Francisco Gil-White
Short preface
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The Muslim Brotherhood
organization is now all over the Muslim world. It controls vast amounts of
resources and has an enormous membership. It is highly disciplined. And
tremendously influential. As the Economist
explains: “The Muslim Brotherhood…, founded in Egypt in 1928, has been an
important incubator of Islamist movements, and has survived decades of
repression.” In the recent political upheaval “its highly disciplined youth movement proved
crucial to the protests that overthrew [former Egyptian president] Mr [Hosni] Mubarak.”
What is the
relationship between the Muslim Brotherhood and the US ruling elite? And what
does this relationship hold for the future? This article will seek to explore
these questions.
The interpretation of diplomatic language
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Historian Bernadotte
Schmitt once wrote: “Diplomatic records… never tell the whole story of a
diplomatic transaction, as Bismarck long ago avowed, for the motives of the
negotiators are seldom declared.” But if statesmen and their diplomats, even in
their one-on-one dealings, do not reveal what their real intentions are, then
their public declarations—speeches, interviews, press briefings, etc.—will be
even less transparent. Whoever says, “President Obama’s intention is X because
he declared his intention to be X” is not doing political science but
propaganda. If we wish to understand Obama’s—or, more precisely, the US ruling
elite’s—intentions vis-à-vis the Muslim Brotherhood, we must interpret their public statements. In
this regard, certain statements from the month of February 2011 are especially
useful. Interpretation (naturally) requires context: the context of US actions. We shall provide it. Historian Bernadotte
Schmitt
Let us begin with
Phillip Crowley, Assistant Secretary of State for Public Affairs. At a February
2nd press briefing reporters asked him about the US position on the Muslim
Brotherhood.
[Quote from Press Briefing begins here]
MR. CROWLEY: [...] If any figure wants to play a role in this [new
political] process [in Egypt], they can come forward. If any -- if any group --
Q: They could? Does that include the Muslim Brotherhood?
MR. CROWLEY: If any group wants to come forward and play a role in a
democratic process, a peaceful process, that is their right as Egyptians. It's
not for us, the United States, to dictate this.
Let us unpack this.
Consider the words:
“It’s not for us, the United States, to dictate…” Anybody who has followed US
foreign policy over the years will see the problem. When the US ruling elite
does not like something, it makes its wishes known, and then, if necessary,
forces the outcome. It dictates. Unhappy with a particular regime, it may bomb
(Yugoslavia), invade (Panama, Iraq), or else arrange a coup d’état (Guatemala,
Iran). Or it may do lots of other things. In the 1947 National Security Act,
the US Congress gave US Intelligence very broad authority to influence the media
and political processes of other countries with so-called “covert actions.”
Perhaps more to the
point, just a few days before the above quoted exchange, former US ambassador
to Egypt, Frank G. Wisner, explained the following on TV:
“We [the US ruling elite] have known that the end of the Mubarak
period would be with us in some reasonable time frame. We've been thinking in
these terms. …the situation is not a surprise.”
But if the US
government was already expecting (planning?) a transition to a post-Mubarak
Egypt, who was the favorite to
replace Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak?
Rewind back to June
2009. Just a few months after installing himself in the White House as the new
president of the United States, Barack Obama made a trip to Egypt, to give a
speech, to send a message to Muslims. This is very deliberate stuff. Dramatic
stuff. (As dramatic and deliberate, perhaps, as Obama giving his first
interview as president, just 6 days after assuming office, to Al Arabiya
Television.) But if Obama was there to address Muslims in general, was he
speaking to (winking at?) anyone in
particular? According to a number of reports in the Middle Eastern media,
Obama insisted that top representatives of the Muslim Brotherhood be allowed to
attend his speech.
All by itself, this
invitation to the Muslim Brotherhood is pregnant with meaning. Egypt is a US
client-state, whose military has been built up, tremendously, with US largesse.
And the client military government, led at the time by Hosni Mubarak, had been
trying to keep the Muslim Brotherhood out of power. So the Muslim Brotherhood
representatives, in the context of the dramatic invitation by the president of
the World Superpower (Egypt’s Big Boss), were bound to pay close attention to
the content of Obama’s speech. And producing such careful attention to content,
naturally, was the reason for inviting them. This is how diplomatic language
works.
And what did Obama say
to the leaders of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, whose mission is to make
Islam the Law of State in Egypt?
Obama passionately
praised the virtues of Islam, and showed that he knows the Quran intimately,
for he quoted extensively from it without even glancing at his notes. And he
produced the most remarkable interpretation of his job: “And I consider it part
of my responsibility as President of the United States,” he said pointedly, “to
fight against negative stereotypes of Islam wherever they appear.” As we said,
public statements by government officials are usually mired in deceit,
subterfuge, and indirectness, but in this case we have relatively clear
diplomatic language. Unless the Muslim Brotherhood leaders had fallen into a
deep coma they were bound to hear Obama loud and clear: Your turn is up. Get ready.
Now fast forward a
year and a half later (in political time, a few seconds) to the 2011 protests.
Frank Wisner was sent to Egypt to convey to Mubarak the desires of the US
government, which Phillip Crowley, speaking for the State Department, explained
in a January 31 briefing: “President Mubarak pledged a -- you know, to
undertake political and economic reform. And, as
we've said ever since, we want to see, you know, concrete actions…” The next
day Christiane Amanpour explained on ABC News
what was going on: “President Obama dispatched Frank Wisner, a former
ambassador to Egypt, to deliver a message directly to Mubarak suggesting he not
seek re-election.”
This is how the Empire
dictates the outcome to its client state.
But pressing the
Egyptian military government to 1) remove Mubarak, and 2) rush to hold
elections, as everybody understands,
will give the upper hand to the Muslim Brotherhood. So, not surprisingly, the
next day (February 2), Phillip Crowley was asked by reporters to state the US
position on whether the Muslim Brotherhood should play a role in Egyptian
politics. To which he replied (as we saw): “If any group wants to come forward
and play a role in a democratic process, a peaceful process, that is their
right as Egyptians. It's not for us, the United States, to dictate this.”
So what does this
mean, in context? It means this:
The US ruling elite WOULD LIKE (very much) for
the Muslim Brotherhood to play an active role in Egyptian politics.
Not surprisingly,
there were reports that Frank Wisner had met with the Muslim Brotherhood during
his trip to Egypt. Reporters asked Crowley about this at the same press
briefing, and he denied it (he seemed a bit nervous).
On February 14th
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was interviewed by Al Arabiya Television.
This is “an Arabic-language television news channel… partly owned by the Saudi
broadcaster Middle East Broadcasting Center (MBC).” So Clinton was speaking here directly to the
Saudi-style salafists/wahabbists allied with the Muslim Brotherhood.
[Excerpt from interview begins here]
MR. MELHEM: […] Is the [Muslim] Brotherhood welcome at the table as
President Obama hinted last week?
SEC. CLINTON: That is up to the Egyptian people. […]
[Excerpt from interview ends here]
Translation: Yes, you understood
President Obama’s hint perfectly.
On February 23rd,
Clinton gave an interview to Masrawy.com, an Egyptian website owned, through LINKdotNET, by Orascom Telecom Holding, an Egyptian multinational. She was speaking
directly to Egyptians.
[Excerpt from interview begins here]
MR. GHANIM: […] What would be the reaction of the United States if Muslim
Brotherhood gained power in Egypt through a true democratic election?
SEC. CLINTON: Well, first, let me say that it's up to the
Egyptian people… any party that is committed to nonviolence, committed to
democracy, committed to the rights of all Egyptians, whoever they are, should
have the opportunity to compete for Egyptian votes. […]
[Excerpt from interview ends here]
Translation: We will all pretend that
the Muslim Brotherhood is committed to nonviolence and democracy. Muslim
Brotherhood: no problem.
Mubarak resigned under
US pressure. Then the US pushed for a lightning quick timetable for a
referendum on a new Constitution followed by new elections. According to the Economist, “the referendum marked a big
step towards sending the army… back to barracks… [T]he speedy timetable laid
out in the new deal may help the Islamists of the Muslim Brotherhood, among
others, to dish secular liberals and other fledgling parties in any early
poll.” And this is the reason, as explained by the Economist, that Egyptian liberals voted against going for a new
Constitution and early polls in the referendum (which they lost). (Let us not forget that the old Egyptian
Constitution forbids the formation of religious political parties, something
Egyptian liberals no doubt appreciated about it.)
Now, given that the US
ruling elite appears to be pushing for a Muslim Brotherhood takeover of Egypt,
we should seek to understand what the Muslim Brotherhood stands for.
What does the Muslim Brotherhood preach?
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Ayaan Hirsi Ali is a widely known Somali author who, in
order to escape Islam, took refuge in Holland, where she became a citizen, a
political scientist, and a Member of Parliament. She now lives in the United
States, after a Muslim stabbed her friend Theo van Gogh to death in the streets
of Amsterdam. Pinned between the knife and her friend’s chest was a letter
addressed to Hirsi Ali: you are next. The reason for the murder
was that van Gogh had made a short film with Hirsi Ali about Islam and its oppression of women.
Hirsi Ali knows the Muslim
Brotherhood well. In her autobiography, titled Infidel, she explains the role of this organization in Kenya, where
she lived for a number of years as a refugee from the Somali civil wars. In her
Nairobi neighborhood, the local Muslim Brotherhood preacher was one Boqol Sawm, whose strategy was to recruit the women first, and then use
the women to shame their husbands into becoming good Muslims. If they wanted
their wives to obey them again (for wives need not obey husbands who do not
accept true Islam), they would have to follow the Brotherhood. It was a powerful inducement. “Boqol Sawm,” explains Hirsi Ali,
“shouted that the men who rejected their wives’ call to Islam
would burn. The rich who spent their money on earthly things would burn. The
Muslims who abandoned their fellow Muslims—the Palestinians—were not true
Muslims, and they would burn, too. Islam was under threat and its enemies—the
Jews and the Americans—would burn forever. Those Muslim families who sent their
children to universities in the United States, Britain, and other lands of the
infidels would burn. Life on earth is temporary, Boqol Sawm yelled; it was meant by Allah to test people. The hypocrites
who were too weak to resist the worldly temptations would burn. If you did not
break off your friendships with non-Muslims, you would burn.”
Hirsi Ali tells how one day
she went with her Islamic class, led by one Sister Aziza, to a new Muslim
Brotherhood mosque built in a poor neighborhood with the money of a Saudi
millionaire. The Muslim Brotherhood was converting many poor Kenyans to Islam
with the hook of social assistance (highly effective). A recently converted
Swahili woman began breastfeeding her child the way she used to prior to her
conversion, with her breast in the open.
“All the girls from Sister Aziza’s class shrieked in unison, and
we transported this young woman to a hall in the women’s section. An older
woman of Swahili origin [another convert to Islam], covered from head to toe in
black, started to instruct her in the Islamic way of breast-feeding. First you
say Bismillah before you put the nipple into the mouth. As the baby is
feeding, beg Allah to protect your child from illness, earthly temptations, and
evil ways of the Jews.”
Is an image worth a
thousand words? Perhaps a well-chosen anecdote is worth a thousand
explanations: It is correct for a Muslim
child to begin life suckling Jew-hatred from mama’s teat.
Hirsi Ali explains further:
“[The Muslim Brotherhood] taught that, as Muslims, we should
oppose the West. Our goal was a global Islamic government, for everyone. How
would we fight? Some said the most important goal was preaching: to spread
Islam among non-Muslims and to awaken passive Muslims to the call of the true,
pure belief. Several young men left the group to go to Egypt, to become members
of the original Muslim Brotherhood there. Others received scholarships from
various Saudi-funded groups to go to Quran schools in Medina, in Saudi Arabia.”
There was also much
talk of jihad,
“a word that may have multiple meanings. It may mean that the
faith needs financial support, or that an effort should be made to convert new
believers. Or it may mean violence; violent jihad is a historical constant in
Islam.”
Hirsi Ali never liked this
kind of talk very much. She was attracted to the West: “For me Britain and
America were the countries in my books were there was decency and individual
choice. The West to me meant all those ideas…”
She was hoping that Boqol Sawm was exaggerating. She was hoping that he was
distorting the true content of the Quran, for she did not wish her religion to
preach death to all those will not convert. So she got the book. She could not
read Arabic, so “I bought my own English edition of the Quran and I read it so
I could understand it better. But I found that everything Boqol Sawm had said was in there. Women should obey their husbands. Women
were worth half a man. INFIDELS SHOULD BE KILLED”
By the time the 9/11
attacks happened Hirsi Ali was living in
Holland. There is, of course, a controversy about the authorship of those
attacks. But that is not the point here. The point is how they were perceived
in the Muslim world, where it was assumed by many that Osama bin Laden was the
mastermind, and where the same people accepted that he had done it in the name
of Islam.That was false.
Talking
to a friend on her way to the office the next day, Hirsi Ali began what would become her lifelong
duty: to inform Westerners about what Islam preaches, and the danger that her
former religion poses to liberty and sanity everywhere. “I couldn’t help
myself. Just before we reached the office, I blurted out, ‘But it is about Islam. This is based in belief.
This is Islam.’ …I walked into the office thinking, ‘I have to wake these
people up.’ ” That’s what Hirsi Ali has been trying
to do ever since: wake up Westerners. As she explains about the violence of
9/11,
“This was not just Islam, this was the form of Islam grown and
manufactured by the west.… There were tens of thousands of people, in Africa,
the Middle East—even in Holland—whohave been trained in tis form of Islam.
Some of my readers may
be wondering, ‘But then why is Obama supporting a Muslim Brotherhood takeover
of Egypt? Could it be that he doesn’t understand what the Muslim Brotherhood
stands for?’
Is President Barack Hussein Obama misinformed about Islam and the Muslim Brotherhood?
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Lots of people seem to
think that objectionable US foreign policy should be explained on the basis of
the supposed ignorance or thick-headedness of US leaders. But if
US policy appears to contradict what you believe reasonable, there is an
obvious alternative to proposing that US leaders are misinformed madmen. The
alternative says that US leaders have different values than your own, but they
lie in public about their real intentions (so that you will think they do share your values). This alternative
hypothesis has the advantage of being reasonable. It does not force us to say
that the most powerful people in the world—in charge of a vast and
sophisticated information-gathering system—are stupider, crazier, or less
well-informed than the average blogger.
The point is perfectly
general, but in the case of Barack Obama and the Muslim Brotherhood we can give
a rather sharp demonstration.
Some have argued that
Obama is in reality a closet Muslim, and they point to the words “My Muslim
faith,” which did indeed slide inadvertently from his lips during an ABC News
television interview. Others consider the error completely innocent: Obama
meant to say “My alleged Muslim
faith” and merely failed to pronounce the word “alleged.” But whatever the
facts of Obama’s inner religious convictions, the facts of his upbringing and
family background are not in dispute. President Obama spent his childhood in
Indonesia, the largest Muslim country in the world, and for this reason alone
one could expect him to be well informed about Islam. If that were not enough,
Obama is descended, on his father’s side, from Muslims. As mentioned earlier,
when he insisted that representatives of the Muslim Brotherhood be present at a
speech he gave in Egypt in 2009, he went out of his way to praise Islamic
extremism, repeatedly, and demonstrated that he can quote from the Quran ex tempore. So Obama is not misinformed
about Islam. And since he knows the Quran, he knows, as Ayaan Hirsi Ali also does, that the book calls for the slaughter of
infidels.
But, in particular,
Obama cannot be misinformed about the Muslim Brotherhood. For you see, his own
Muslim family is from Nyang'oma Kogelo, in the extreme Western end of Kenya.
Islam is still a
minority religion in Kenya (about 10%), and Muslims are mostly on the coast, in
the East. In the West, the first Muslim missionaries did not arrive until the
very late 19th c. As a consequence, Muslim converts in this area—the area from
which Obama’s family hails—are mostly the consequence of Muslim Brotherhood
proselytizing, which became especially intense from the 1970s onward. So
Obama’s Muslim family, and in particular his father (whom Obama himself
explains was “raised a Muslim”) must be quite familiar with the Muslim
Brotherhood message that Ayaan Hirsi Ali (above) witnessed in Kenya: death to all infidels and, especially, death
to the Jews.
Also, Obama has to
know that the terrorist organization Hamas, in control of the Gaza strip, which
has a border with Egypt, and pledged to destroy the Jewish state, is a branch
of the Muslim Brotherhood. Why? Because Hamas makes no secret of this, and the
information is published in Article 2 of the Hamas Charter, which the Avalon
Project at Yale University has made public on the internet:
“ARTICLE 2: The Islamic Resistance Movement is one of the wings
of Moslem Brotherhood in Palestine. Moslem Brotherhood Movement is a universal
organization which constitutes the largest Islamic movement in modern times. It
is characterised by its deep understanding, accurate
comprehension and its complete embrace of all Islamic concepts of all aspects
of life, culture, creed, politics, economics, education, society, justice and
judgment, the spreading of Islam, education, art, information, science of the
occult and conversion to Islam.”
Here then are the
facts of US foreign policy. After sending billions upon billions of dollars in
US armament to the Egyptian military since 1974, Obama—or, more precisely, the
US ruling elite—now wants the Muslim Brotherhood in charge of all that
armament. This, Obama—or, more precisely, the US ruling elite—is doing with a
perfect understanding of what the Muslim Brotherhood is and what it intends to
do: destroy Israel.
Does this agree with
the history of US foreign policy? Perfectly. It has nothing to do with Obama per se but with the longstanding goals
of the US ruling elite.
The future, coming soon
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Other Muslim countries
besides Egypt have been experiencing protests and revolts of late. In every
case, it is the Muslim Brotherhood taking the lead, and the Muslim Brotherhood
taking over. In Tunisia, the main opposition to the deposed president was the
Islamist movement Enahda, now legalized as a
party. Enahda traces its roots to
the Muslim Brotherhood. In Libya, the Muslim
Brotherhood “is the best-run opposition movement.” And in Syria everything
indicates that the Muslim Brotherhood is the main force behind the recent unrest.
The US government is
lending support to all of these revolts. It appears, therefore, that the
Brotherhood is poised to gain lots of power in the Muslim world, in the short
term. No surprise, then, that the leadership of the Muslim Brotherhood is
expressing such satisfaction with the course of developments.
|
The future, sooner
than you think, will show us a Muslim world universally run by the Islamist
offspring of the Muslim Brotherhood developed for decades by the west, where a
child learns to kill people of other religions,hate and fear Jews,and later
used as terrorists for imperialist west. literally, at his mother’s teat. Where
the goal of everything is a Universal World Government of Islam. Where killing
the remaining obstacles—the infidels who will not convert—is a glorious
undertaking, and to die in the process ensures a ticket to Heaven.This time,I think nations like Russia and China will simply be termed Infidels,just Gadaffi was termed a non-muslim and murderer.
All of this, courtesy
of US leaders (who are apparently in a great hurry).
CHAMAKHE MAURIENI IS A MOROCCAN BORN FREELANCE WRITER,ENTERPRENEUR,AND AUTHOR.ADD HIM ON FACEBOOK:www.facebook.com/chamakhe.maurieni
HIS LATEST BOOK IS TITLED FACEBOOK IS DECEPTION_- VOLUME ONE AND VOLUME TWO
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