This Just recently, the Muslim Brotherhood released its political platform, part of which would establish an Iranian-style mullah council overseeing Egypt's democratic institutions. It also prohibits Christians and women from serving as President.
What does this particular development signify? What does it highlight in regards to what U.S. policy should be toward the Muslim Brotherhood?
A heated debate among policymakers and analysts is in progress at the moment about how the U.S. should deal with the group. Robert S. Leiken and Steven Brooke, for instance, have advanced arguments about “the moderate Muslim Brotherhood,” emphasizing that the U.S. should see the group as a notable opportunity, to nurture engagement with it and not to treat it automatically as it would treat terrorist groups such as al-Qaeda. Other experts, such as Patrick Poole, firmly disagree with this approach, arguing that the Muslim Brotherhood is anything but moderate and that it needs to be designated as a terrorist organization and to be treated like one.
Today we have assembled a distinguished panel to discuss these and other questions regarding the Muslim Brotherhood. Our guests are:
Douglas Farah, a former Washington Post correspondent, now an author and consultant on terror finance issues. He is currently a senior investigator for the NEFA Foundation, for whom he wrote the paper on the Muslim Brotherhood in America, based on the HLF court papers. He is also a senior fellow for the International Assessment and Strategy Center (IASC). His most recent book is Merchant of Death: Money, Guns, Planes and the Man Who Makes War Possible.
Jeff Breinholt, a terrorism expert and former prosecutor. Breinholt has written about the Muslim Brotherhood from his position as Director of National Security Law at the International Assessment and Strategy Center.
Daveed Gartenstein-Ross, the vice president of research at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and the author of My Year Inside Radical Islam , which documents his time working for the extremist Al Haramain Islamic Foundation.*
and
Patrick Poole, a researcher who has written and lectured on the Muslim Brotherhood. He introduced FrontPage readers to "The Project" of the Muslim Brotherhood, and earlier this year debated Robert Leiken and Stephen Brooke of the Nixon Center concerning their "The Moderate Muslim Brotherhood" article published in Foreign Affairs.
FP: Douglas Farah, Jeff Breinholt, Daveed Gartenstein-Ross and Patrick Poole, welcome to Frontpage Symposium.
Patrick Poole, let’s begin with you. What are your thoughts regarding the Muslim Brotherhood’s recent release of its political platform?
Poole: Thanks, Jamie. I think the most notable thing about the Muslim Brotherhood's political platform is that at every opportunity the Brotherhood has used it to articulate its political vision – and it is exactly the opposite of what the Brotherhood's Western apologists inside the Beltway and the establishment media represent the organization as. We can read diatribes about the so-called "Moderate Muslim Brotherhood" in Foreign Affairs, but when the Brotherhood speaks on its own we can only hear the extremist rhetoric about instituting shari'a and excluding non-Muslims and women from high office.
We are now seeing a repeat of what happened after the Brotherhood released its Reform Initiative in March 2004. Prior to its release, their Western apologists promised a new, improved, and democratic Muslim Brotherhood. When the Reform Initiative was published, they outlined their extremist agenda to establish an Iranian-style Islamic state. Their apologists then promptly went out to create a smokescreen, parroting their "the Muslim Brotherhood is not a monolith" catchphrases and trotting out the so-called "moderate" leaders - all to convince us that the Brotherhood was something other than what it is. This pattern is exactly what we see with their brand new political program. No one should be fooled about their ambitions having stated their intent so clearly.
FP: I am a bit confused as to what can be moderate about a group that yearns for a world without non-Muslims and women. If you don’t want certain people and groups in “high office” it is obvious what you are saying about them, and purges are the next result.
Douglas Farah?
Farah: One of the things the Brotherhood has done extremely well through the years is couch its extremist agenda in moderate language, particularly to the outside, non-Muslim world. They master the ways, language and structure of the non-believing world, and learn how the system operates before beginning to penetrate it, influence it and ultimately, seek to bring about its collapse.
International Muslim Brotherhood leaders seldom offer a direct defense of their platform to the outside world, even in the case of beating one's wife, stoning to death and other parts of the broader platform they endorse as part of their acceptance of Sharia law. They hedge, call for a moratorium on the activities and generally try to move on quickly, because they cannot disown it, yet they cannot embrace it without alienating those they are courting in the West.
Yet, the Brothers have to speak a different language to their followers, and that is the beauty of documents like the platform, the Holy Land Foundation exhibits and others. There, the leaders are speaking to their followers and laying out a much different, more coherent and true agenda. The caliphate, the ultimate goal of the Muslim Brotherhood, would be a place where non-Muslim pay extra taxes and cannot hold high office, where women are relegated to permanent second-class status, where arms are amputated for thievery, adulterers stoned, music banned, democracy and human rights denied in favor of their interpretation of the Koran, etc. etc. There is no room for equivocation on what the Koran demands, in their view.
So let's not fool ourselves. The Americanized and European-ized Ikhwan are still Ikhwan. They cannot say their agenda in Europe and the United States is "a kind of grand Jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and “sabotaging” its miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers so that it is eliminated and God’s religion is made victorious over all other religions," as they write in their U.S. declaration of intent. So, they say they are working for "civil rights," to "end oppression and discrimination," etc. If they stated their real objective they would have no access to power. By reframing their public agenda as something Americans and Europeans understand and embrace (a true touch of genius), they have access to the FBI, DOD, presidents, secretaries of state etc.
So, as Patrick says, they tell us what we want to hear, but never abandon their true intent, and intent they make clear in their internal writings.
Breinholt: I agree with much of what Patrick and Doug describe about the Muslim Brotherhood. The more interesting question is why there is such a debate about a group whose manifesto describes its goal as “jihad.” One would think that, after 9/11, such groups would be radioactive within the U.S., and that Americans who argue that the we should consider going into business with them would be laughed out of polite company. Why is that not happening? I want to offer a diagnosis and a remedy.
When things are not going well, there is a tendency to think about radical solutions. Just like the lonely guy at the bar at closing time, ugly people start looking attractive if they offer the prospect of some new way of thinking and the means out of the morass. Doug has illustrated this in his book about Victor Bout, once we needed to keep supplies efficiently flying into Iraq. I think this dynamic is in play with the Brotherhood, who claim to favor democracy and look relatively un-bad to those looking for a novel way for winning the hearts and minds of the Arab world, at a time when we otherwise seem not to be doing very well. To this, you add the difficulty of pinning the Brotherhood down on its core goals, and you have a recipe for some bad official partnering. Is the Muslim Brotherhood’s goal impose Shari’ah law on the unwilling? If so, it’s not something they advertise. When you ask them that question, as Christianne Amanpour recently did on that CNN series, you tend to get a deer in the headlights.
If this is the cause of the recent willingness to embrace of the Brotherhood, what is the remedy? It is to insist that the Brotherhood operate transparently, under our laws. Surely, no one can seriously object to this suggestion. After all, this is what we require of American political candidates, and U.S. charities, in order to assure that voters and donors are not sold a bill of goods. It's what we require of companies traded on the New York stock exchange. If the Brotherhood within the U.S. is a legitimate, democracy-loving political movement, let’s have it send a list of its members to FPM to publish. Why have they circulated documents describing the need to practice tradecraft to conceal their true membership and goals? Americans have been convicted of felonies for making illegal political campaign contributions, and for such things as lying to the government. Ask George Steinbrenner, or Martha Stewart Whether the Brotherhood has violent goals within the U.S. is rather beside the point. That’s never been an element of white-collar fraud, let alone choosing international partners. If our criteria in deciding whether to embrace the Brotherhood is that they are not as bad as Al Qaeda, it would seem that there has been a serious dumbing down of deviancy.
There still exists little problem for the Brotherhood’s U.S. supporters: what’s the deal with this “jihad” business? If the Brotherhood is not really serious about conquest through violence, why is that term in their manifesto? Of course, some of my conservatives colleagues have suggested that “jihad” does not really mean violence, but that’s a little hard to accept when the Brotherhood manifesto also talks about “dying in the cause of Allah” and it highest glory. If you accept that the Hamas is one of the components of the Brotherhood, it has plenty of American blood on its hands since 1994. I challenge Robert Leikin and others to meet with Stephen Flatow and other surviving victims of Palestinian terrorism, as I have, and to try to maintain their warm feeling towards the Brotherhood.
On the question of whether the U.S. should embrace them, count me among the highly skeptical.
Gartenstein-Ross: My colleagues do a good job of outlining the Muslim Brotherhood’s problematic ideology, as well as the naïve assumptions underlying some of the strategies of engagement that have been urged upon policymakers. I believe that the question of whether we can gain strategic advantage by engaging members of the Muslim Brotherhood in dialogue remains open. There may be some benefit to doing so: the U.S. should fight smarter in general, and engaging members of the Muslim Brotherhood in dialogue may (or may not) be an effective way to bolster moderates within the group’s ranks and drive our enemies against each other. Yet effective engagement requires a solid understanding of the ideology of groups that we intend to engage: the unrealistic assumptions of those who currently urge us to engage the Brotherhood is perhaps the best argument about why doing so at this particular juncture is not a good idea.
I would not describe the article penned by Robert S. Leiken and Steven Brooke as intellectually bankrupt. Unlike many advocates of engaging the Brotherhood who simply ignore some of the group’s more violent and bigoted ideological strands, Leiken and Brooke confront the Brotherhood’s continued veneration of Sayyid Qutb as well as the anti-Semitism that can be easily found in its literature. Yet their sweeping conclusions are at times laughable, as when they declare: “When it comes to the Muslim Brotherhood, the beginning of wisdom lies in differentiating it from radical Islam and recognizing the significant differences between national Brotherhood organizations.” Prominent aspects of the Brotherhood’s ideology make it difficult to draw the sharp distinction between that group and radical Islam that Leiken and Brooke would like.
As Farah outlines, the Brotherhood is known for its dissimulation. If policymakers who intend to engage it in dialogue do not understand the group’s ideology, they are likely to be taken in by dialogue partners who are able to pass themselves off as educated and appreciative of Western culture. (Note that Leiken and Brooke make specific reference to the fact that Brotherhood member Kamal El Helbawi is an “admirer of Shakespeare and the Brontës”—the kind of nod to Western culture that analysts looking for dialogue partners frequently believe has far more significance than it actually does.)
Engagement with groups like the Brotherhood, if it is to gain us anything, needs to be done against a backdrop of knowledge about what the group actually believes. Sadly, it seems that advocates of engagement are first obscuring what the group believes, and then claiming that engagement is justified based on their fictionalized accounts. This is a recipe for disaster.
Poole: The only thing I would add regarding the supposed "moderation" of the Brotherhood is that most of the moderates, such as they are, left in 1996 to form the Wasat Party after years of intransigent leadership and ideological lockdown. Al-Wasat still advances an Islamist agenda and uses terms like "democracy" and "human rights" in very different ways, but they are nonetheless viewed with suspicion by the Brotherhood. What this means is that, much like Elvis, the moderates have already left the building. Few are actually left, and as we see in their official documents and pronouncements, any remaining moderates have virtually no influence on the organization.
That hasn't prevent the Brotherhood's supporters in the West from identifying so-called "moderates" in leadership, but only after short investigation it becomes apparent that the "moderates" march in lockstep following the hardline leadership when they are addressing the faithful, just as Doug said earlier about their speaking a different language depending on their audience. Acknowledging this operational duplicity is essential for understanding their political and social agenda.
Farah: To me one of the most instructive things about the Brotherhood is an experience Patrick and I had together, involving the Foreign Affairs piece published by Robert Lieken. Leiken, and many others since, make a significant point of praising the writings of MB leader Hassan al-Hudaybi and his "Preachers, Not Judges" book, which, according to the current MB lobbying efforts, was written in rebuttal to Sayyid Qutb's violent strain of Islam. Qutb, the leader of the MB who was hanged in 1966, wrote "Milestones," which remains the seminal work on violent jihad that the MB embraces. According to the current MB storyline, al-Hudaybi's work is embraced by the global Umma and the MB in particular, while Qutb's quaint notions of violence and war against the infidel and apostate regimes have gone out of date. Al-Hudaybi is the evidence of MB's ideological and theological rehabilitation.
A nice story, but only a story that Westerners, (to use Breinholt's analogy), sitting at the bar at closing time and looking for something to grab on to, embrace. In fact al-Hudaybi very likely did not write "Preachers" at all. Even if he did, the target was not Qutb, who is never mentioned. Beyond that, and this is the key point to the deception, al-Hudaybi's work was only published twice, both times in Egypt by the regime that likely paid for the book's publication, and only in Arabic. One cannot find the book today. In contrast, "Milestones" and other work by Qutb is sold on all Ikhwan websites, remains one of the best selling Muslim texts in the world, and has been translated into dozens of languages. It circulates widely in the United States, distributed through the MB legacy organizations here. "Preachers" cannot be found.
Yet, by offering to guide unschooled outsiders through the process-the source in the case of Leiken and other articles was al-Hudaybi's grandson and active MB member by his own account-the MB controls the information and language. The storyline of "Preachers" surpassing and replacing "Milestones" became a part of the policy debate. The false equivalence strategy is brilliant and hard to fight.
We see much the same thing, in my opinion, in the current efforts to change the word "jihad" to "hirabah," a word that means "sinful violence." Hirabah may be a useful word, but it is not part of the Muslim theological lexicon, as Jihad is. It was used for a few centuries, long ago, and now has no currency. Yet, in an effort to let the MB and others off the hook for their open embrace of Jihad, some are looking for another word. Hirabah seems to fit. But this is another run at false equivalence. Jihad has a specific meaning in Muslim theology. Hirabah is a minor, little-known and little used word, but suddenly given as an equivalent in the debate.
To close, my point is that the MB is masterful at appropriating the language and terms of debate, both about itself and about their true goals. Patrick and others have been extremely helpful in trying to wrest that control away and set new terms, but this has not yet taken root in policy circles in the U.S. government. There, the MB's spoon-fed and self-serving appropriation of language and agenda still dominate.
Breinholt: There does not seem to be much daylight in the opinions of my fellow panelists. The only disagreement involves the good faith of those like Robert Leikin who have been championing the Muslim Brotherhood as a counterweight to al Qai’da. Their relative good faith is irrelevant, however, if we agree that their prescriptions are wrong. I ask readers to indulge me in another loose analogy to illustrate why this is so:
There was a story told in a small budget movie about 15 years ago involving two European survivors of Hitler’s death camps who run into each other in Montreal park several decades after the war. One is an Orthodox rabbi, while the other is a secular atheist, and the film revolves around their argument over the meaning of the Holocaust in the course of the afternoon. The rabbi tell a story about how he was recently on a train and accosted by a secular Jewish woman who disapproved of the way he was dressed, because of the problems his sect's refusal to assimilate causes fellow Jews like her. Seeing a way to humble her, the rabbi says that she misperceives him, and that he’s actually Amish. The woman immediately shifts gears, and replies, “Oh, I have such great respect for your people, who insist on carrying on your tradition in the face of modern pressures.”
The woman was the brunt of this joke. Her reaction was obviously wrong. After all, why should she challenge the garb of fellow Jews while expressing approval for how the Amish have withstood pressures to conform?
So it is with the Muslim Brotherhood, only in reverse. Its Western apologists seem to think the religious basis for its political outlook is quaint. It means that the Brotherhood stands for something, and perhaps that it is not as easily corruptible as previous Palestinian governments. These apologists refuse to consider how Brotherhood’s politico-religious outlook would translate into statecraft if they rose to power through the ballot box and controlled a country like Egypt. The problem is that, when this happens, the Brotherhood’s view of individual liberty would look very much like al Qa’ida’s, a group the Brotherhood’s Western supporters have no trouble condemning. Just as the woman on the train was wrong to criticize the dress style of the Orthodox rabbi while simultaneously revering the same styles worn by the Amish, I think it is wrong not to condemn the Muslim Brotherhood's worldview where it is indistinguishable from the odious views of Bin Laden and Al Zawahiri. That's why Doug and Patrick's observations are so relevant.
What about my proposal that the Brotherhood be forced to be transparent within the U.S.? That seems to be sine quo non of an entity that claims to be democratic. While I am not holding out hope that they will accept my challenge and submit their membership roster for publication by FPM, something happened in the course of this symposium that suggests another possibility. In Chicago, Abdulhaleem Ashqar was sentenced to 11 years in prison. His crime was refusing to testify about his colleagues after being granted immunity. At his sentencing, Ashqar was reportedly defiant, saying that he would do it again if faced with the same choice today.
Who exactly is he protecting, and why? Is Ashqar a member of the Muslim Brotherhood? Well, let's see, he ran for president of the Palestinian Authority as a member of the Muslim Brotherhood's party, which seems to answer that question. In the U.S., where the Brotherhood reportedly has a presence, it is a crime to conceal non-privileged, relevant information from a duly-impaneled grand jury, as Ashqar now knows. If the Brotherhood is as transparent and democracy-loving as Leikin and others argue, why are its members going to jail for refusing to be open about their membership and operations? If they insist on being taken seriously as a political movement, they should expect the political backlash that follows when their leaders are convicted of white-collar crimes.
Hopefully, people like Leikin will realize that. If they do not, we will cease having many disagreements over their good faith. After all, we should not have one standard that governs our homegrown politicians, and something less exacting when it comes to Third World parties that aspire to compete here. That's what I mean by dumbing deviancy downward.
Gartenstein-Ross: Doug spoke of the experience he and Patrick had debating about engagement of the Muslim Brotherhood, in which Hassan al-Hudaybi’s book Preachers, Not Judges was given far more significance by Western scholars writing about the Brotherhood than it is by the Brotherhood itself. I had my own bizarre al-Hudaybi experience a couple of years ago when debating against Mahdi Bray, the executive director of the Muslim American Society’s (MAS) Freedom Foundation, in the pages of the Dallas Morning News. For the uninitiated, MAS is the name under which the U.S. Brotherhood (or, rather, one branch of the U.S. Brotherhood) operates. An excellent investigative report published in the Chicago Tribune in late 2004 details how a contentious debate among Brotherhood members preceded MAS’s incorporation, and provides a glimpse into MAS’s internal educational curriculum—a curriculum dominated by the most violent Brotherhood ideologues, such as Sayyid Qutb.
In my Dallas Morning News column, I criticized MAS for propagating radical teachings internally while simultaneously trying to promote itself as a paragon of moderation: at the time, the group was loudly speaking about building youth centers to keep young Muslims “away from the voices of extremism.” Naturally, Bray’s response introduced Hudaybi: “Mr. Ross’ information concerning MAS and the Muslim Brotherhood is equally flawed. For example, he mentions Sayyid Qutb ‘advocating militant Jihad against non-believers,’ but fails to mention that the leader of the Brotherhood in the ’60s, Hasan Hudaybi, wrote an extensive refutation of Mr. Qutb’s views.”
While this was a natural move for someone on Bray’s side of the debate, his argument was worse than irrelevant. I didn’t mention Qutb in my column because of his association with the Brotherhood: rather, he was relevant because MAS’s internal curriculum and required reading features Qutb. I have posted .mht copies of that internal curriculum at the Counterterrorism Blog, and Patrick has posted the text of the curriculum here at FPM. A quick look at the curriculum shows the irony of Bray’s argument: while a top-level MAS member will have encountered four different works from Qutb, Hudaybi is nowhere to be found. The exchange with Bray illustrates Doug’s point about control over the information and language concerning the Brotherhood: the notion that Hudaybi’s tract demonstrates the Brotherhood’s moderation has become so ingrained in the minds of some debaters that they will trot his work out even when it is completely irrelevant.
John Esposito, the founding director of Georgetown University’s Prince Alwaleed bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding, provides another example of this phenomenon. He and his colleague John Voll wrote a somewhat bizarre letter to the editor of the Washington Post in September 2004 criticizing an article that the Post had published about the Brotherhood:
It also presented a flawed picture of the Brotherhood, which is based in Egypt . Readers might think that Sayyid Qutb—described as a “Brotherhood leader” in the 1960s who “advocated militant jihad against nonbelievers”—represented the position of the organization. In fact, the Brotherhood rejected his extremism. The general guide of the Brotherhood at the time, Hasan Hudaybi, wrote an extended refutation of Mr. Qutb’s views.
In addition to the problem that Doug has outlined with this analysis—that Qutb’s work is more prominent within the contemporary Brotherhood than Hudaybi’s—Esposito had to contradict his own academic work to argue that Qutb should not have been described as a “Brotherhood leader.” Esposito in fact used the same phraseology when describing Qutb in his contribution to The Oxford History of Islam: “Thousands were arrested and Brotherhood leaders—among them the militant ideologue of Islamic revolution, Sayyid Qutb (1906-66)—were executed” (emphasis added). Elsewhere in the same contribution, Esposito describes Qutb as “the great theoretician of the Muslim Brotherhood.” Other authors in the Esposito-edited Oxford History go even further in tying Qutb to the Brotherhood. Vincent J. Cornell, for example, described Qutb as the “chief ideologist of the Muslim Brotherhood.”
All of which demonstrates a significant point. Those who argue that the Brotherhood is moderate often like to portray their position as more nuanced than those of us who are concerned about the Brotherhood’s ideology—painting their debating opponents as making assumptions that are not reflective of reality. Yet many of their arguments for the Brotherhood’s moderation, such as the Hudaybi narrative, are demonstrably guilty of unrealistic assumptions.
Jeff has now twice noted the Brotherhood’s lack of transparency. Some policymakers and journalists are so desperate to promote ostensibly moderate Muslim organizations that they will look past this lack of transparency and even alarming signs of radicalism (such as, for example, the endorsement of suicide bombings). At the very least, I think we can all agree that policymakers and others should be very skeptical about regarding organizations like MAS—which refuse to be open about their association with the Brotherhood or honest about their Brotherhood-influenced teachings—as partners in the battle against Islamic extremism.
Poole: I'm glad that Daveed brought up his published interchange with Mahdi Bray in the pages of the Dallas Morning News back a few years ago. When Daveed noted that the Muslim American Society had published a fatwa permitting suicide bombing in their organizational magazine, The American Muslim, in the March 2002 issue, Bray flat-out denied it and basically called Daveed a liar. But as I demonstrated in an article here at FrontPage, by going through an external archive of the magazine's website, the fatwa was not only exactly as Daveed had represented, but MAS had tried to erase any evidence of the fatwa existence after it had been exposed - just as they had done with their membership curriculum.
That whole interchange demonstrated a fundamental problem when discussing the Muslim Brotherhood: you can never take anything they say at face value. Deception and duplicity have been standard tools in crafting their public image for Western audiences, but their Western apologists only want us to consider one side of their two faces. Alain Chouet, the former head of the French Secret Service has said that "like every fascist movement on the trail of power, the Brotherhood has achieved perfect fluency in double-speak". That is a warning American policymakers should take seriously.
This deception and duplicity extends to the Western apologists themselves. Doug and I pretty much buried the public mythology surrounding the claims made about the role of Preachers, Not Judges in the Muslim Brotherhood's public ideology - that Hudaybi played little or no role in its publication and that it wasn't directed at Sayyid Qutb - but that hasn't prevented the apologists from continuing to float the claim about its supposed importance.
Then we have the Truespeak movement that Doug mentioned earlier. As Pentagon analyst Stephen Coughlin noted in a recent DoD memo, this effort is a Muslim Brotherhood-backed enterprise. The Islamic "scholars" who have thown their weight behind Truespeak are associated with the Brotherhood, and the sources cited in support of their lexicon don't support their case. The discussion regarding Truespeak is one being made entirely in the American policy circles. It has no impact whatsoever on what is actually being preached in Muslim Brotherhood-controlled mosques all over the world.
There is one addition I would make to Jeffrey's comments about Abdulhaleem Ashqar and his connection to the Muslim Brotherhood. In fact, we have evidence that he is/was part of the Muslim Brotherhood as indicated by the 1992 phonebook introduced as evidence in the Holy Land Foundation trial this summer that lists Ashqar as the "Texana" regional leader of the Muslim Brotherhood in North America.
Farah: I agree that transparency is vital, and enforcing that concept as government entities seek different Muslim groups to engage with, is vital. If one feels to need to obfuscate and deny membership in an organization that is not illegal, then there is a transparency problem.
As Patrick says, there is virtually nothing that the Brotherhood organizations say that can be taken at face value. Every interpretation, every public utterance, every denial of things past, has to be examined, and we have generally be slow in coming to that recognition. The sad fact is that almost no one in government is even asking the questions about these groups or Brotherhood writ large. Almost all the serious work is being done by private citizens and entities outside of government, while the Brotherhood has the inside track-through the Clinton years, through the Bush years and likely into the next administration.
Until the government cuts off the only real currency of these groups-access to power and legitimization-we are a small, bothersome group that has yet to significantly slow their train. The ability to convince rational people like those at Truespeak to push, perhaps unwittingly, a major Brotherhood initiative, is staggering. Truespeak's initiative on language change is coursing through the Pentagon and to the staff of Gen. David Petraeus.
The information on these groups is readily available now, particularly since the Holy Land Foundation trial. Enough has been written that anyone who wants to can have a clear understanding of the methodology, theology, ideology and modus operandi of these groups. The only think lacking in most circles is a desire to learn and understand how a small band of dedicated people, backed by foreign money, have succeeded in gaining credibility and setting a political agenda while seeking to implement a strategy to topple the government and do away with our fundamental precepts as a nation. That is no small accomplishment, and one that frankly scares the hell out of me.
Breinholt: Doug has mentioned the Truthspeak project, which I want to pick up on it, but first I want to describe why I keep harping on transparency.
Transparency is a virtue. In foreign policy, it determines which developing countries are eligible for foreign aid. In the U.S., we have chosen to practice what we preach, through legal regimes to assure transparent operations in important public functions. It is why we have campaign finance rules - to make sure that those who are trying to influence our leaders are out in the open. It is why, since the Cold War, we have required persons in the U.S. who are lobbying on behalf of foreign powers to register themselves. It is also the rationale for rules requiring banks to know their customers and report suspicious activity to the government, so as to deprive the unscrupulous of access to the financial system. It's why we have the SEC. Transparency is designed to minimize the prospect of backroom deals, hidden agendas, and front groups who argue for certain actions while concealing their true intentions and the identity of their financial backers. Accountability is good, and the best way to assure it is through the shining of sunlight on who is doing what, and who is paying them for it.
Is the Muslim Brotherhood within the U.S. acting transparently? Not by a long shot. That's why it should be disqualified for the benefits of official outreach, unless and until they decide to get with the program. This conclusion does not require us to reach the conclusion that its members are violent.
Regarding Truthspeak, it is the brainchild of Jim Guirard who, with Michael Waller, have been pushing the idea that the U.S. should scrap the term jihad to define who we are fighting, and instead rely on the more limited Arabic word " hirabah."
Waller wrote a book called Fighting the War of Ideas Like a Real War (Institute of World Politics 2007), which argues that we should build relations and earn the trust of that portion of the Muslim world that we can peel away from the hardcore radical Islamic extremists. He claims that this peelable portion, which include Muslim traditionalists, reformers, and even fundamentalists (the latter "must not be dismissed as fringe elements," Waller argues) together make up the vast majority of all Muslim in the world. We are not at war with Islam, he claims. We can convince this collection of Muslims to follow with our counterterrorism efforts if we show them a little kindness and prevail on them that we share a common enemy - the few radicals in their midst. Ceasing our consistent condemnation of jihad, he argues, would be a step in the right direction, since it is offensive to too large a portion of the Muslim world for whom jihad is a religious calling.
The problem with this argument is it involves not recognizing that our national security problem is not limited to terrorists, but extends to the human rights of those people unfortunate enough to live in places run by Islamists. This is why the Brotherhood's lack of transparency obviates the need for us to reach the question of whether they are in favor of terrorism. It is enough that they have never renounced their goal imposing Shari'ah law on much of the globe.
Viewed this way, it is not merely violence we should fear from Muslims, as Waller suggests. It is the mandatory imposition of the Shari'ah on the unwilling in the West. You think this is not possible? Imagine how your grandparents would have reacted in 1945 to the prediction that, by 2007, it would be illegal to smoke in New York City restaurants. Getting the U.S. positioned where Muslims want them to be is part of even the most benevolent meanings of jihad. That is why the term is useful to describe what it is we are fighting. It captures what we don't like in the manifest destiny nature of Muslim aspirations: striving to make the world more Islamic. When Muslim organizations pursue their political aims in a non-transparent way, we have reason to distrust them.
Of course, the Muslim Brotherhood has a vested interest in polishing the term jihad. It is, after all, part of its Manifesto. What does the Brotherhood intend by the term? The Manifesto reads "Allah is our objective. The Prophet is our leader. Quran is our law. Jihad is our way. Dying in the way of Allah is our highest hope." Does not leave much to the imagination, does it?
We don't have to stop there. How does the Muslim Brotherhood describe its actions within the U.S. when it is speaking to it members? According to an internal document seized by the FBI, and recently disclosed:
The process of settlement [of Islam in the United States] is a "Civilization-Jihadist" process with all the word means. The Ikhwan must understand that all their work in America is a kind of grand Jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and "sabotaging" their miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers so that it is eliminated and God's religion is made victorious over all religions. Without this level of understanding, we are not up to this challenge and have not prepared ourselves for Jihad yet. It is a Muslim's destiny to perform Jihad and work wherever he is and wherever he lands until the final hour comes, and there is no escape from that destiny except for those who choose to slack.
Sorry, Mike and Jim. Some of us do not buy your arguments the term jihad has too many offensive connotations, and that it should be shelved in favor of "hirabah." If the shoe fits …..
Gartenstein-Ross: As Jeff observed, there is not much daylight in the opinions of this symposium’s panelists. Since there is broad agreement among us, in my last contribution I would like to summarize what I consider to be the most salient points.
First, policymakers and analysts need to better understand the Muslim Brotherhood before even thinking about engaging the group. It seems that I’m the only panelist who thinks it possible (though not necessarily probable) that, if done right, engaging the Brotherhood could help bolster moderates within the group and, as President Bush called for just after 9/11, turn our enemies against each other. But at present, calls for engagement are premised on a false idea of the Brotherhood, one that sharply distinguishes it from terror groups that pine for a global caliphate. To accept this illusory idea of the Brotherhood, it is necessary to ignore the group’s political platform, the writings of its key ideologues, and its history. The only way we can gain anything from engaging the group is by entering discussions without illusion or self-deception, but the loudest voices for engagement have been characterized by false hope—and, consequently, by false characterizations of the Brotherhood. Before we seriously entertain the possibility of engagement, the advocates of this course need to demonstrate a better understanding of the Brotherhood—and base their arguments for engagement on the Brotherhood as it is, not as they would like it to be.
Second, the Brotherhood has shown a penchant for guile and duplicity. They have done this internationally—as Doug observed, by “master[ing] the ways, language and structure of the non-believing world”—and have done this through affiliate groups in the West. This is one reason that dialogue with the Brotherhood based on the assumptions urged by analysts like Leiken and Brooke would be so dangerous. A productive dialogue is only possible if the U.S.’s representatives are able to refute the Brotherhood’s false representations, rather than swooning when a Brotherhood member expresses his admiration of the Western literary canon.
The Muslim Brotherhood is not the Islamic equivalent of the Kiwanis Club: it has an unequivocal ideological agenda. Jeff quoted from an internal Brotherhood document speaking of settling Islam in the United States as a “‘Civilization-Jihadist’ process” working toward “destroying the Western civilization from within.” The Brotherhood cannot be declared moderate by pretending that such documents do not exist. Rather, for the group to truly be moderate, its ideology and concomitant agenda must somehow change. Aside from the absence of evidence indicating an ideological shift, there is another reason to be skeptical of the Brotherhood. In his classic study The Society of the Muslim Brothers, Richard P. Mitchell describes the Brotherhood’s fifth conference, which came on the group’s tenth anniversary. In memorializing the Brotherhood’s ideology, and the conference insisted on
(1) Islam as a total system, complete unto itself, and the final arbiter of life in all its categories; (2) an Islam formulated from and based on its two primary sources, the revelation of the Qur’an and the wisdom of the Prophet in the Sunna; and (3) an Islam applicable to all times and to all places.
When Muslim extremist groups speak of “an Islam applicable to all times and to all places,” that should serve as a warning sign. Such groups believe that their political mission is driven by an immutable religious imperative. Since their raison d’être holds that their religious obligations are unchanging, it is difficult for these groups to “evolve” away from extremist principles without undercutting their core rationale.
Third, we should be wary not only of the international Brotherhood, but also of the group’s U.S. branches. American affiliates follow the group’s established pattern of deception, packaging themselves as “civil rights” groups devoted to pluralism and dialogue while propagating Islamic supremacist teachings internally. I spoke of MAS’s history and curriculum in this symposium; it is clearly not the only domestic Brotherhood affiliate.
The Muslim Brotherhood has not abandoned its extremist principles. Contra Leiken and Brooke, I do not think that “the beginning of wisdom lies in differentiating [the Brotherhood] from radical Islam.” Rather, the beginning of wisdom lies in seeing the group as it truly is.
FP: Douglas Farah, Jeff Breinholt, Daveed Gartenstein-Ross and Patrick Poole, thank you for joining Frontpage Symposium.
http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/Read.aspx?GUID=B5E3F96C-FCD9-4D8D-BF40-ADE28BB2D168
