If anyone must know whether or not the Muslim Brotherhood is a terrorist organization, it is those who have borne the brunt of its wrath.
The Coptic Solidarity, a group dedicated to defending the rights of one of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood’s chief terror targets, began an advocacy campaign in favor of the Muslim Brotherhood Terrorist Designation Act.
Coptic Solidarity President Alex Shalaby declared:
It is unconscionable that the U.S. still has not taken this action when countries such as Egypt, Syria, Russian, UAE, and Saudi Arabia have all declared the Muslim Brotherhood to be a terrorist organization.
This delay is solely the responsibility of the powerful friend of the Brotherhood who lives in the White House. Barack Obama made sure that Muslim Brotherhood members were in the audience when he gave his Cairo speech in June 2009, and came out in favor of the uprisings against Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak even when it became clear that the Brotherhood stood to be their chief beneficiary.
As the Brotherhood regime in Egypt was driven from power in 2013, the protesters accused Obama of supporting terrorism. The accusation wasn’t made lightly. During the Brotherhood’s one year in power, Egypt’s El Nadeem Center for Rehabilitation of Victims of Violence documented 359 cases of torture by the regime — ten times the number of cases documented annually during the Mubarak regime.
One chief Brotherhood target was Egypt’s Christian community: Brotherhood partisans ransacked Christian businesses and abducted Christian children. Brotherhood members blamed the fall of their regime on the Christians and rampaged against Christians all over Egypt, burning and looting nearly seventy churches and destroying 1,000 Christian businesses and homes.
The Rev. Khalil Fawzi of Kasr El Dubarrah Evangelical Church, the Middle East’s largest evangelical church, said:
The Muslim Brotherhood were the ones who called for aggression [against Christians]. They are responsible. Either they are in control or they burn Egypt.
This violence, however, was just an intensification of the ongoing low-level persecution to which the Brotherhood subjected the Christians. As far back as 2003, the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom said:
Coptic Christians face ongoing violence from vigilante Muslim extremists, including members of the Muslim Brotherhood, many of whom act with impunity.
The Muslim Brotherhood Terrorist Designation Act itself sets out ample evidence that the Brotherhood richly deserves the terror designation. It includes February 2011 testimony from then-FBI Director Robert Mueller:
[E]lements of the Muslim Brotherhood both here and overseas have supported terrorism.
Richard Clarke, the former national coordinator for national security and counter-terrorism, said in 2003:
The issue of terrorist financing in the United States is a fundamental example of the shared infrastructure levered by Hamas, Islamic Jihad and al-Qaeda, all of which enjoy a significant degree of cooperation and coordination within our borders. The common link here is the extremist Muslim Brotherhood — all of these organizations are descendants of the membership and ideology of the Muslim Brothers.
Clarke was right: al-Qaeda founders Abdullah Azzam and Osama bin Laden and its current leader Ayman al-Zawahiri were all members of or trained by the Muslim Brotherhood.
This support for jihad terror is in line with the Brotherhood’s goal since its founding. Brotherhood founder Hasan al-Banna’s ambition was to restore the caliphate (which had been abolished in 1924, four years before he founded the Brotherhood), creating a global Islamic superstate instituting Sharia as a universal law. Al-Banna insisted:
[It is a] duty incumbent on every Muslim to struggle towards the aim of making every people Muslim and the whole world Islamic, so that the banner of Islam can flutter over the earth and the call of the Muezzin can resound in all the corners of the world: Allah is greater (Allahu akbar)!
That includes the United States. Brotherhood leader Muhammad Mahdi Othman Akef said in 2004:
I have complete faith that Islam will invade Europe and America.
He was referring not to a military invasion, but one driven by propaganda. On Obama’s watch, that propaganda has spread far and wide, giving the Brotherhood a patina of respectability. One secular Muslim noted in 2015:
Most Americans do not know how vicious and bloody the Muslim Brotherhood is. They really can’t understand.
It’s time they do. The terror designation will enable the next president and Congress to move decisively against the Brotherhood, and maybe just in the nick of time. The passage of S. 2230, the Muslim Brotherhood Terrorist Designation Act, is not just an option. It’s a necessity for bringing sanity back to U.S. foreign and domestic policy.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member