Thursday, June 30, 2011

Obama to establish formal contacts with Muslim Brotherhood

Reuters: Obama to Establish Formal Contacts with Muslim Brotherhood


There are no accidents. Obama invited the outlawed Musim Brotherhood global jihadists to his submission speech in cairo in June 2009. Those of us that reported on it were ..... deeply disturbed by this pro-jihadist stand by an American president. His subsequent contacts with the group concerned us (and this was well before their coup on the Mubarak.

Now Obama will establish formal contacts with the genocidal, racist Islamic supremacist group. Muslim Brotherhood-tied CAIR must be squealing.

The MB as an international Islamic organization dedicated to the imposition of Sharia, by violent or peaceful means, throughout the world.

"International law enforcement authorities and Western intelligence agencies discovered a twenty-year old document revealing a top-secret plan developed by the Muslim Brotherhood, the oldest Islamist organization with one of the most extensive terror networks in the world to launch a program of “cultural invasion” and eventual conquest of the West that virtually mirrors the tactics used by Islamists for more than two decades" (more here). And according to Article Two of the Hamas Charter: “The Islamic Resistance Movement is one of the wings of the Muslim Brotherhood in "Palestine" (more here). The Organization of the Islamic Conference is the brainchild of the Muslim Brotherhood. CAIR in the USA has been linked to the Muslim Brotherhood. The Muslim Brotherhood is acting to overthrow democratic governments world wide.

This Reuters piece tries to cast the Muslim Brotherhood in a soft light - I did not include the taqiya by the Reuters reporter, Mohammed.

Exclusive: U.S. to resume formal Muslim Brotherhood contacts

By Arshad Mohammed | Reuters – 6/29/11

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The United States has decided to resume formal contacts with the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, a senior U.S. official said on Wednesday, in a step that reflects the Islamist group's growing political weight but that is almost certain to upset Israel and its U.S. backers.

"The political landscape in Egypt has changed, and is changing," said the senior official, who spoke on condition of anonymity. "It is in our interests to engage with all of the parties that are competing for parliament or the presidency."

The official sought to portray the shift as a subtle evolution rather than a dramatic change in Washington's stance toward the Brotherhood, a group founded in 1928 that seeks to promote its conservative vision of Islam in society.

Under the previous policy, U.S. diplomats were allowed to deal with Brotherhood members of parliament who had won seats as independents -- a diplomatic fiction that allowed them to keep lines of communication open.

Where U.S. diplomats previously dealt only with group members in their role as parliamentarians, a policy the official said had been in place since 2006, they will now deal directly with low-level Brotherhood party officials.

There is no U.S. legal prohibition against dealing with the Muslim Brotherhood itself, which long ago renounced violence as a means to achieve political change in Egypt and which is not regarded by Washington as a foreign terrorist organization.

But other sympathetic groups, such as Hamas, which identifies the Brotherhood as its spiritual guide, have not disavowed violence against the state of Israel.

The result has been a dilemma for the Obama administration. Former officials and analysts said it has little choice but to engage the Brotherhood directly, given its political prominence after the February 11 downfall of former President Hosni Mubarak.

STIRRING UP DEMONS

U.S. President Barack Obama will surely face criticism for engaging with the Brotherhood, even tentatively.

Howard Kohr, executive director of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, made clear the pro-Israel group's deep skepticism about the group in a speech last month.

"While we all hope that Egypt emerges from its current political transition with a functioning, Western-oriented democracy, the fact is the best-organized political force in Egypt today is the Muslim Brotherhood -- which does not recognize Israel," Kohr said.

Former U.S. diplomats said the United States had to engage with the Brotherhood given its influence in Egypt.

"We cannot have a free and fair election and democracy unless we are going to be willing to talk to all the people that are a part of that democracy," said Edward Walker, a former U.S. ambassador to Egypt and Israel who now teaches at Hamilton College.

"It's going to stir up demons," he added. "You have got an awful lot of people who are not very happy with what the roots of the Brotherhood have spawned ... There will be people who will not accept that the Brotherhood is of a new or different character today."

Egypt's parliamentary elections are scheduled for September and its military rulers have promised to hold a presidential vote by the end of the year.

DIPLOMATIC FIG LEAF

U.S. dealings with the Brotherhood have evolved over time and officials have found ways to keep lines open under the cover of one diplomatic fig leaf or another.

"We have not had contacts with the Muslim Brotherhood," then Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said in response to a question at the American University in Cairo in June 2005. "We have not engaged the Muslim Brotherhood and ... we won't."

[...]

The group says it wants a civil state based on Islamic principles, but talk by some members of an "Islamic state" or "Islamic government" have raised concerns that their goal is a state where full Islamic sharia law is implemented. The group says such comments have been taken out of context.

"It's critical ... that we make it very, very clear to Egyptians, if we are going to do a meeting, that we are no less opposed to the ideas they represent," Abrams said, noting that there are splits among Brotherhood members.

"We have to think about whether we can use meetings to deepen those splits and to help, quietly, those who are trying to moderate the positions of the Brotherhood," he added, saying the United States should choose its interlocutors with care and that the talks need not be conducted by the U.S. ambassador.



No comments:

Post a Comment