The Muslim Brotherhood: Wellspring of Terrorism

[Gatestone Institute]() [Facebook]( [Twitter]( [RSS]( [Donate]( In this mailing: - Judith Bergman: [The Muslim Brotherhood: Wellspring of Terrorism](#toc_item_9942) - Denis MacEoin: [Agents of Their Own Destruction](#toc_item_9540) - George Igler: [The United Nations: Making a Mockery of Human Rights](#toc_item_9809) [] [The Muslim Brotherhood: Wellspring of Terrorism]( by Judith Bergman • February 15, 2017 at 5:00 am - The Muslim Brotherhood (MB) in Egypt released an official statement calling on its supporters to "prepare" for "jihad", in January 2015. - "The Muslim Brotherhood at all levels have repeatedly defended Hamas attacks... including the use of suicide bombers and the killing of civilians." — UK government expert review of the Muslim Brotherhood, December 2015. - The Muslim Brotherhood not only funds one of the most virulent terrorist groups, Hamas, but there is barely any daylight between the various leaderships of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, Jordan and Hamas. - Most of the terrorists who later founded al Qaeda were rooted in the MB. Osama bin Laden was apparently recruited as a young man to the MB, whereas Ayman al Zawahiri joined the MB at the age of 14 and went on to found the Egyptian Islamic Jihad (EIJ),"an organization that.... holds many of the same beliefs as the MB but simply refuses to renounce violence inside Egypt" — Foundation for Defense of Democracies. - The Muslim Brotherhood believes today what it has always believed: that a caliphate, where sharia law will rule, must be established through jihad. Refusing to designate the Muslim Brotherhood a foreign terrorist organization would be a grave mistake, playing straight into the strategy of the Brotherhood and, once more, revealing to the world the extreme gullibility of the West. "The objective, then, is to strike terror into the hearts of God's enemies, who are also the enemies of the advocates of Islam..." — Sayyid Qutb, chief ideologue of the Muslim Brotherhood in the 1950s and 1960s. The Trump administration is considering designating the Muslim Brotherhood (MB) a foreign terrorist organization, and Human Rights Watch is outraged. "Designating the Muslim Brotherhood a 'foreign terrorist organization' would wrongly equate it with violent extremist groups like Al-Qaeda and the Islamic State and make their otherwise lawful activities illegal," said Human Rights Watch. The press release went on to repeat the old claim that "...the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt officially renounced violence in the 1970s and sought to promote its ideas through social and political activities". Adding its voice to the Muslim Brotherhood's apologists, the New York Times wrote: [Continue Reading Article]( [] [Agents of Their Own Destruction]( Are Palestinians Victims or Actors? by Denis MacEoin • February 15, 2017 at 4:30 am - The importance of a shift in narratives cannot be overemphasized. It is the key to peace. - "Just as real peace could come to Europe after World War II only after Germans abandoned the 'German narrative' and accepted the true history of the war that Germany started, so only abandonment of the 'Palestinian narrative' and acceptance of the true sequence of the events of 1947-48 can serve as a basis for reconciliation between Jews and Arabs." — Moshe Arens, former Defence Minister, Israel. - Psychologically, it is easier to embrace a good cause (or, for that matter, even a bad one) in simplistic, "black and white" terms. For many people a "good" cause is made up of people who suffer from "imperialism" and "colonialism", plucky minorities, third-world victims of first-world oppression, revolutionary vanguards, and anyone put upon by the United States, Great Britain, France or any former "imperialist" power. Other "imperialist" powers, such as Russia, China or Iran, are conveniently overlooked or forgotten -- not to mention the centuries of Islamist imperialism that covered Iran, Turkey, Greece, all of North Africa, Hungary, Serbia, the Balkans, virtually all of Eastern Europe and which we see still continuing. - The Palestinians, in this narrative of "good" and "bad" have purportedly been permanently "dispossessed" by, of all people, the Jews -- whom they had the misfortune to attack in 1948, 1956, 1967 and 1973 -- and lose to. - If members of the new U.S. administration seek to advance the moribund "peace process", they could find no better place to start than direct confrontation with Palestinian rejectionism. This means that those leaders must be pressed as hard as possible to end their persecution of their own populations. - There must be carrots, but there must also be sticks. The UN, the EU, and the OIC will offer only carrots. Will the U.S. now add the threat of real consequences to that mix? In Khartoum, three months after the Six Day War they lost in 1967, Arab leaders refused to negotiate with Israel -- "no peace, no recognition, no negotiations". Pictured from left to right, on September 2, 1967 in Khartoum: King Faisal of Saudi Arabia, Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt, Abdullah Sallal of Yemen, Sheikh Ahmad Sabah of Kuwait and Abd al-Rahman Arif of Iraq. (Image source: Wikimedia Commons/Bibliotheca Alexandrina) With the advent of President Trump's administration, massive changes are expected, not just on the domestic front, but internationally. One of the first regions that will require immediate attention is the Middle East, where the policies of the Obama administration have led to a diminished role for the United States and therefore for global freedom. [Continue Reading Article]( [] [The United Nations: Making a Mockery of Human Rights]( by George Igler • February 15, 2017 at 4:00 am - "Nowhere has the UN's failure been more consistent and more outrageous than in its bias against our close ally Israel." — Governor Nikki Haley, US Ambassador-designate to the United Nations. - When those handsomely remunerated within transnational institutions make their priority spiteful political issues and arguably anti-Semitic point-scoring -- rather than protecting hard-won humanistic principles such as human rights -- the very values that differentiate segments of the modern world from the more barbarous norms of the past -- their legitimacy is eroded. - "My commitment is... to reject any oppression in the name of religion... a goal that we will reach in a peaceful and law-abiding way." — Raif Badawi, a Saudi blogger sentenced for such thoughts to 1000 lashes -- in contravention of international law -- followed by ten years in jail and a fine of approximately $260,000. His lawyer, Walid Abu'l-Khayr, was jailed as well. Where was the United Nations then? A royal pardon for both men should be granted immediately. - It is high time that democratic nations reasserted their sovereignty in the face of these unelected, untransparent, and unaccountable transnational institutions which so often make a mockery of the standards they are pledged to uphold. Nikki Haley (pictured above from 2014), President Trump's appointment to the United Nations, has stated: "Nowhere has the UN's failure been more consistent and more outrageous than in its bias against our close ally Israel." (Image source: defenseimagery.mil) The "rise of populism" has become an absorbing subject for political commentators in the West, yet as the Cato Institute scholar, Alberto Mingardi, helpfully observes, the term is "as slippery as it is popular." Perhaps the most noteworthy feature of this current political trend is why we are struck by it. The nations of the West are, after all, democracies: systems of government designed to translate popular concerns into legislative instruments. An answer to this dysfunction might lie in the layers of transnational governance, which proliferated after the Second World War, superseding national, and by implication democratically-accountable, decision making. The horrendous carnage that ripped the world apart in the middle of the last century led to a principled decision by the world's leaders to promote the formulation, and then ratification, of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. [Continue Reading Article]( You are subscribed to this list as {EMAIL}. To unsubscribe, go to To edit your subscription options, go to To subscribe to the this mailing list, go to [Gatestone Institute]() 14 East 60 St., Suite 1001, New York, NY 10022