The Muslim Brotherhood, which is being whitewashed by the world media as having given up on using violence to establish an Islamic state (pure bullshit, by the way; the Brotherhood has never given up on violence), has an interesting AP label: “fundamentalist.”
Example one:
If Egypt’s opposition groups are able to truly coalesce – far from a certainty for an array of movements large and small that include students, online activists, old-school opposition politicians and the fundamentalist Muslim Brotherhood – it could sustain and amplify the momentum of the week-old protests.
Example two:
This Mediterranean coastal city is a bastion of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, and perhaps nowhere else are the strengths – and the weaknesses – of the powerful fundamentalist movement clearer as Egypt explodes with protests aimed at removing its long-ruling president.
Interesting, how the word “fundamentalist” is used to describe an organization that wants to establish sharia law worldwide, by stealth if it must, but by force if need be. I defy you to find a single AP article without the modifier “hardline” attached to “Likud” or “Netanyahu.” But I digress. This is how the WaPo chooses to describe the Brotherhood:
Inspired by the YMCA when it was founded in 1928, the Muslim Brotherhood has been under a ban since 1948, and its real size is difficult to gauge. The group was brutally repressed by President Gamal Abdel Nasser in the 1950s and 1960s. Since then, it has at times been propped up as a foil – especially for Western audiences – with periodic crackdowns that have sent many of its members to prison.
Akef, sentenced to death in 1954, served 20 years in prison before emerging as a leader of the group.
For most of its existence in Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood has refrained from violence against the state. It is not the organization of radical jihadists that it is sometimes made out to be. But its caution in dealing with Mubarak has made it appear recently that it is more concerned with protecting itself than with improving the nation.
Really? It was inspired by the YMCA? The brotherhood wants something like this?
Founded on June 6, 1844 in London, England by Sir George Williams, the goal of the organization was putting Christian principles into practice, achieved by developing “a healthy spirit, mind, and body.”
I can’t find a cite anywhere that states the Brotherhood was inspired by the YMCA. But I can find the thoughts of its founder over at Wikipedia, the source that even anti-Zionists generally don’t have issues with:
To help consecrate the Islamic order, al-Banna called for banning all Western influences from education and ordered that all primary schools should be part of the mosques. He also wanted a ban on political parties and democratic institutions other than a Shura (Islamic-council), and wanted all government officials to have a religious study as main education.
Hasan al-Banna saw Jihad as a God-ordained defensive strategy, stating that most Islamic scholars: “Agree unanimously that jihad is a communal defensive obligation imposed upon the Islamic ummah in order to broadcast the summons (to embrace Islam), and that it is an individual obligation to repulse the attack of unbelievers upon it.” As a result of unbelievers ruling Muslim lands and humbling Muslim honor: “It has become an individual obligation, which there is no evading, on every Muslim to prepare his equipment, to make up his mind to engage in jihad, and to get ready for it until the opportunity is ripe and God decrees a matter which is sure to be accomplished.[9]
Yes, that’s just like the YMCA. To this day, the world lives in fear of the YMCA crusade to put the entire world under the Christian faith, by force if necessary.
That same Mahdi Akef, whom the WaPo is quoting as such a reformer, was quoted a bit earlier, by Barry Rubin:
Akef said that Hamas should be supported, “By any means necessary.†The implication is, since the Brotherhood has always favored abrogation of the Egypt-Israel peace treaty that Egypt should go to war with Israel on behalf of the Palestinians. A Brotherhood government would probably do just that.
That was in 2009. Today, we have proof of their amiability even in the whitewash. Even the AP acknowledges that the fiercest fighting is in the Brotherhood’s stronghold.
After weekly prayers last Friday, tens of thousands spilled into the streets of Alexandria, calling for the end of Mubarak’s rule. Clouds of tear gas billowed, fistfights broke out between protesters and riot police, and after hours of street battles, police retreated leaving nearly 100,000 people marching all day.
[…] The strong Brotherhood presence in Alexandria marches was a contrast with those in capital, Cairo, where Brotherhood members were generally not overt in the participation until Sunday. Their appearance among the thousands camped out for days in Cairo’s central Tahrir Square raised the suspicion of some secular protesters, who worried that the rallies could start to take a more fundamentalist look.
There’s that word again. The men who would re-establish the Islamic Caliphate, segregate men and women, bring back medieval laws of stoning, cutting off the hands of thieves, hanging homosexuals, and much, much more… and they’re just “fundamentalist.”
Yeah. And denial is just a river in Egypt.
