Why Did NPR Lie About the Jordanian Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas?

Patrick Poole | 1:24 PM on July 19, 2017

In the ongoing debate over the possible terror designation of the Muslim Brotherhood, the media cartel has been pushing fake news and false propaganda regarding the group.

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One such example was a puff piece by Jane Arraf at NPR back in February. Arraf, in noting the debate over the terror designation issue, painted the Muslim Brotherhood’s affiliate in Jordan as “mainstream” moderates pursuing peace and democracy.

That fake news was exposed by an incident earlier this week when Hamza Mansour, a senior leader of the Jordanian Muslim Brotherhood, openly encouraged suicide terror attacks, even by young children:

This is not the first time that Mansour has made news. In 2015, he refused to call ISIS terrorists while they were engaged in widespread genocide and religious cleansing in Iraq and Syria:

Arraf’s NPR agitprop also conveniently failed to mention the symbiotic relationship between the Jordanian Muslim Brotherhood and designated terrorist group Hamas.

Also missing was the fact that the Jordanian government has already all but banned the Muslim Brotherhood, shutting down its headquarters and most of its activities.

These can be seen as deliberate omissions intended to give a false impression to NPR listeners. Lying, in other words.

For years Hamas has operated as an arm of the Jordanian Muslim Brotherhood, as this 1998 intelligence report on Hamas by the South African National Intelligence Agency, noted (HT: John Rossomando):

In fact, the Hamas senior leadership lived and worked out of Amman until 1999, when King Abdullah expelled them in one of his first major moves during the first year of his reign.

Since 2008, Hamas has been directly affiliated with the Jordanian Muslim Brotherhood’s Guidance Bureau, operating more independently.

Despite the expulsion of Hamas from Jordan, the group still relies on the Jordanian Muslim Brotherhood for support, as was seen with the discovery that the Muslim Brotherhood was storing weapons for the terror group back in 2006. The weapons cache included rockets, C4 explosives, and small arms.

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The Muslim Brotherhood’s political wing, the Islamic Action Front (IAF), rose to Hamas’ defense, claiming the weapons cache was a set-up and a conspiracy theory.

Since then, the Jordanian Muslim Brotherhood has made no secret of its support for Hamas.

During the Israeli Operation Protective Edge during the summer of 2014, which targeted Hamas in Gaza to stop rocket attacks on Israeli civilians, the Muslim Brotherhood in Jordan staged massive rallies in support of the terror group.

One August 7, 2014, Muslim Brotherhood rally in Amman called for more rocket attacks targeting Israel.

Reuters reported:

More than 15,000 Muslim Brotherhood supporters gathered at a pro-Hamas rally in Jordan’s capital on Friday, with many chanting “death to Israel” and urging the militant Palestinian group to step up rocket salvos against Israeli towns and cities.

The evening rally, the largest such protest in Amman in years, saw scores of masked youths dressed in the uniform of Izzedine al-Qassam Brigades, the military wing of Hamas, stage a mock military parade to the cheers of a flag-waving crowd.

The Muslim Brotherhood, the ideological counterpart to Hamas and Jordan’s largest political group, is seeking to take advantage of a rise in anti-Israeli sentiment arising from the Jewish state’s month-long offensive in the Gaza Strip.

After the conflict, the Jordanian Muslim Brotherhood sent a delegation to meet with Hamas leadership, who thanked them for their support during the crisis.

Shortly thereafter, the Jordanian Muslim Brotherhood appealed to Hamas for help in securing the release of their members imprisoned in Israel for gun-running, inciting violence, and organizing terror attacks.

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And yet in Jane Arraf’s glowing NPR profile of the Jordanian Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas is never mentioned once, nor is the Brotherhood’s history of direct involvement in terrorism in Israel.

Everything I’ve noted above was reported by major international media, so one can conclude that its absence in the NPR article was intentional because it contradicted the “moderate” Muslim Brotherhood narrative.

But that’s not all. It’s not just Hamas among terrorist organizations that the Jordanian Muslim Brotherhood is tied to.

As I noted more than a decade ago in response to the “moderate Muslim Brotherhood” lunacy, the Jordanian Muslim Brotherhood was instrumental in calling for the release of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi — later the head of Al-Qaeda in Iraq — from Jordanian prison.

When Zarqawi was killed in a U.S. airstrike in Iraq, four senior leaders of the Jordanian Muslim Brotherhood visited Zarqawi’s family in Jordan to give their condolences, including one calling the al-Qaeda leader a “martyr.”

This occurred just months after Zarqawi had organized a triple suicide bombing of a hotel in Amman that killed dozens and shocked the country.

In response to the Muslim Brotherhood’s condolence call to Zarqawi’s family, the Jordanian government threatened to close down their Islamic centers. That prompted the head of their organization to reluctantly apologize.

Regarding the matter, Abdulrahman al-Rashed, writing at Asharq al-Awsat, said:

Instead of renouncing their colleagues’ behavior and supporting their country, members of the Jordanian Muslim Brotherhood treated them heroically and threatened to withdraw from politics, under feeble pretexts…

The Muslim Brotherhood in Jordan ought to make up its mind: it can either support its own citizens or al-Qaeda’s terrorists. It is no longer possible to support terrorists shamelessly. The tape of al-Zarqawi where he praised the Amman bombings leaves no space for neutrality. The Muslim Brotherhood in Jordan should make it clear whether they are with their fellow citizens or their fellow “brothers”.

It should be noted that even after the Amman hotel bombing, there was a faction of the Jordanian Muslim Brotherhood that wanted to see Zarqawi take over the leadership of their group if he were willing to give up his terrorist ways.

Apart from the fraudulent “moderate Muslim Brotherhood” talking point, the group’s U.S. supporters claim that designating the Muslim Brotherhood would hinder Middle East allies, such as Jordan, since the Muslim Brotherhood operates political parties.

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In Jordan, the Islamic Action Front (IAF) currently holds 10 seats in the 130-member Parliament.

But again, what is omitted from the NPR article on the Muslim Brotherhood in Jordan is that the group is all but banned there already.

Arraf noted the following in a description about a medical clinic in Amman:

The patients are mostly refugees and Jordanian orphans. The clinic is one of dozens in a charity network founded by the Muslim Brotherhood and now run by the Jordanian government.

This is her oblique way of saying that the Jordanian government has seized the Muslim Brotherhood’s charity network and now operates them as part of the government.

Last year, the Jordanian government closed the Muslim Brotherhood’s headquarters.

And despite the Washington, D.C. “smart set” talking point that designating the Muslim Brotherhood would create problems for King Abdullah, it should be noted that the group has openly agitated to overthrow the Hashemite monarchy.

And King Abdullah has no reservations about expressing his antipathy towards the Muslim Brotherhood.

In an April 2013 interview with The Atlantic, Abdullah openly mocked the “smart set” narrative on the Muslim Brotherhood:

Abdullah expounds on that dislike to many of the Western visitors he receives—in part because he believes his Western allies are naive about the Brotherhood’s intentions. “When you go to the State Department and talk about this, they’re like, ‘This is just the liberals talking, this is the monarch saying that the Muslim Brotherhood is deep-rooted and sinister.’ ” Some of his Western interlocutors, he told me, argue that “the only way you can have democracy is through the Muslim Brotherhood.” His job, he says, is to point out that the Brotherhood is run by “wolves in sheep’s clothing” and wants to impose its retrograde vision of society and its anti-Western politics on the Muslim Middle East. This, he said, is “our major fight”—to prevent the Muslim Brothers from conniving their way into power across the region.

King Abdullah continued, noting how the Arab Spring revealed the Muslim Brotherhood’s loyalty to their international leadership and not their country and how they anticipated that the Arab Spring would remove him and bring them to power:

The king, for his part, is certain that the Muslim Brotherhood wants to see him gone. The GID has told him that the Brotherhood high command in Cairo is actively fomenting unrest in Jordan. According to multiple sources, the GID claims to have intercepted communications from Brotherhood leaders in Egypt to their Jordanian affiliates, encouraging them to boycott elections and destabilize the country. Abdullah told me that “behind closed doors, the Muslim Brotherhood here wants to overthrow” the government. I noted that the Brotherhood has his portrait on the walls of their offices. “They don’t believe in the constitution of Jordan,” he replied. “They won’t swear on the constitution. They will only swear on the constitution of the Muslim Brotherhood. Their allegiance is to the murshid,” the supreme guide, or leader, of the Brotherhood, who is based in Cairo. Abdullah said that when Brothers win election to parliament, and swear to follow the text of the Jordanian constitution, they get a fatwa—a religious ruling—stating that “you can put your hand on the Koran but what you swear on the Koran is nonbinding” when you’re declaring fealty to a secular document.

He noted that while he won’t let anyone kiss his hand (“we don’t believe anyone should kiss my hand, we’re all human beings”), “when you see Hamza Mansour, you see that after a speech, they all come kiss his hand.”

Two months after the Arab Spring erupted, the king received the leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood’s Jordanian branch in his office. “They were the first people I saw in the Arab Spring,” he told me. “They were the loudest voice, so I brought them in, and they said, ‘Our loyalty is to the Hashemites, and we stood with you in the ’40s and ’50s and ’70s,’ and I said, ‘That is the biggest load of crap I have ever heard.’ And they were like, ‘Aaaargh’—they were shocked.” He recounted that he said to them, “ ‘My father told me that you guys watched the way things were going, and when you saw that my father was winning, you went with him.’ I said, ‘This is complete and utter bullshit, and if we’re going to sit here and bullshit each other, then we might as well have a cup of tea and then say goodbye. If you want to have a serious conversation’—we Arabs like to ass-kiss each other for the first half hour of conversation—‘if you want to have a serious conversation, here’s where we start.’ ”

The king said he outlined for the Brotherhood leaders some areas of common interest, and then told them, “I think you’re part of the Jordanian system, and I think you should be part of the process.” He said he told them, “I think we all leave this meeting feeling really good, but—I’ll be honest with you—there’s 10 percent distrust from me, and 10 percent distrust from you, I’m sure. But we have good vibes here.”

Those Brotherhood leaders went to Cairo to ask the supreme guide and other Brotherhood leaders whether they should participate in the king’s newly established national-dialogue committee, meant to frame a broad civic discussion about political reform. Abdullah said he had told Hamza Mansour and two other Brotherhood leaders that he wanted an answer within a few days. “They were in Cairo to see the murshid, and they saw Tahrir Square and the Muslim Brotherhood. We asked Mansour, ‘Who are the three names you’re going to put on the national-dialogue committee?’ ” No names were ventured. “I think they thought the revolution was going to happen in Jordan, and they didn’t need to be part of the national committee,” the king said. “They thought they’d won. They had decided that they had won.”

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And King Abdullah has taken active measures against the Muslim Brotherhood, including the transfer of the charity network cited in the NPR report.

In 2015, the Jordanian government backed a breakaway faction of the Brotherhood that wanted to severe ties with its international leadership.

As one analyst put it:

As a consequence, observers say, the Royal Palace struck off the Brotherhood as an untrustworthy political actor and has been actively working to weaken the movement ever since.

“The state had lost all trust in the Brotherhood and saw them as an enemy,” says Oraib Rantawi, analyst and director of the Amman-based Al Quds Center for Political Studies.

“The internal crisis was a golden opportunity for Jordan to remove the Brotherhood from the political landscape.”

Then last year came the closure of the group’s headquarters and new limits on its activities:

With the exception of its IAF political wing, the Muslim Brotherhood in Jordan is organizationally defunct.

If the Muslim Brotherhood’s media cartel defenders wanted an honest conversation about designating the group as a terrorist organization, they should at least be honest about it.

But being honest about the Muslim Brotherhood is impossible, because all of the evidence is against them.

NPR has promoted another “moderate” Muslim Brotherhood leader in Tunisia, Rachid Ghannouchi, as a herald of Middle East democracy:

But as I reported here at PJ Media last month, Ghannouchi has been implicated in the assassination of his top political rival — a killing conducted by Ghannouchi’s al-Qaeda allies in Libya:

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As I’ve been saying for more than a decade, the “moderate Muslim Brotherhood” narrative is a fact-free doctrine of the Washington, D.C. “smart set” globalist faith. It’s as factually based as Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, or the Tooth Fairy.

The reality — as proven in U.S. federal court — is that the international Muslim Brotherhood is directly involved in terrorism across the globe. Even U.S. officials and federal prosecutors have implicated the Muslim Brotherhood here for their role in supporting international terrorism.

That, too, has been branded heresy by NPR:

If the “smart set” wants to indulge in these fact-free fantasies about how the “moderate Muslim Brotherhood” is going to usher in democracy in the Middle East, they should at least not use taxpayer-funded public radio to do it.

Perhaps that’s something for the Trump administration and Congress to investigate.

Patrick Poole
For media inquiries, please contact [email protected]

Patrick Poole is a national security and terrorism correspondent for PJMedia. Follow him on Twitter.
Category: HOMELAND SECURITY
Tags: HOMELAND SECURITY

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