Brad Plumer points out that Mitt Romney's stance on the Muslim Brotherhood is actually well to the right of the Bush administration. So if you think the problem for the past few years has been that George W. Bush is a weak-kneed appeaser, I think Mitt's got to be your man.
« Here Comes Another | Main | Kagan's Obama »
More Brotherhood
04 May 2007 02:53 pm
Comments (17)
Well, let's see, the Muslim Brotherhood says that they renounced terrorism. Good enough for Matthew!
Hey, George Bush says we don't torture. Must be true, right?
Moreover, what exactly is Romney's "position" on the Muslim Brotherhood, given his statement in the debate? That the MB is just like "Shi'a" and "Sunni"! After all, all Romney did was list the MB among various groups, including "Shi'a" and "Sunni".
Hey, let's look at that well-known right wing source, Wikipedia:
The Brotherhood's position on violence to achieve its ends is a matter of controversy. The Muslim Brotherhood officially opposes attacks against civilians, and has officially condemned the 9/11 attacks. However some have claimed the Brotherhood's non-violent stance is part of a "chameleon-like adaptation is tactical moderation with the ultimate objective of complete Islamization of society."[20] Furthermore, White House counterterrorism chief Juan Zarate, states: "The Muslim Brotherhood is a group that worries us not because it deals with philosophical or ideological ideas but because it defends the use of violence against civilians." [21] The Brotherhood is widely believed to have had a `secret apparatus` responsible for terrorist attacks in Egypt including the assassination of Egypt's prime minister in 1948. The Brotherhood currently advocates suicide bombing attacks on civilians to fight Zionism, and its Palestinian wing Hamas[22] targets both civilians and the military in Israel. The Brotherhood is widely believed to have had a `secret apparatus` responsible for terrorist attacks in Egypt including the assassination of Egypt's prime minister in 1948.
In the U.S., the European Union, and other places, the Brotherhood is often regarded by experts as the source of all modern jihadi terrorism, its denials of involvement notwithstanding. Columnist and former Kuwaiti official Dr. Ahmad Al-Rabi, for example, recently wrote that the "beginnings of all of the religious terrorism that we are witnessing today were in the Muslim Brotherhood's ideology."[23] Former U.S. Middle East peace envoy Dennis Ross told Asharq Alawsat that the Muslim Brotherhood is a global, not a local organization, governed by a Shura (Consultative) Council, which rejects cessation of violence in Israel, and supports violence to achieve its political objectives elsewhere too. [24] Newsweek journalists Mark Hosenball and Michael Isikoff report connections between al-Qaeda and Brotherhood figures Mamoun Darkazanli, Youssef Nada.[25] Abdul Rahman al-Amoudi, an "expert in the art of deception" was an influential lobbyist and founder and head of the Brotherhood-linked American Muslim Council before being convicted for conspiracy to murder Saudi Prince Abdullah at the behest of Libyan leader Muammar al-Gaddafi and sentenced to 23 years in prison. [26]
This strikes me more as a story about Romney name-dropping an organization that he does not know anything about than as a story about Romney suggesting a substantive change in policy. Just like when Bush pronounced Olusegun Obasanjo during the Gore debates, he's just reading a list of foreign-sounding names to create a veneer of being informed. No one in his intended audience is well-informed enough to recognize this as strategic escalation, so he has nothing to gain from striking a pose that is to the right of Bush in this manner.
Al would have been far better served to just admit that Romney was talking out of his ass. I guarantee you that Al, simply by virtue of copying a wikipedia article, knows far more about the Muslim Brotherhood than Romney has ever learned.
No one is going to believe that Romney has a deep-seated position on this issue premised on his close study of whether the Muslim Brotherhood has sufficiently renounced the radical writings of Qutb, so why even bother, Al?
The funniest thing is reading Spencer Ackerman's ignorance on the subject. He writes:
Not only is the Muslim Brotherhood not a jihadist organization, but its very lack of jihadiness is what spawned Ayman Zawahiri's Egyptian Islamic Jihad.
Does Spencer know what the Muslim Brotherhood's motto is? Let's give it a try:
Heee...
No one is going to believe that Romney has a deep-seated position on this issue
Um, where exactly did Romney claim to have a "deep-seated position" on the Muslim Brotherhood? He mentioned the name, along with the names Sunni, Shi'a, al Qaeda, Hamas, and Hezbollah. It is hilarious to see Yglesias, Drum, Ackerman, et al ascribe to Romney some type of grand position on the Muslim Brotherhood on the basis of one offhand mention of the name.
Al -- The link you give doesn't say anything about a MB "motto". Nor does it ascribe a speaker. I couldn't find the motto anywhere in the MB website
Could you point me to your source? (I'm not challenging your research -- just looking for an authoritative cite)
Um, where exactly did Romney claim to have a "deep-seated position" on the Muslim Brotherhood?
He didn't. YOU did, by suggesting that it's somehow relevant to analyze whether the Muslim Brotherhood fits squarely into a list of violent jihadist organizations.
It's my contention that Romney just threw a bunch of names out there, not really analyzing whether each name on his list actually belongs as part of the "worldwide jihadist effort." If you feel pretty much the same way as I do, what's the point of poring over Wikipedia trying to prove that he lucked into a correct answer?
From Romney's site:
The defeat of this radical and violent faction of Islam must be achieved through a combination of American resolve, international effort, and the rejection of violence by moderate, modern, mainstream Muslims. An effective strategy will involve both military and diplomatic actions to support modern Muslim nations. America must help lead a broad-based international coalition that promotes secular education, modern financial and economic policies, international trade, and human rights.
"Romney wants the public to know that Jihadists are not an 'armed group of crazed maniacs in the hills of Afghanistan.' Rather, Romney says the United States is facing a 'far more sinister and broad-based extremist faction' with a 'very 8th century view of the world.'"
(ABC News, April 30, 2006)
Governor Romney: "The jihadists are waging a global war against the United States and Western governments generally with the ambition of replacing legitimate governments with a caliphate, with a theocracy."
(Omaha World Herald, January 23, 2006)
This hardly sounds like an in depth policy, nor does my reading of this or the soundbite strike me as a departure from common sense.
Romney has the intellectual capacity to be nuanced on matters of substance, and if he flubs that, then he deserves to fail. I agree with Steve, that in context, he was identifying with the term 'Jihadist' commonly used by the strategic thinkers on the matter, like Bill Roggio, and pointing to the broader base of radicals than just AQ.
Jihad is our way.
Ok, genius, now go back to Wikipedia and look up jihad.
The quote "Allah is our objective. The Prophet is our leader. Qur'an is our law. Jihad is our way. Dying in the way of Allah is our highest hope" seems to appear on p. 36 of Ziauddin Sardar's book Desperately Seeking Paradise; this comes from an Amazon search inside the book but my account doesn't let me read inside so I can't see the context, but according to a review it's a slogan Sardar chanted (and has presumably renounced as a student). The attribution to the Muslim Brotherhood seems to be a bit sloppy.
Sardar himself says that members of the Muslim Brotherhood condemn the use of suicide bombing outside of Israel/Palestine but support its use within I/P. That would certainly be morally wrong but as Yglesias points out in his previous post it doesn't make it a good idea to go after the MB. Note also that if members of the MB verbally support terrorist tactics it doesn't make them terrorists, just as assorted right-wingers support the use of military force in Iraq without themselves being soldiers.
that should be "Sardar chanted as a student (and has presumably renounced)."
Matthew Yglesias:
I know you never quite got it, partly accounting for your early support of the Iraq war (youthful exuberance and a misguided desire to seem serious explaining the rest), but Bush is an appeaser. Saudi Arabians attacked us on 9/11 and Bush failed to confront them for the obvious reasons.
And while bin Laden hides in Pakistan, Bush appeases the nuclear proliferator Musharraf, for fear of that confrontation, too. Weakness and appeasement are the Bush foreign policy method, looting the treasury the goal. Mission accomplished.
Oh yeah, he beat up a tyrant his daddy declawed.
If you don't know the enemy, you can't win the war.
Re: Muslim Brotherhood motto. Yeah, all I've is self-referencing among right-wing blogs of this quote. You can't find it anywhere on the MB English-language site...who knows, maybe on the Arabic-language one?
I did find this nugget (called the group's 1994 Testimony) on the MB site: Link
"Indeed, the present atmosphere of suppression, instability and anxiety has forced many of the young men of this nation to commit acts of terrorism which have intimidated innocent citizens and threatened the country's security as well as its economic and political future. The Muslim Brotherhood dissociate themselves totally, without any hesitation, from all kinds and forms of violence and we denounce terrorism of any form and from any source. In addition we consider those who shed the blood of others or aid such bloodshed, as being wrongdoers and partners in sin."
The MB has broken apart, split, come back together again and again so many times since 1948 that using events in 1948 to draw a straight line to today to explain what MB is now is foolish. It is a multilayered, complex organization with different cliques within it. Talking about it as a totality and in binary friend-or-enemy terms is foolish. That doesn't make them a group I would like to be powerful (either here or in Egypt), but making good policy relies on analyzing the world as it is, not in dialectic terms.
For anyone interested in reading more about the remarks on Islam and the Middle East made by Romney and his 9 colleagues, I covered the debate from an Arab-American Republican perspective.
Comments closed May 18, 2007.
| 
Heads in the Sand
Romney’s comments are really just a distillation of the standard right wing view of the ‘war on terror’. He was pandering to the audience like he always does.
Also, there’s a pretty strong connection between the muddled thinking exemplified by Romney’s comments and our country’s post-9/11 policy failures. Right wingers tend to downplay the importance of Bin Laden, and see all of the bad guys of the Islamic world as an undifferentiated threat. After 9/11, we ended up letting Bin Laden escape, then invaded a country that had nothing to do with 9/11. This is not a coincidence…
Posted by RC | May 4, 2007 3:39 PM