Who Are the Muslim Brothers?

Michael

One of the things that I attempt to do with this blog is encourage people to read up on the history of radical Islam and, particularly, the history of the Muslim Brotherhood. At this political moment the Obama administration is mainstreaming that organization and encouraging normalization of relations with it. It is for this reason that we read that this fascistic and genocidal Brotherhood, with historical and ideological roots to Nazi Germany, is actually a "moderate" political group and therefore it is no big deal, really, that American politicians, including Barack Obama, himself, have occasionally met with them. Shortly after the fall of Tunisia to radical Islam, Obama actually compared the Islamist turmoil throughout the Middle East to the Revolution of '76 and the American Civil Rights Movement of 1950s and 1960s.

Among the historians and scholars who have written extensively on the Brotherhood, Matthias Küntzel, who received his PhD in political science from the University of Hamburg, is among the most respected. His 2007 work, Jihad and Jew-Hatred: Islamism, Nazism and the Roots of 9/11, is essential reading for anyone interested in the rise of the Jihad and its history going back to birth of the Brotherhood in 1920s Cairo.

In a 2008 paper presented at Stanford University, Küntzel tells us the following:

It was the Organization of the Muslim Brotherhood, founded in 1928 by Hassan al-Banna in Egypt, that established Islamism as a mass movement. The significance of the Brotherhood to Islamism is comparable to that of the Bolshevik Party to communism: It was and remains to this day the ideological reference point and organizational core for all later Islamist groups, including al-Qaeda and Hamas.

So the Muslim Brotherhood is the granddaddy of terrorist organizations like Qaeda and Hamas. Hamas, in fact, is the Muslim Brotherood in Gaza. That's what Hamas is. It's not just that Hamas is allied with the Muslim Brotherhood, but that it is the Muslim Brotherhood's affiliate organization in the Gaza Strip.

The Brotherhood advocated the replacement of Parliamentarianism by an “organic” state order based on the Caliphate. It demanded the abolition of interest and profit in favor of a forcibly imposed community of interests between capital and labor. And it set itself up as the rallying point for the restoration of patriarchal domination.

At the forefront of the Brotherhood’s efforts lay the struggle against all the sensual and “materialistic” temptations of the capitalist and communist world. At the tender age of 13, the pubescent al-Banna had founded a “Society for the Prevention of the Forbidden” and this is in essence what the Brothers were and are – a community of male zealots, whose primary concern is to prevent all the sensual and sexual sins forbidden according to their interpretation of the Koran. Their signature was most clearly apparent when they periodically reduced their local nightclubs, brothels and cinemas – constantly identified with Jewish influence – to ashes.

So, the Brotherhood promotes the Caliphate and has often used violence in order to promote that goal.

The Islamists’ answer to everything was the call for jihad to establish a new order based on sharia law. But the Brotherhood’s jihad was not directed primarily against the British. Rather, it focused almost exclusively on Zionism and the Jews. Membership in the Brotherhood shot up from 800 to 200,000 between 1936 and 1938. In those two years the Brotherhood conducted only one major campaign in Egypt, a campaign directed against Zionism and the Jews.

Brotherhood membership rose dramatically at the exact time that Nazism arose in Germany. This is not a coincidence.

Their Jew-hatred drew on early Islamic sources: First, they found encouragement in the Koranic dictum that Jews are to be considered the worst enemy of the believers. Second, they justified their aspiration to eliminate the Jews of Palestine by invoking the example of Muhammad, who in the 7th century not only expelled two Jewish tribes from Medina, but also beheaded the entire male population of a third Jewish tribe. Third, Islamists considered, and still consider, Palestine an Islamic territory, Dar al-Islam, where Jews must not run a single village, let alone a state.

At the same time, their Jew-hatred was inspired by Nazi influences: Leaflets called for a boycott of Jewish goods and Jewish shops, and the Brotherhood’s newspaper, al-Nadhir, carried a regular column on “The Danger of the Jews of Egypt,” which published the names and addresses of Jewish businessmen and allegedly Jewish newspaper publishers all over the world. In fact, this column attributed every evil of modernity, from communism to brothels, to the “Jewish danger.”

This is the Muslim Brotherhood and, not surprisingly, they were early advocates of a proto-BDS movement. Just as today's BDS movement owes something to previous anti-Jewish boycott efforts, such as that of the Muslim Brotherhood, so the Brotherhood's proto-BDS efforts owed a little something to the Nazis and their own form of "BDS."

If anyone is blasé about the rise of this organization throughout the Middle East, I would suggest that being blasé about the Brotherhood is something akin to being blasé about the rise of Nazi Germany. The reason for this is that the Muslim Brotherhood is, essentially, an organization whose roots go to the Koran and to European fascism and that their genocidal tendency towards Jews derive from both.  It's not that the Brotherhood will unleash World War III or a second Holocaust, merely that they are a rising star and would like to see that latter of those two.

And I am supposed to believe that when Barack Obama cleared a path for the Brotherhood by encouraging the ouster of Hosni Mubarak in Egypt that this should in no way reflect negatively on the American administration? I find it exceedingly peculiar just how anyone could consider the Obama administration and be entirely dismissive of this particular fact.

Does this mean that Obama has genocidal intentions toward the Jewish people? Of course, not. That would be entirely absurd. What it really means is that, like most progressives, Barack Obama simply doesn't understand the meaning and extent of radical Islam and therefore doesn't really take it seriously. No one who understands the nature and history of radical Islam could possibly think of this movement in terms of the American Civil Rights movement as Obama has encouraged Americans to think. Think of "the dignity of Rosa Parks as she sat courageously in her seat," is what the president of the United States said upon the rise of radical Islam in Tunisia, if you can believe it.

The problem here is not Obama administration malice toward the Jewish people.

The problem here, rather, is a gross and irresponsible ignorance on the part of the administration and its advocates. It is this gross and irresponsible ignorance which leads to an almost suicidal complacency in the face of something exceedingly dark. The political right in the United States has some understanding of the nature of this movement, while the political left, sadly, remains almost entirely blinkered by an ideological disinclination to face obvious truths in regard the rapid spread of radical Islam.