terrorist organization. The UAE ban included U.S. Muslim Brotherhood entities the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) and the Muslim American Society (MAS) as well as Islamic Relief Worldwide, which has sent money to Hamas.
Israel has also banned Islamic Relief Worldwide for funding Hamas.
The UK commissioned a report into the Muslim Brotherhood. While it stopped short of banning it as a terrorist organization, the British government rejected the myth that the Brotherhood is “moderate” along with the patently false notion that it is “non-violent.” The UK will keep the Muslim Brotherhood under review.
This past Good Friday, the Islamic Society of Wichita, Kan., invited a self-declared Hamas supporter, Sheikh Monzer Taleb, as a special guest for its fundraising event. Sheikh Taleb is a notorious figure in the Muslim community, bringing controversy — and hate — wherever he goes. That is, until Representative Mike Pompeo caught wind of the plans and took a stand, calling on the Islamic Society to cancel the event, to the ire of the group and some in the community.
Sheikh Taleb has proudly sung as part of a pro-Hamas group that calls for the destruction of Israel and the Jewish people, even declaring on video: “I am from Hamas.” His other extremist ties are also significant and damning: In the 2008 terrorism-financing case against the Holy Land Foundation, Taleb was named an “unindicted co-conspirator” for his deep association with Hamas. The case resulted in guilty verdicts on all 108 counts against leaders of the Foundation.
All Americans have a duty to speak out, like Pompeo did, for if we stay silent, we give Islamists a pass to suffocate critical thinking inside Muslim communities. There is nothing more American, more pro-Islam, and more pro-Muslim than taking a stand against the extremist and anti-Semitic hate spewed by Islamist individuals like Sheikh Taleb. In fact, this tough love is what every Muslim community needs to pursue on its own, long before their elected representative have to intervene.
Marginalizing and exposing the ideas of Sheikh Taleb and others like him is crucial if we are to effectively counter Islamist ideology and radicalization. This is the sort of reform work the American Islamic Forum for Democracy (AIFD) encourages. Before Islamic terrorists become hell-bent on using violence, extremist Islamist ideologues radicalize them. Islamist movements such as Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood reject the liberal secular democratic order and seek an Islamic state with sharia law, filled with ugly anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism.
This debate is not about silencing speech, but rather about exposing and defeating extremist Islamist ideas. From San Bernardino to Brussels, radical Islamism will never be defeated unless Muslims and non-Muslims alike expose it, confront it, and marginalize it, much as Mike Pompeo did in Wichita last month.
It seems obvious that Sheikh Taleb’s Hamas sympathies and connections would make any American Muslim organization hesitant to have anything to do with him, much less invite him as a special guest to an event. Particularly in today’s climate, one would think that the Islamic Society of Wichita would want to stay as far away as possible from Taleb. Better yet, one would hope they would protest his appearances at mosques around the country in order to truly convey their dedication to reforming the hateful ideas that radicalize Muslims in our communities.
Instead, the Islamic Society of Wichita was stubborn in its invitation, cancelling the event only when Pompeo expressed serious concern and community pressure mounted. Now, rather than admitting its mistake, the Islamic Society of Wichita has the temerity to play the victim, blaming Kansans for their “Islamophobia.” The Islamic Society is attempting to dodge responsibility and avoid the repercussions of its terrible and even dangerous decision. But the facts remain the same: The Islamic Society invited and was planning to fête a man who has supported Hamas not only in word but also in deed, by raising funds for the terrorist group. In this case, the Islamic Society of Wichita can blame only itself for increased tensions in the community.
The event featuring Sheikh Taleb was canceled, yet it is critical for Kansans and all Americans, both Muslims and non-Muslims, to take a long, hard look at some of the key instigators and ideologies of extremist sentiment: the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) and the other Hamas-sympathizing, Muslim Brotherhood–tied individuals and groups passing themselves off as mainstream.
M. Zuhdi Jasser is the president of the American Islamic Forum for Democracy and the co-founder of the Muslim Reform Movement. He is a former U.S. Navy lieutenant commander and the author of A Battle for the Soul of Islam.
On March 25, The New York Times published an editorial effectively calling for US President Barack Obama to abandon the US alliance with Egypt.
The Obama White House’s house paper urged the president to “reassess whether an alliance that has long been considered a cornerstone of American national security policy is doing more harm than good.” The editorial concluded that Obama must “start planning for the possibility of a break in the alliance with Egypt.”
The Times’ call was based on an open letter to Obama authored by a bipartisan group of foreign policy experts that call themselves the “Working Group on Egypt.” Citing human rights violations on the part of the government of Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, the Working Group urged Obama to tie US financial and military assistance to Egypt to the protection of NGOs operating in Egypt.
The self-proclaimed bipartisan band of experts is co-chaired by Robert Kagan from the Brookings Institution and Michele Dunne from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Among its prominent members are Elliott Abrams, Ellen Bork, Reuel Gerecht, Brian Katulis, Neil Hicks and Sarah Margon.
The Working Group has a history.
In January 2011, it called for Obama to force then Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak to resign from office. In so doing, it provided bipartisan cover for Obama’s decision to abandon the US’s most critical and dependable ally in the Arab world. Then, as now, the group’s esteemed experts argued that due to the regime’s infringement of human rights, the US could not in good conscience support it. Back in 2011, Israelis found a rare wall-to-wall unanimity of purpose in vocally and forcefully defending Mubarak from his American detractors. From the far Left to the far Right, from the IDF General Staff to the street, Israelis warned anyone who would listen that if Mubarak were forced out of power, the Muslim Brotherhood would take over and transform Egypt into a jihadist state.
Due in large part to the presence of senior Republican foreign policy hands on the Working Group, by and large Israel’s warnings were ignored in Washington. Facing the unusual Israeli consensus backing Mubarak was an American consensus insisting that “democracy” would ensure that a new liberal democratic Egypt would emerge out the ashes of the Mubarak regime.
The Americans chided us for repeating over and over again that the Muslim Brotherhood, the progenitor of al-Qaida, Hamas, Egyptian Islamic Jihad and every other major Sunni jihadist terrorist group around at the time, was a terrorist group.
We were attacked as “anti-democratic,” for insisting that the Facebook posters and twitterers on Twitter were in no position to replace Mubarak.
Who were we, the Americans scoffed, to point out that the “Facebook revolutionaries” were but a flimsy veneer which barely hid the Islamists from willfully blind Western officials and reporters who refused to admit that liberal values are not universal values – to put it mildly.
In the ensuing five years, every single warning that Israel expressed was borne out in spades.
Just as we said, right after Mubarak was forced from power, the Islamists unceremoniously dispatched with the Facebook crowd. The two million Islamists who converged on Tahrir Square to hear Sheikh Yussuf Qaradawi call for jihad and the Islamic conquest of Israel weren’t interested in democracy.
The women and Christians of Egypt soon realized, Mubarak’s overthrow, which paved the way for the Muslim Brotherhood electoral victories in 2012, did not expand their rights, it endangered their lives. As for the hapless Americans, immediately after Muslim Brotherhood leader Mohammed Morsi was inaugurated to serve as president of Egypt, the government began demanding that the US release from prison Omar Abdel Rahman, the so-called Blind Sheikh who masterminded the 1993 World Trade Center bombings. The US embassy in Cairo was the target of jihadist riots on September 11, 2012.
Then, since Morsi was elected democratically, none of this was any sweat off the back of Washington’s Egypt experts. They supported sending F-16s to his air force even after he hosted then Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in Cairo, let Iranian warships traverse the Suez Canal and became a strategic ally of Hamas. They also supported his government, even though he enabled Libyan arms to flow through Egypt to Syria, transforming the war in Syria from a local dispute into the incubator for Islamic State – the precursor of which Morsi also gave a free hand to operate in the Sinai, in conjunction with Hamas.
The Americans didn’t reconsider their belief that Morsi was the guy for them, even after he allowed his Muslim Brothers to torch Coptic churches and massacre Christians. They didn’t revisit their support for the Muslim Brotherhood government even after Morsi arrogated to himself dictatorial powers that even Mubarak never dreamed of.
Perhaps if Morsi had been a responsible economic leader, and maintained the liberalization policies Mubarak enacted during his last five years in power, then defense minister Abdel Fatah Sisi wouldn’t have felt the need to remove him from power. After all, Morsi appointed Sisi to his position.
But in addition to ending even lip service to human rights, Morsi gutted the economy. By the time the military overthrew Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood in the summer of 2013, Egypt had a mere $5 billion in reserves, and according to the World Health Organization, a quarter of Egyptians were starving.
So had the Muslim Brotherhood remained in power, Egypt would not have remained a democracy.
It would have become a jihadist state as dangerous as Iran, with the economic prospects of North Korea.
In other words, five years ago, there was no chance that a post-Mubarak Egypt would become a liberal democracy. There were only two options – a US-allied tyranny that fought jihad and maintained the peace with Israel, or a jihad state, aligned with Iran, that posed an existential threat to Israel, Jordan, the US and the international economy.
Those are still the choices today, but the stakes are even higher. Due to the Muslim Brotherhood’s year in power, the jihadist elements that gathered force in the Sinai over the past 20 years were able to organize as a more or less unified force, under the rule of Islamic State (ISIS), and in strategic alliance with Hamas. Like ISIS in Syria, ISIS in Egypt is an aggressive, dangerous group that stops at nothing to achieve its aims of expanding the ISIS empire.
The war it now fights against the Egyptian state is a total war.
To his credit, Sisi recognizes the nature of the threat and has taken steps to counter jihad that Mubarak never contemplated. The Egyptian leader recognizes that to defeat ISIS nothing less than a reformation of Islam is required. And so, in addition to fighting ISIS with everything he has, he is risking everything by taking on the jihadist belief system.
Sisi has mobilized the clerics at Al-Azhar seminary to develop an Islamic narrative that rejects jihad.
Sisi risks everything because everything is already at risk. If ISIS wins, Egypt is finished.
To win this war, he has publicly embraced Israel as an ally. He has openly sided with Israel against Hamas. Unlike Mubarak, Sisi has been fully willing to acknowledge that just because Hamas’s primary victims are Jews doesn’t mean that it isn’t a terrorist group that has to be destroyed.
Without putting too fine a point on in, for his fearless fight to the death with the forces of jihad – both in the mosque and on the battlefield – Sisi has already entered the pantheon, alongside Winston Churchill, of word historical figures. And yet, rather than embrace him and support him in his fight for Egypt and humanity, the same “experts” who called for Mubarak to be overthrown now urge Obama to abandon Sisi.
It is depressing that there is no magic bullet – like democracy – for the pathologies that afflict the Islamic world. But there is no magic bullet. And there are no easy choices for people who refuse to recognize that the natural state of man is neither liberal nor democratic.
But it is hard to accept the credibility of those who refuse to learn from their mistakes. It is harder still as well to listen to the “moral calls” of those who refuse to accept that because their past advice was heeded, thousands have died, and if their current calls are heeded, millions of lives will be imperiled.
Senator Leahy (D-Time Warner) heading this up is not a surprise. His pro-terrorist and anti-Israel views are well known. There’s a long and ugly history there. And Leahy is once again trying to defund the Israeli military.
The Leahy letter to Kerry though is blatantly Muslim Brotherhood inspired. It classes together Israel and Egypt, accusing Israel of “extrajudicial” killings of Islamic terrorists and broadcasting the Muslim Brotherhood’s claims of victimhood in Egypt.
The claims about “human rights violations” in Egypt lists Muslim Brotherhood figures who were killed by Egyptian police in a shootout with the Islamic terror group after it was removed from power by political protests, including Osama al-Husseini, Hisham Khifagy and Ibrahim al-Sisi, the Brotherhood’s “defense minister”.
The Leahy letter never mentions the Muslim Brotherhood though making it not only a pro-terrorist letter, but a dishonest one.
Leahy and other Democrats also complain about Israel killing some of these Islamic terrorists…
Fadi Alloun stabbed a 15-year-old in Jerusalem in early October, 2015, moderately wounding him. The attacker fled and was killed by police fire after they noticed the knife in his hand.
Saad Al-Atrash was killed by soldiers in late October, 2015, after he had attacked them with a knife near a pedestrian checkpoint down the street from the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron.
Hadeel Hashlamoun was shot after attempting to stab an Israeli soldier at an IDF check point in Hebron in September, 2015.
This is what Leahy is defending. Also signing on is Jim McDermott and James McGovern, who are in the same pro-terrorist category as Leahy. Also on board is radical leftist Chellie Pingree backed by the anti-Israel group, J Street, and retiring Rep. Sam Farr. Also signing on are career progressive caucusers Betsy McCollum and Raúl Grijalva who would just happily sign on to a letter proposing Stalin for a posthumous Model of Freedom award.
Andre Carson, a Muslim convert who has a history of appearing at Islamist pro-terrorist events and anti-Israel activism, is not a surprising signature.
But there are also a number of Congressional Black Caucus members here, Hank “Guam will tip over” Johnson, Eddie Bernice Johnson and Eleanor Holmes Norton.
This is not just an anti-Israel letter. It’s a pro-terrorist letter. It covertly advocates on behalf of the Muslim Brotherhood and its contents were no doubt formed and shaped by Brotherhood activists in America.
(The views expressed in this article are mine and do not necessarily reflect those of Warsclerotic or its other editors. — DM)
Fascists want to take away our freedom of speech. So do the delicate little snowflakes infesting our institutions of “higher learning.” How much worse will it get over the next few years? Substantially worse, I fear.
In the above video, Bill Whittle recounts numerous Fascist attempts to shut down those with different ideas. I’ll not repeat what he says. Instead, I’ll point out a few other Fascist efforts.
Islamist Fascists
In line with its “misconception” that Islam is the religion of peace and tolerance, the Obama administration has consistently courted the Muslim Brotherhood and its affiliate, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) — which do everything they can to shut down all discussion of whether Islam is peaceful and tolerant and whether it should change. The Obama administration, following its lead, has ignored Muslim voices for reform.
What does Hillary Clinton think? Apparently that Islam is fine the way it is.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali has a different view.
As I noted here, Ayaan Hirsi Ali is a former Muslim. She had been scheduled to receive an honorary degree from Brandeis University in April of 2014. However,
Brandeis University in Massachusetts announced Tuesday that it had withdrawn the planned awarding of an honorary degree to Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a staunch critic of Islam and its treatment of women, after protests from students and faculty.
The university said in a statement posted online that the decision had been made after a discussion between Ali and university President Frederick Lawrence.
“She is a compelling public figure and advocate for women’s rights, and we respect and appreciate her work to protect and defend the rights of women and girls throughout the world,” said the university’s statement. “That said, we cannot overlook certain of her past statements that are inconsistent with Brandeis University’s core values.” [Emphasis added.]
Ali, a member of the Dutch Parliament from 2003 to 2006, has been quoted as making comments critical of Islam. That includes a 2007 interview with Reason Magazine in which she said of the religion, “Once it’s defeated, it can mutate into something peaceful. It’s very difficult to even talk about peace now. They’re not interested in peace. I think that we are at war with Islam. And there’s no middle ground in wars.”
Ali was raised in a strict Muslim family, but after surviving a civil war, genital mutilation, beatings and an arranged marriage, she renounced the faith in her 30s. She has not commented publicly on the issue of the honorary degree.
. . . .
More than 85 of about 350 faculty members at Brandeis signed a letter asking for Ali to be removed from the list of honorary degree recipients. And an online petition created Monday by students at the school of 5,800 had gathered thousands of signatures from inside and outside the university as of Tuesday afternoon.
“This is a real slap in the face to Muslim students,” said senior Sarah Fahmy, a member of the Muslim Student Association who created the petition said before the university withdrew the honor.
“But it’s not just the Muslim community that is upset but students and faculty of all religious beliefs,” she said. “A university that prides itself on social justice and equality should not hold up someone who is an outright Islamophobic.” [Emphasis added.]
The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) also got into the act:
“It is unconscionable that such a prestigious university would honor someone with such openly hateful views.”
The organization sent a letter to university President Frederick Lawrence on Tuesday requesting that it drop plans to honor Ali.
“This makes Muslim students feel very uneasy,” Joseph Lumbard, chairman of Islamic and Middle Eastern studies, said in an interview. “They feel unwelcome here.” [Emphasis added.]
Following the public announcement, the Muslim Students Association at Yale went through its usual routine, first seeking to have Ms. Hirsi Ali disinvited (though it disputes this), then to limit the subject matter of her speech, then to impose conditions on her speech that would stigmatize her. In the spirit of WFB himself, Lizardo stood firm.
The MSA routine worked at Brandeis; at Yale, not so much. Not this time.
Poor delicate little snowflakes. Isn’t it a shame that they might be exposed to new ideas that are alien to them? That they were not required to attend and listen to those ideas is, apparently, inconsequential. They did not anyone to listen to them.
Here’s a video of her remarks. The introductions are a trifle long and add little value. The questions she was asked at the end and her answers are, however, interesting. They begin at 55 minutes into the video.
She seemed to be speaking less to the “choir” and more to a broader audience which she was trying to convince. To that end, she was as conciliatory as she could be without abandoning her thesis that Islam is the religion of repression, submission and death, not peace; that it is highly dangerous to Western civilization, including our concepts of freedom and democracy. “Radical” Islam is rising, becoming even worse and it must be defeated.
Even to try to defeat Islam, we need to defeat the increasing efforts to eliminate freedom of speech at home in favor of speech that is politically and multiculturally correct and therefore not free. [Emphasis added.]
On April 7, 2015, Hirsi Ali spoke at the National Press Club. Here’s a video of her remarks on the Clash of Civilizations, largely based on her book Heretic, which I later reviewed here. There, she writes optimistically of the possibility (but not the probability) of an Islamic revolution, someday.
There is a clash of civilizations. Muslims in Western countries generally refuse to help the police prevent Islamic terror attacks, such as recently occurred in Brussels.
There is a reason why Israel razes the homes of terrorists. It is because Israelis know that a terrorist cannot plot and carry out an attack without the knowledge and help of his or her immediate relatives, and further, the entire community. Punitive home demolition is meant to serve as a deterrent, the idea being that a would-be terrorist’s family will fear losing their home and thus persuade him or her against the attack.
In fact, knowing that it “takes a village” to aid and abet a terrorist is precisely why the terrorists responsible for the Paris and recent Brussels bombings could operate “right under the noses” of their victims. And it is why some are calling for heightened scrutiny of Muslim communities across the West, and right here in the U.S., despite cries of Islamophobia.
The MailOnlinereports that police in Molenbeek — a district known for spawning jihadis like the France and Brussels attackers — have pleaded with local Muslims for help in finding the terror suspects only to have their pleas rebuffed.
Western nations which welcome and care for them are spit upon. “See something, say something” did not work before the San Bernardino Islamic attack. Perhaps those who saw something but said nothing remained silent because they feared being characterized as Islamophobes.
Here is a recent video of an interview with a teenage Yazidi girl who escaped the Islamic State. Is Islam the religion of peace and respect for females? For people of other religions?
In the unlikely event that any delicate little snowflakes watch it, will they be offended by its presence on You Tube, by the “lies” told by the Yazidi girl or by the truth of her statements?
Multicultural Fascists
Europe has many multicultural Fascists and Obama’s America has fewer. However, those who propagate the multicultural fantasy are winning. In the past, we sought immigrants who brought with them cultures compatible with ours. Now, Obama demands that we accept immigrants whose cultures of violence, drugs, gangs, crime and the like are not compatible. We have sanctuary cities where gang, other violence and drug smuggling and use are endemic. Although state efforts to enforce Federal immigration laws which the Obama administration refuses to enforce have been struck down by the judiciary, the Obama administration somewhat impotently challenged the sanctuary cities this year, only following pressure from the Congress.
Here is a video of remarks made by Victor Davis Hanson about one year ago on the travesty of “illiberal illegal immigration.” Illegal immigration breeds illegality across the board.
A transcript of his remarks is available here. Here’s just a short snippet:
[I]t’s a controversial topic. If I had said to you 20 years ago, 10 years ago, we’re going to get in a situation in the United States where 160,000 people are going to arrive at the border and break immigration law and we’re going to let them all in at once without any prior check, medical histories, you would think I was a right-wing conspiracist. If I had said to you, we’re going to have a president who is going to not only nullify existing federal immigration law, but on 22 occasions prior to that nullification warn us that he couldn’t nullify it, or, if I had said, he’s not only going to nullify federal immigration law, which he said would be unconstitutional, but that he is going to punish members of ICE, the border patrol, who follow existing law rather than his own unlawful existing order, I could go on, but you’d all think this was surreal, Orwellian, it couldn’t happen. Yet that’s the status quo as we look at it today.
Our borders are worse than porous; they are open and little effort is being made to keep criminals, drug dealers, gang members and other violent people out. While Obama has many “top” priorities, doing that is not among them.
Cultures are either consciously abandoned, or consciously enforced. The theory of multiculturalism has always been a tonic for simpletons, since it celebrates the perpetuation and imposition of an incompatible culture, still being practiced by those who carry it, upon a host culture with which it is mutually exclusive. Multiculturalism is entirely subversive. It is intended to force one or more cultures upon the hosts who do not want or need them. Since both cultures cannot successfully coexist within the host, which has its own successful working culture, the purpose of the exercise has always been fraudulent. The “melting pot” concept worked not because of the concept of multiculturalism, but as testament against it. Those who came here in our parents’ and grandparents’ generation consciously chose to abandon the cultures they left in favor of the American culture. They became Americans, embracing one culture.
If one was being less generous than to call multiculturalism a tonic for simpletons, it would be more accurate to say that modern leftist multiculturalism is actually a weapon. Its purpose is not to enhance the host, but to consume it. If the host’s culture is peaceful, it has no use for malcontents who insist upon the dominance of their native culture. Malcontents, in the form of angry and entitled guests, foment chaos and disorder. And yet, the leftists insist that we demonstrate our cultural superiority by abandoning the superiority of our own culture and importing incompatible languages, traditions, practices, and morals.
Here’s a snapshot of our current Southern border by Sharyl Attkisson:
Conclusions
The delicate little snowflakes who demand safe spaces from reality in what were once institutions of higher learning seem to be increasing in number. They are our next generation and will soon begin to elect those with whose milquetoast views they agree. It will be a sad day for America when our nation mirrors those “educational” institutions. Solutions? I have none to offer, other than the development of backbones by their university administrators and teachers; perhaps even by their own parents. Perhaps some little snowflakes will be told, “If you don’t want to be exposed to views inconsistent with those you already hold, don’t come here.”
Living in America should be an honor not granted those who despise and abuse her by coming illegally, by illegally bringing crime and violence or by supporting those who do. Falsely characterizing Islam as the religion of peace and tolerance should not be “who we are” as Obama claims. Most of us are not deluded fools, I hope.
Oh well. Somehow we got Obama as the Commander in Chief. Twice.
This message was posted just eight days before the recent Islamic attack in Brussels, Belgium:
“In Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood showed an additional model, according to which the Islamic Arab parties, or most of them, tend to impose a dictatorship because they do not believe in democracy. They adopt it as a tactic only in order to attain their objectives, and when they take power, their true face is revealed, and they turn to tyranny and absolute rule.”
**********************
In his column in the London-based Saudi daily Al-Sharq Al-Awsat, ‘Uthman Al-Mirghani argued that the Arab Spring had exposed not only the failure of the Arab regimes, but also the various Arab oppositions’ failure to constitute an alternative to the tyrannical regimes that had been brought down. He stated that these oppositions, of all political shades – liberal, leftist, rightist, and Islamic – were just as opportunistic, egocentric, and dictatorial as the regimes they had deposed. Furthermore, he wrote, they had distanced themselves from the Arab peoples so much that the peoples now yearned for the previous regimes. In light of the powerlessness and failure of all the oppositions in the Arab world, he added, it is no wonder that the young people have abandoned them and turned to the ‘online party’ as an arena for opposition and for voicing their distress.”
“Many maintain that the ‘Arab Spring’ failed to actualize even one of the hopes and dreams pinned on it in its initial days and months – and that, on the contrary, it even led the region to a series of disasters and crises. Undoubtedly, there are many factors in how the fleeting ‘[Arab] Spring ended as it did, in chaos, crises and wars…
“[However,] what is most important of all is that the Arab Spring exposed not only our crisis and the crisis of the regimes against which the peoples rose up, but also the failure of the [various] Arab oppositions to present themselves as a convincing, credible alternative [to these regimes] that could actualize the peoples’ hopes and aspirations. The crisis of the Arab oppositions definitely preceded the Arab Spring, but is etched more deeply in the people’s minds [since the Arab Spring] because of these oppositions’ frustrating performance, the disappointing outcomes[of their actions], and the current regression, wars, and chaos.
“The widespread impression today is that the weakness of the opposition parties and groups, and likewise their internal division and their intense preoccupation with their own interests and dreams of power, have distanced them from the people, and they have become detached from the issues that preoccupy the people. For this reason, [these opposition elements] can no longer convince [the people] that they are fit to rule as an option that is better than the regimes that they oppose. To prove this, we need only point out that today the people are lamenting, yearning for the past and for the era of the regimes that [the opposition elements] brought down, against the backdrop of widespread fear that change could mean [only] chaos and wars.
“The problem with the Arab oppositions is not with a specific stream of thought, but is general and crosses ideological boundaries. It includes the liberal streams as well as parties of the left or those who wield religious slogans. Many of the opposition parties accusing the existing regimes of tyranny are, within themselves, undemocratic. Thus, for example, some opposition leaders’ leadership of their own parties predates the regimes of the rulers whom they oppose and accuse of dictatorship and of stubbornly clinging to power. The leftist parties have, in the eyes of the people, become a model of the elitism that is sunk in developing theories, while the Islamic parties have become a model of egocentrism and opportunism.
“In Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood showed an additional model, according to which the Islamic Arab parties, or most of them, tend to impose a dictatorship because they do not believe in democracy. They adopt it as a tactic only in order to attain their objectives, and when they take power, their true face is revealed, and they turn to tyranny and absolute rule. In Sudan, the Islamists carried out a military coup against democracy when they were still part of the parliament, and saw fit to impose their rule with tanks instead of obeying the ballot box.
“Some may argue that the Islamic parties in Tunisia and Morocco are currently presenting a different model, and that they have proven their desire for a peaceful and democratic transfer of power. A response to this is that, while the experience in both these countries justifiably sparks hope, it is [just] at the beginning of its path, and we must wait and monitor it to see how it develops before taking a stand on it.
“It is not only the Islamists who have not passed the test of democracy. The left, with its communist and national parties, has also [failed it],by turning to coups that they call revolutions; the region’s history is rife with examples [of such revolutions] that have left in their wake dictatorships, wars and crises. There are of course other streams and parties, that transcend the label of political left and religious right, but they too are helpless and failing, like the other Arab oppositions, with all their elements.
“So it is no wonder that the young people have abandoned the traditional opposition, as became clear in the Arab Spring revolutions, and have turned to what can be called ‘the online party’ as an arena for opposition and for voicing their distress… The young people are not alone in this, of course, because frustration becomes generalized when people see the internecine wars and the internal rift – such as in Libya, Syria, Iraq, and Yemen – that is caused by the failure of the political elites and opposition [there]…
“The Arab Spring…was not a message just to the regimes, as some people think. Its outcomes are an indictment of the Arab oppositions, which seem, to this day, not to have gotten the message.”
Obama usually defends his bad decisions on foreign policy by blaming someone else. He tried to blame General Austinfor his ISIS JayVee team line. He blames Netanyahu for his failed outreach to Islamic terrorists in Israel. Benghazi was caused by a video. The Libyan War was caused by bad advice, especially from Hillary Clinton. Also by the Europeans.
We don’t discuss Egypt much. But, perhaps to get ahead of the blame game, it turns out that Obama rejected the advice of his national security team to back a Brotherhood coup of Mubarak in Egypt. (Yes, I know, the official media narrative is that the overthrow of Morsi was a “coup” but the overthrow of Mubarak was a popular protest, even though both involved the army stepping in. Because the narrative is based on lies and word games.)
Former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates revealed that President Barack Obama disregarded the near unanimous advice of the national security team and decided to depose then-Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak because he wanted to be on the “the right side of history.”
“The entire national security team recommended unanimously handling Mubarak differently than we did,” Gates said in a Fox News interview. “And the president took the advice of three junior backbenchers in terms of how to treat Mubarak — one of them saying, ‘Mr. President, you have to be on the right side of history.’”
This isn’t much of a surprise since Obama has always picked his White House juniors and his pet radicals over his official national security team. He’ll blame military people and cabinet members, but not his toadies who got upgraded from speechwriting to unofficially running foreign policy.
How has the “right side of history” worked out. The Muslim Brotherhood has been crushed in most places where it launched its takeovers. (Not counting the United States.) It’s still in the game in Libya though. Maybe Obama can start a second war on its behalf.
The revelation of his praise for Palestinians who chose “the jihad way” to liberation forced northern Virginia surgeon Esam Omeish to resign from a statewide immigration commission in 2007. But it hasn’t stopped him from enjoying red carpet treatment from Obama administration officials.
Omeish briefly drew national attention in 2007 when he was forced to resign from the Virginia immigration panel. The move resulted from Investigative Project on Terrorism (IPT) video showing him praising for Palestinians who chose the “jihad way” during a rally in 2000.
This was no slip of the tongue. At a different event two months earlier, Omeishcongratulated Palestinians who gave “up their lives for the sake of Allah and for the sake of Al-Aqsa. They have spearheaded the effort to bring victory upon the believers in Filastin, insha’allah [God willing]. They are spearing the effort to free the land of Filastin, all of Palestine, for the Muslims and for all the believing people in Allah.”
Now, Omeish is hoping those contacts will help him persuade U.S. officials to change gears in Libya, shifting support from a secular political figure to one with links to al-Qaida. He spelled out those ambitions in a Feb. 29 letter addressed to President Obama posted on Omeish’s Facebook page.
It is co-signed by Emadeddin Z. Muntasser, secretary general of the Libyan American Public Affairs Council (LAPAC). Omeish is identified as the LAPAC president.
Before he was affiliated with the LAPAC, Muntasser was convicted in 2008 of failing to disclose connections between a charity he worked with and jihadist fundraising when he sought tax-exempt status for the charity.
Muntasser ran the Boston branch of the Al-Kifah Refugee Center, which is considered a precursor to al-Qaida, federal prosecutors have said. It was founded by Osama bin Laden’s mentor Abdullah Azzam. Under Muntasser’s leadership, Al-Kifah’s Boston office published a pro-jihad newsletter called Al-Hussam and distributed flyers indicating its support for jihadists fighting on the front lines in places such as Chechnya, Bosnia, Afghanistan and Algeria.
Muntasser’s charity, Care International, was “an outgrowth of and successor” to Al-Kifah, prosecutors say.
Omeish and Muntasser note in their letter that the U.S. has backed the “Libyan National Army,” led by Khalifa Hifter, a former general under dictator Muammar Gaddafi. That’s a bad idea, Omeish and Muntasser wrote, because “many in Libya believe [Hifter] has dictatorial aspirations …”
“He sounds like the Ahmed Chalabi of Libya,” said former Pentagon spokesman J.D. Gordon, a fellow at the Center for a Secure Free Society. “He wants America to fight his battles for him in order to gain the upper hand over his countrymen.”
However, the letter makes no mention of ties between the group Omeish endorses, the Revolutionary Council of Derna, and al-Qaida. Instead, he and Muntasser casts the group as an effective counter to ISIS because the council has “stripped [ISIS] from its social support. [ISIS]’s foreign presence and violent ways made them an evil that local Libyans themselves rejected and defeated” in Derna.
The council’s leaders included two men – Nasir Atiyah al-Akar and Salim Derbi –known to have had ties to al-Qaida.
After ISIS killed al-Akar, the Derna council eulogized him last June for his close ties to Abu Qatada, al-Qaida operative currently in Jordan. Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) reports from 2012 connect Akar to Abdulbasit Azzouz, who was al-Qaida leader Ayman al-Zawahiri’s man in Libya at the time. Azzouz allegedly was involved with the attack on the U.S. consulate and CIA annex in Benghazi that left U.S. Ambassador Stevens and three other Americans dead.
Derbi, also killed fighting ISIS, previously belonged to the al-Qaida linked Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG) and commanded the Abu Salim Martyrs Brigade, which also has al-Qaida ties.
Egypt’s Al-Alam Al-Youm refers to the Revolutionary Shura Council as “a branch of al-Qaida.”
Despite his ongoing connections to key White House decision-makers, Omeish appears headed for disappointment this time.
His letter is not likely to be read by the president’s national security team, a White House source told the Investigative Project on Terrorism (IPT). The U.S. is prepared to support a “Government of National Accord” that is being developed, the White House said in a statement.
However, the Obama administration repeatedly has involved Omeish in policy deliberations about Libya.
White House logs show that Omeish visited nine times since 2011, including a Dec. 13, 2013 visit in which he was photographed with President Obama.
Omeish’s encounter with the president came during the White House’s annual Christmas party, a White House spokesperson said. President Obama never conducts policy discussions at such public meetings, the source said.
Two photos appear on Omeish’s Facebook page showing him with U.N. Ambassador Samantha Power, widely considered an architect of the president’s Libya policy, where she advocated for military intervention. She notably helped draft PSD-11, a secret presidential directive that led to the U.S. supporting the Muslim Brotherhood in Libya among other places.
One photo shows Omeish meeting with Power in February 2012, when she worked as special assistant to the president and senior director for Multilateral Affairs and Human Rights at the National Security Council. The other photo posted the day Obama announced Power’s nomination as U.S. ambassador to the U.N. shows her standing next to Omeish.
White House officials thought enough of Omeish that they invited him to attend an April 2011 speech on Libya by President Obama at the White House. Omeish also attended the installation of Christopher Stevens, the late U.S. ambassador to Libya killed in the Sept. 11, 2012 Benghazi attack, and that of his successor, Deborah Jones, in 2013.
Omeish told The Washington Times following the Benghazi attack that he briefed Stevens before the ambassador began his duties in Tripoli.
Omeish and the Muslim Brotherhood
In addition to his comments about Palestinians and jihad, Omeish admits to prior personal involvement in the Muslim Brotherhood in the U.S. and served as president of the Muslim American Society, which has been described as the “overt arm” of the Brotherhood in America. His association with the Brotherhood likely dates back to his involvement in the Muslim Students Association (MSA) in the 1990s when he became the national organization’s president, which was founded by Brotherhood members in 1963.
Omeish endorsed Libya’s Muslim Brotherhood in a 2012 IRIN News article, stating that although it came in a distant second in Libya’s 2012 elections, it “may be able to provide a better platform and a more coherent agenda of national action.”
Libya’s Muslim Brotherhood subsequently failed to implement a coherent agenda and became deadlocked with its liberal rival, the National Forces Alliance, over establishing a working constitution.
Brotherhood members opposed building a strong Libyan military that could have helped rein in the militias that have since created havoc. Numerous militias tied to the Brotherhood have contributed to Libya’s instability. U.S. State Department officials contracted with the Brotherhood-linked February 17 Martyrs Brigade – a group that also had Al-Qaida ties – to provide security for the ill-fated U.S. consulate in Benghazi. A BBC report described the brigade as the best armed militia in eastern Libya. It additionally held al-Qaida sympathies, according to posts on its Facebook page. A State Department report called reliance on the February 17 militia in the case of an attack such as happened on Sept. 11, 2012 “misplaced.”
LAPAC is but one of an alphabet soup of groups that Omeish helped found as a result of the Arab Spring, aimed at affecting U.S. policy toward Libya.
LETF lobbied for the U.S. and the international community to establish a no-fly zone to keep Gaddafi from bombing rebellious cities in early 2011. Omeish’s LCNA worked to facilitate meetings between U.S. officials and Libyan rebels, including a meeting with John Kerry while he still was a U.S. senator. ALCCI works with the Libyan embassy in Washington to “certify and support trade relations between Libya and the United States.”
It remains to be seen whether the advice from Omeish and Muntasser will be ignored. But their gambit, publicly posting their letter urging the president to support Islamists, indicates a confidence generated by years of access and consultation. That raises a host of troubling questions.
Headline of last issue of Turkey’s Zaman before government takeover
Turkey and Saudi Arabia have taken separate steps to break free from Washington’s dictates on the Syrian issue and show their resistance to Russia’s highhanded intervention in Syria. They are moving on separate tracks to signal their defiance and frustration with the exclusive pact between Presidents Barack Obama and Vladimir Putin which ostracizes Riyadh and Ankara on the Syrian question.
Turkey in particular, saddled with three million Syrian refugees (Jordan hosts another 1.4 million), resents Washington’s deaf ear to its demand for no-fly zones in northern and southern Syria as shelters against Russian and Syrian air raids.
Last year, President Reccep Erdogan tried in desperation to partially open the door for a mass exit of Syrian refugees to Europe. He was aghast when he found that most of the million asylum-seekers reaching Europe were not Syrians, but Muslims from Africa, Afghanistan and Pakistan, in search of a better life in the West. Most of the Syrians stayed put in the camps housing them in southern Turkey.
Even the Turkish intelligence agency MIT was hard put to explain this setback. According to one partial explanation, organized crime gangs of Middle East dope and arms smugglers, in which ISIS is heavily represented, seized control of the refugee traffic heading to Europe from Libya, Iraq and Syria.
This human traffic netted the gangs an estimated $1 billion.
Turkey was left high and dry with millions of Syrian refugees on its hands and insufficient international aid to supply their needs. No less painful, Bashar Assad was still sitting pretty in Damascus.
Finding Assad firmly entrenched in Damascus is no less an affront for Saudi Arabia. Added to this, the Syrian rebel groups supported by Riyadh are melting away under continuing Russian-backed government assaults enabled by the Obama-Putin “ceasefire” deal’
The oil kingdom’s rulers find it particularly hard to stomach the sight of Iran and Hizballah going from strength to strength both in Syria and Lebanon.
The Turks threatened to strike back, but confined themselves to artillery shelling of Syrian areas close to the border. While appearing to be targeting the Kurdish YPD-YPG militia moving into these areas, the Turkish guns were in fact pounding open spaces with no Kurdish presence. Their purpose was to draw a line around the territory which they have marked out for a northern no-fly or security zone.
Saturday, March 5, President Erdogan proposed building a “new city” of 4,500 square kilometers on northern Syrian soil, to shelter the millions of war refugees. He again tried putting the idea to President Obama.
The Saudi Defense Minister, Deputy Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman put together a more high-risk and comprehensive scheme. Its dual purpose is to hit pro-Iranian Hizballah from the rear and forcied [Sic] the two big powers to treat Riyadh seriously as a player for resolving the Syrian imbroglio.
The scheme hinged in the cancellation of a $4 billion Saudi pledge of military aid to the Lebanese army, thereby denying Hizballah, which is a state within the state and also dominates the government, access to Saudi funding. But it also pulled the rug from under Lebanon’s hopes for combating ISIS and Al Qaeda’s Nusra Front, which have grabbed a strip of Lebanese territory in the northern Beqaa Valley.
The Saudi action, by weakening the Lebanese military and its ability to shore up central government in Beirut, risks tipping Lebanon over into another civil war.
The London Economist commented that this Saudi step against Lebanon seems “amateurish.” Under the young prince (30), “Saudi Arabia sometimes acts with bombast and violence that makes it look like the Donald Trump of the Arab World,” in the view of the magazine.
But the Saudi step had a third less obvious motive, a poke in the eye for President Obama for espousing Iran’s claim to Middle East hegemony. Resentment on this score is common to the Saudi royal house and the Erdogan government.
As a crude provocation for Washington, the Turkish president ordered police Friday, March 4, to raid Turkey’s largest newspaper Zaman, after an Istanbul court ruling placed it under government control.
The newspaper released its final edition ahead of the raid declaring the takeover a “shameful day for free press” in the country. A group of protesters outside the building was dispersed with tear gas, rubber bullets and water cannons.
Zaman is owned by the exiled Muslim cleric Felhullah Gulen, who heads the powerful Hizmet movement, which strongly contests Erdogan government policies. A former ally of the president, the two fell out years ago. In 1999, after he was accused of conspiring to overthrow the government in Ankara, Gulen fled to the United States.
Today, the exiled cleric runs the Hizmet campaign against the Turkish president from his home in Pennsylvania, for which he has been declared a terrorist and many of his supporters arrested.
The takeover of Zaman was intended both as a blow by Ankara against Muslim circles opposed to the Erdogan regime and as an act of retaliation against the United States, for harboring its opponents and sidelining Turkey from Obama administration plans for Syria.
Oddly enough, the Turkish president finds himself in a position analogous to Egyptian President Abdel-Fatteh El-Sisi, who is at war with the Muslim Brotherhood, a movement which enjoys Obama’s support.
Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu has his own dilemmas. Struggling to keep his balance while walking a tight rope on the Syrian situation between Israel’s longstanding ties with Washington and handling the Russian tiger lurking next door, he is in no hurry to welcome Erdogan’s determined overtures for the resumption of normal relations.
Turkey is in trouble with both major world powers and, after living for five years under hostile abuse from Ankara, Israel does not owe Erdogan a helping had for pulling him out of the mess.
Last Week’s House Judiciary Committee discussion of a bill requesting the State Department evaluate classifying the Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist organization showcased the confirmation bias of the bill’s Democratic opponents on the panel.
Numerous examples of ties between the international Muslim Brotherhood and terrorist groups like Hamas and al-Qaida peppered the original draft of the bill introduced by Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart, R-Fla.
However, Ranking Member Rep. John Conyers, D-Mich., made the oft-repeated assertion the organization had sworn off violence.
Conyers asserted that the Brotherhood had become a “non-violent religious and social service organization” and that Diaz-Balart’s bill promotes so-called “Islamophobia.”
“Before rushing to conclusions that can lead to unknown and unintended consequences, our committee should consider the facts that pertain to this complex organization,” Conyers said.
He pointed to testimony given in a 2011hearing but much of what was said there undermines Conyers’ premise the Brotherhood is “non-violent.”
For example, Washington Institute Executive Director Robert Sotloff testified that the Muslim Brotherhood is far from “an Egyptian version of the March of Dimes,” whose orientation was fundamentally humanitarian.
“Should the Brotherhood achieve political power, it will almost certainly use that power to transform Egypt into a very different place … A more realistic situation would see deeper and more systemic Islamization of society, including the potential for a frightening growth of sectarianism between Muslims and Copts and even deepening intra-Muslim conflict between Salafis and Sufis,” Sotloff said, accurately predicting the divisive nature of the Brotherhood’s rule before it was ousted in July 2013.
Similarly, another person who testified before the subcommittee cautioned against falling victim to the Brotherhood’s semantics when it comes to terrorism.
“Just because the MB opposes al-Qaeda does not mean that they agree with us on the definition of terrorism,” Tarek Masoud of Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government told the committee. “For example, they view both Hamas and Hezbollah as freedom fighters whose acts of violence are legitimate forms of resistance against what they see as Israeli occupation. In August 2006, former Muslim Brotherhood leader Mahdi Akef even declared that he was ready to send 10,000 (ten thousand) Brothers to fight alongside Hezbollah in its war against Israel. He didn’t, of course. But the sentiment reveals the gulf between us and the Brotherhood on this issue.”
The House bill also includes the 2011 assessment from then-FBI Director Robert Mueller: “I can say at the outset of that elements of the Muslim Brotherhood both here and overseas have supported terrorism.”
Conyers’ effort to characterize the Brotherhood as a “a predominately non-violent religious political and social service organization” ignores the repeated involvement of Brotherhood-linked charities in terrorism financing, ranging from the Union of Good to the Holy Land Foundation. The Holy Land Trial exposed a Hamas-support network in the United States created by the Muslim Brotherhood which included the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) as a branch.
Conyers ignores statements by the Brotherhood in the past year, including a Jan. 27 call for a “long, uncompromising jihad” against the Egyptian government, as noted in Diaz-Balart’s bill.
Groups calling themselves “Revolutionary Punishment” and “Popular Resistance” have carried out attacks against Egyptian police stations and businesses with support from Brotherhood-connected social media accounts. These accounts have been promoted by U.S. based pro-Brotherhood activists.
The legislation included other numerous specific examples of Brotherhood support for funding or engaging in violent jihad since its founding in 1928 by Egyptian schoolteacher Hasan al-Banna.
“…Jihad in its literal significance means to put forth one’s maximal effort in word and deed,” Al-Banna said in an undated speech. “[I]in the Sacred Law it is the slaying of the unbelievers, and related connotations, such as beating them, plundering their wealth, destroying their shrines, and smashing their idols … it is obligatory on us to begin fighting with them after transmitting the invitation [to embrace Islam], even if they do not fight against us.”
Al-Banna also stated that the “people of the Book” should be fought until they pay jizyah, a tax mandated by the Quran paid by Christians and Jews to an Islamic state in exchange for keeping their lives and not embracing Islam.
It notes that the U.S. government previously listed Hamas, the Brotherhood’s Palestinian branch, and Lajnat al-Daawa, the social wing of Kuwait’s branch of the Brotherhood, as terrorist entities.
Lajnat al-Daawa’s reported involvement in terrorism financing on behalf of Osama bin Laden underscores the hollowness of the Brotherhood’s condemnation of al-Qaida. Ramzi Yousef, planner of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, and Khalid Sheikh Muhammad, architect of 9/11, each worked for Lajnat al-Daawa.
Numerous individual Brotherhood members with ties to al-Qaida who were previously sanctioned by the U.S. government as terrorists are mentioned in the bill. Among them; Osama bin Laden’s brother-in-law, Mohammad Jamal Khalifa, served a senior member of the Lebanese branch of the Muslim Brotherhood. Khalifa ran charitable offices on al-Qaida’s behalf in the Philippines, including an office for the Saudi-controlled International Islamic Relief Organization. He also established a charity called the International Relations and Information Center in the Philippines, which was the primary funding mechanism for Khaled Sheikh Mohammed and Ramzi Yousef’s 1995 “Bojinka” plot to blow up American airliners over the Pacific.
Diaz-Balart’s bill additionally points out that the Libyan Muslim Brotherhood’s militias joined forces with Ansar al-Sharia, the al-Qaida linked militia responsible for the Sept. 11, 2012 attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi.
In opposing the bill, Conyers said it unfairly paints all Brotherhood members as terrorists. He dismissed the measure as “Islamophobia [which] may be good politics … but it certainly is not good policy.” Classifying the Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist organization had more to do with fear than keeping Americans safe, he said.
But existing groups on the State Department’s terror list. such as Hizballah and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), also actively engage in social services or serve in parliament.
Hizballah’s social services give it strong support among poor Shiites in Lebanon. It also has 14 seats in Lebanon’s parliament and considerable political clout. Likewise, FARC has a significant social-service component.
Muslim Brotherhood supporters. (Photo: © Reuters)
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