The Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt Reviewed

For John, BLUF:  .  Nothing to see here; just move along.

Michael J Totten is one of those chaps I read.  I read him because he seems to have his head screwed on right.  Here he talks about the Muslim Brotherhood and what we got right and what we got wrong.

Genuine political liberals are thin on the ground in Egypt, but they do exist.  I know several.  Some are my friends.  Most of them were wrong about the Brotherhood, too.  They were right, of course, when they warned the rest of us that the Brothers would transform Egypt into a theocratic dictatorship, but they were wrong when they estimated how much support the Brotherhood had. Hardly any expected the Islamists to win most of the votes, though that’s exactly what happened.

American liberals made a different mistake.  Despite warnings from secular Egyptians and former Islamists, the idea that the Muslim Brotherhood is a moderate and democratic party became an article of faith here in the States, particularly among academics and journalists who should have known better.  Even James Clapper—who, as the Director of National Intelligence,♠ really should have known better—said the Muslim Brotherhood is “a largely secular organization.”  Surely that ranks among the dumbest things ever said about the organization in all of its 85 years.

Look:  the Muslim Brotherhood is not a mysterious new group that no one knows anything about.  It was founded in 1928, for crying out loud, and its ideology has been documented exhaustively.  Not for even five minutes has it been a democratic or moderate party.  It has been struggling for theocracy since the day it was born, sometimes peaceably and sometimes by force.  Every Sunni Islamist terrorist organization in the region is a spin-off of the Brotherhood or a spin-off of one of its spin-offs.

Has anyone read Milestones?

Regards  —  Cliff

♠  Yes, that is the very same General James Clapper who Election Commissioner Tom O'Brien singled out on City Life this AM.  The one Tom was calling for to be put on trial lying to Congress over NSA Snooping.