ANALYSIS: Does the Obama administration support the Muslim Brotherhood?
The Obama administration has supported the Muslim Brotherhood in Libya, Egypt, and Syria. Palestinian journalist Mudar Zahran has reported that the Muslim Brotherhood supports Islamic State. The day before yesterday, it was reported that ISIS is cooperating with the Iranian regime and Pakistan in order to crush the Balochi Freedom Movement.
May 21, 2015, 10:15AM | Rachel Avraham
Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton stressed that if the American people had known that US President Barack Obama, former US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and other senior level US officials had known that the Benghazi terror attack was orchestrated by Al Qaeda from the beginning yet “lied and covered up this fact, Mitt Romney might very well be president. These documents also point to the connection between the collapse in Libya and the ISIS war and confirm that the US knew remarkable details about the transfer of arms from Benghazi to Syrian jihadists. These documents show that the Benghazi cover-up has continued for years and is only unraveling through our independent lawsuits. The Benghazi scandal just got a whole lot worse for Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.”
Fitton accused the Barack Obama administration of supporting the Muslim Brotherhood, stressing that this support continued even after the US knew that the Muslim Brotherhood was responsible for the Benghazi terror attack that led to the murder of four US citizens, including US Ambassador Christopher Stevens. According to a report in Front Page Magazine, Obama had backed regime change in Libya in order to assist the Muslim Brotherhood and the Benghazi Consulate was guarded by the February 17 Martyrs Brigade, a Muslim Brotherhood linked militia. The report also blames senior level Al Qaeda terrorist Abdul Basit Azuz for the terror attack: “Azuz established the Al Tawheed College in Derna” that was approved by “Under Secretary Minister of Education Fathi Al Ka’ary, a member of the Muslim Brotherhood and currently one of the eight presidential candidates.”
The Obama administration’s assistance to the Muslim Brotherhood in Libya and Syria is only one element of a systematic policy that favors radical Islamists. According to Western Journalism, Dalia Mogahed, a former member of Obama’s Advisory Council of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships, authored a report in 2008 that called for engagement with radical Islamists: “The US must consider when and how to talk with political movements that have substantial public support and have renounced violence, but are outlawed and restricted by authoritarian governments allied to the US. The Muslim Brotherhood parties in Egypt and Jordan are arguably in this category. In general, the Leadership supports engagement with these groups that have clearly demonstrated a commitment to non-violent participation in politics.”
One year later, in June 2009, US President Barack Obama declared in a speech that he delivered in Cairo with Muslim Brotherhood members sitting in the front row: “The partnership between America and Islam must be based on what Islam is, not what it isn’t. And I consider it part of my responsibility as President of the United States to fight against negative stereotypes of Islam wherever they appear.” Following this speech, US President Barack Obama redefined the US government’s definition of terrorism, declared that the War against Terrorism was over, and began a systematic policy of embracing radical Islamists.
As part of this policy, an Egyptian report claims that Muslim Brotherhood members infiltrated the Obama administration. According to the Investigative Project on Terrorism, a 2013 article published in the Egyptian magazine Rose El-Youssef claimed that six individuals turned the White House “from a position hostile to Islamist groups and organizations in the world to the largest and most important supporter of the Muslim Brotherhood.”
According to the 2013 report, the six individuals included Arif Alikhan, Deputy Executive Director for Homeland Security and the founder of the World Islamic Organization that is identified as a Muslim Brotherhood subsidiary; Rashad Hussein, former US special envoy to the Organization of the Islamic Conference that presently serves as the Special Envoy and Coordinator for Strategic Counter-Terrorism Communications, who partook in the 2002 annual conference of the American Muslim Council that was formerly run by the convicted terrorism financer Abdurahman Alamoudi and participated in the organizing committee of the Critical Islamic Reflection alongside Muslim Brotherhood members; Salam al-Marayati, co-founder of the Muslim Public Affairs Council that is connected to the International Muslim Brotherhood; Imad Mohammed Magid, president of the Islamic Society of North America that was founded by Muslim Brotherhood members; and Eboo Patel, a member of Obama’s Advisory Council on Faith-Based Neighborhoods and Partnerships who also was a member of the Muslim Students Association, which identifies itself as a “large Muslim Brotherhood organization.”
More recently, Palestinian dissident Walid Shoebat reported that the White House appointed Robert Malley to be a new special assistant to US President Barack Obama on the Middle East, North Africa and Persian Gulf region. He supports working with the Muslim Brotherhood. His International Crisis Group called for integrating the Muslim Brotherhood into the political mainstream. One of the members of Malley’s International Crisis Group is a Palestinian named Wadah Khanfar, whom Mareb Press reported was “a Hamas activist affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood and one of its key figures in the Hamas office in Sudan.” Interestingly, Shoebat reports that Malley removed Mohammed El Baradei from the International Crisis Group, thus permitting this influential policy-making group to have a more pro-Muslim Brotherhood stance.
The infiltration of Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated officials into the Obama administration affected US policy. “The Obama administration conducted an assessment of the Muslim Brotherhood in 2010 and 2011, beginning even before the events known as the Arab Spring erupted in Tunisia and in Egypt,” Gulf News reported. “The President personally issued Presidential Study Directive 11 (PSD-11) in 2010, ordering an assessment of the Muslim Brotherhood and other political Islamist movements, including the ruling AKP Party in Turkey, ultimately concluding that the United States should shift from its longstanding policy of supporting stability in the Middle East and North Africa (that is, support for stable regimes even if they were authoritarian) to a policy of backing moderate Islamist political movements.”
Gulf News reported that US State Department documents obtained via the Freedom of Information Act confirm that the Obama administration maintained frequent contact with the Libyan Muslim Brotherhood, with at one point in 2012 even arranging for the Public Relations Director of the Libyan Muslim Brotherhood Mohammad Gaair to come to Washington, DC to speak about “Islamists in Power” at a conference organized by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Other declassified documents exposed by Gulf News demonstrated the US administration’s sympathy for having the Muslim Brotherhood control Libya following Qaddafi’s removal from power.
Thus, even though the Qaddafi regime had given up their nuclear weapons program and the US military suggested that Qaddafi should stay in power due to fears that his departure would leave a power vacuum to be filled by Al Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood, the Obama administration overthrew the Qaddafi regime and permitted the transfer of Qaddafi’s lethal weapons to Islamist terror groups throughout the globe. However, Libya and Syria were not the only countries adversely affected by this Obama policy as the US administration also assisted the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt.
The Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood has openly declared jihad against the West, threatened Israel with war, promoted the persecution of Egyptian Christians, and supports female genital mutilation, but the Obama administration had insisted that they be permitted to replace Mubarak in the name of respecting democracy. “Following Egypt’s Revolution, we have broadened our engagement to include new and emerging political parties and actors,” White House Spokesman Tommy Vietor told Politico following a meeting between the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood and US officials in 2012.
The Obama administration maintained this position even though according to the Gatestone Institute, thousands of Coptic Christians were prevented from being able to vote following Mubarak’s removal from power and many voters received ballot’s already marked in Morsi’s favor. However, when Sisi overthrew Morsi, the move was treated by the Obama administration as anti-democratic since the Muslim Brotherhood was a democratically elected government that was allegedly removed from power by a military coup. The US administration ignored the popular protests that sought to remove Morsi from power as well that accompanied the Egyptian military’s actions.
Numerous Egyptians were infuriated by the Obama administration’s pro-Muslim Brotherhood policy. As Egyptian pro-democracy activist Hana El-Hattab had previously stated, “Try having a terrorist for a president and then tell me how you feel about him being democratically elected. The Muslim Brotherhood is a terrorist organization. Good riddance!” She felt there was no difference between the Egyptian military helping the people overthrow Mubarak and doing the same for Morsi following popular protests within the country.
“The Egyptian people are astounded,” Michael Armanious wrote in the Gatestone Institute. “They simply do not understand the Obama administration’s efforts to bring the Muslim Brotherhood back to power. The Muslim Brotherhood has no respect for the rule of law, but the Obama administration treats the Egyptian military that removed them from power as a threat to democracy itself. It was the same type of democracy, merely an election, which is only a small part of a democracy that brought Hitler to power in Germany and Hamas to power in the Gaza Strip. If Hamas is outlawed in the West, then why isn’t the Muslim Brotherhood? Why is the US siding with forces of oppression and assisting Egypt’s transformation into a failed state under the leadership of the Muslim Brotherhood? These conditions all run contrary to American interests.”
These sentiments within Egypt did not affect the US administration’s policy. Obama continued this hostile policy of supporting the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood against Sisi even after Sisi was elected to rule his country democratically. Earlier this year, Front Page Magazine reported that the Obama administration hosted Muslim Brotherhood leaders in the US, thus infuriating the Egyptian government. According to the report, Egyptian Foreign Minister Sameh Shoukry stressed that the meeting was far from routine and the meeting “was not understandable as they are not a political party and according to the Egyptian law, they should be treated as a terrorist group.”
“What this shows is that the widespread rejection of the Muslim Brotherhood across the Middle East, particularly the largest protests in recorded history in Egypt on June 30, 2013 that led to President Morsi’s ouster, is not recognized by the US State Department and the Obama administration,” Patrick Poole, a terrorism expert, told Front Page Magazine. “This is a direct insult to our Egyptian allies, who are in an existential struggle against the Muslim Brotherhood, all in the pursuit of the mythical moderate Islamists who the DC foreign policy elite still believe will bring democracy to the Middle East.”
This pro-Muslim Brotherhood policy has wide-spread regional implications, as Obama’s support for Islamist groups also extends to the Iranian axis, as Obama engages in outreach towards the Iranian regime despite the terrorism they wage across the Middle East and their pursuit of nuclear weapons. As Israeli scholar Mordechai Kedar told JerusalemOnline, “I am afraid that the US is clueless. On the one side, they want good will with the Iranians with the talks. They try to divide what happens in Yemen, Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon on one side and what happens in the nuclear talks on the other as if it is a different Iran, as if it was different ayatollahs and as if they had a different agenda. Everything that happens in the Middle East today is because of the Iranian intervention.” The Obama administrations desire for good will with the Iranian regime has had catastrophic consequences. Just the other day, the Jerusalem Post reported that the US permitted the sale of airplanes to Iran in direct violation of the sanctions regime.
However, the easing of the sanctions against Iran in the name of engagement has not changed Iranian policy. JerusalemOnline reported the day before yesterday that Iran is collaborating with Pakistan to import ISIS terrorists from Syria to Iran and from there, to Pakistan and Afghanistan to crush the Balochi Freedom Movement. In Pakistan, these ISIS terrorists are trained by Taliban leader Nikk Mohammed, who is controlled by the Pakistani government’s ISI Major Abbas that was trained by the US. These ISIS terrorists earn between $1,000 and $10,000 per month murdering Balochi political dissidents. Pakistan proceeds to throw out the Balochi dead bodies, of which a number were discovered recently. This report proves that there is a direct connection between ISIS and the Iranian regime.
Furthermore, as Palestinian journalist Mudar Zahran previously told JerusalemOnline, the Muslim Brotherhood supports ISIS: “What most people don’t realize is that ISIS is an offshoot of Muslim Brotherhood ideology. It’s not just an agreement of ideology between Islamic State and the Muslim Brotherhood. Islamic State is an extension of Al Qaeda. Bin Ladin and Zahrawi are former Muslim Brotherhood members. In addition, the Muslim Brotherhood today does not hide its support for Islamic State. For example, the Muslim Brotherhood’s de facto spokesperson Sheikh Wajdi Ghunaim openly on youtube pledges support for Islamic State. The conclusion is that the Muslim Brotherhood at least supports Islamic State.” Therefore, by the Obama administration assisting the Muslim Brotherhood and engaging Iran, one can ponder whether it is possible for them to seriously fight against ISIS!
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