Monday, March 26, 2007
The Boston Globe give column space to a couple of guys who think we should start getting used to our new Muslim Brotherhood overlords as soon as possible: Hear out Muslim Brotherhood
Islamist political groups are incredibly popular in the Middle East, and will remain so for some time. As the oldest of these groups, the Brotherhood has continuing ties to other regional Islamist parties and movements. The United States currently lacks access to some of these Islamist organizations. Engaging with the Brotherhood, therefore, would open up new channels of communication with Islamist groups. It would also signal that the United States is open to talking with all groups that are committed to peaceful political participation...
Ah! Access politics. Sounds even more corrupt than access journalism. This whole thing reminds me of Joseph Kennedy writing home from Britain before the US entered WW2 that Britain was finished and we'd better start making nice with Hitler ASAP.
Wizbang comments here. Douglas Farrah has an ongoing debate about the Brotherhood with the authors, here, and Patrick Poole wrote a related piece (best of the lot) here.
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Here's my letter to the editor of the Boston Globe
Mike
.....................................
Dear Editor:
The opinion page of the Sunday Boston Globe is a fine venue for ideas and well crafted thoughts from diverse writers and contributors. I am fond of scanning the page for insight and information otherwise outside of my ken.
To my dismay, on occasion, the essays as published do not offer any solid insight nor information – and, at times, provide inaccurate pieces of data as to mislead the reader. Thus, I was struck by the recent essay published on March 25, 2007 – ‘Hear out Muslim Brotherhood,’ by Messrs. Stacher and Shehata.
The essay is a disingenuous piece of misinformation and a distortion of any sense of history.
The last line of the article, “And there is no more important moderate Islamist group in the region than Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood,†is fabrication in totality.
Let’s look at the record. The society of the Muslim Brotherhood was founded in 1927 by Hassan al-Banna, an Egyptian schoolteacher. According to Banna, the credo of the Muslim Brothers is: "Allah is our goal; the Qur’an is our constitution; the Prophet is our leader; Struggle is our way; and death in the path of Allah is our highest aspiration.†(Islamic Imperialism, Efraim Karsh, p. 208.)
Further, Messrs. Stacher and Shehata assert that “ … the Brotherhood has continuing ties to other regional Islamist parties and movements..†Yes, the Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brothers is known by its Arabic acronym Hamas (Islamic Resistance Movement).
To describe the Muslim Brotherhood as ‘moderate’ is to redefine the very notion of being moderate.
Michael A. Iwanowicz