Don't Rescue the Muslim Brotherhood

FRANK J. GAFFNEY, JR. August 23, 2013

Ever since President Obama came to office, his administration has cultivated relations with, legitimated, emboldened, empowered, funded and even armed the Muslim Brotherhood.  This policy has amounted to our changing sides in what is best described as the War for the Free World.

As documented in a free online, video-based course I produced last year (www.MuslimBrotherhoodinAmerica.com), one of the factors behind this strategically disastrous - and largely unnoted - reversal is the success the Brotherhood has had, going back at least to the Clinton administration, in penetrating and running influence operations against our country.  The Brothers call it "civilization jihad."  And it has enabled them to establish not only an array of front groups to insinuate themselves into American civil society institutions and governing agencies.  It has also largely obscured the true nature of this organization and the threat it poses to our nation, allies and interests.

The success of such patient, stealthy subversion is much in evidence at the moment in the response to events in Egypt on the part of some prominent Democrats and Republicans, alike.  In recent days, President Obama and Senators like Jack Reed, Democrat of Rhode Island, and Republicans John McCain, Lindsay Graham and Kelly Ayotte of Arizona, South Carolina and New Hampshire, respectively, have discussed the need to cut off assistance to those in Egypt now battling the Muslim Brotherhood.


The principal justification offered for doing so is that the Egyptian people elected the Brotherhood to run their country after America's longtime ally, Hosni Mubarak, was overthrown, with the support of the Obama administration.  It is further being intensified by the Brothers' success in forcing the government to resort to violence to establish order throughout Cairo and other cities.

The trouble is that the bloodshed now taking place in Egypt - including that of Christians at the hands of Islamists who have torched or otherwise damaged more than eighty churches in recent days - is just a foretaste of what is to come if we do as the aforementioned leaders have in mind and rescue the Muslim Brotherhood.  And some of that blood will inevitably be ours.
This unhappy prospect is inevitable because of a fact obscured by the Brotherhood's successful influence operations, and ignored at our peril:  We know for a fact that the Muslim Brotherhood has as its mission the worldwide imposition of Islam's toxic, brutally repressive and anti-constitutional supremacist doctrine known as shariah.  And yes, it means here, too.
Lest there be any confusion on that point, consider the 1991 mission statement of the Muslim Brotherhood in America: "It is a kind of grand jihad in eliminating and destroying Western civilization from within...sabotaging its miserable house from within...by [our] hands and the hands of the believers so that God's religion is made victorious over all other religions."  The strategic plan from which this passage comes was introduced into evidence during the successful 2008 federal prosecution of Muslim Brotherhood operatives in Dallas, Texas in connection with their fundraising in this country for the organization's Palestinian franchise: the designated terrorist organization known as Hamas.

Senators McCain and Graham have also provided bipartisan political cover to the Islamists' efforts to takeover other countries, as well.  These include, notably, Libya and Syria.  The former has been a debacle of the first order; the murderous attack on our missions and personnel in Benghazi is but a taste of what is to come there and beyond.  And these lawmakers are working with Team Obama to inject the United States into the latter's civil war, with the predictable practical effect of helping the Brotherhood and/or al Qaeda take over that country next.
As in these other places, if the Muslim Brotherhood's American friends have their way in Egypt - most immediately, by cutting off U.S. aid or other ties to its military - the killing will not stop.  It will, instead, mean those dying will increasingly be people who have historically looked to us as allies and partners.  And they will be dispatched by jihadists bent on our destruction, as well.
It seems the military and tens of millions of ordinary citizens in Egypt have no intention of rolling over, as their counterparts have done in Turkey.  In that case, an Islamist regime has used elections to destroy democracy and institute an increasingly shariah-compliant order - complete with the incarceration on trumped-up charges of much of the leadership of the Turkish armed forces.  Having tried and failed to effect a similar transformation in Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood seems now determined to crush its opponents through full-scale civil war.  Were the United States to cut off Egypt's military, it would simply encourage and perhaps enable the Muslim Brotherhood to pursue that course.
Even worse from our point of view, the United States will likely drive the Egyptian military back into the arms of the Russians - and possibly this time the Chinese - folks who would love to displace us and secure close relations with a nation that sits astride the strategic Suez Canal.  These are, after all, countries now seen, unlike America, to be reliable allies, not fair-weather friends.
The Muslim Brotherhood is our enemy.  Insisting on its restoration to power - either immediately or through another round of premature elections - will be perilous for this country and for people in Egypt and elsewhere who do not want to submit to the Islamists and their anti-freedom shariah agenda.

Frank J. Gaffney, Jr. is President of the Center for Security Policy and a columnist for the Washington Times.

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