Muslim Brotherhood

[SWJED]

Moderator's Note

In April 2011 I merged four threads, one large and three small. Today April 2014 I have merged five other threads, including a RFI and a thread relating to the MB in the USA (ends).



20 April Counterterrorism blog - State Department’s Flirting with the Muslim Brotherhood by Lorenzo Vidino.

Over the last weeks there have been numerous signs of a new attitude at Foggy Bottom in relation to the international movement of the Muslim Brotherhood. While scores of moderate Muslims and Islamic scholars, the 9/11 Commission, and European security officials point to the Muslim Brothers as the forefathers of modern Islamist terrorism, the State Department is, in fact, flirting with them. As noted by Doug Farah here, last month the State Department sent its head of counterterrorism, Ambassador Hank Crumpton, to be the keynote speaker at a conference co-sponsored by the International Institute for Islamic Thought (IIIT), an infamous Brotherhood-linked Northern Virginia outfit. And in two weeks, as Rachel Ehrenfeld reported, the U.S. Embassy in Rome will co-sponsor a high-profile two-day symposium about immigration and integration where the highly controversial Swiss scholar Tariq Ramadan has been invited as a keynote speaker.

Isolated blunders? Unfortunately not. Two weeks ago the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations held a hearing on Islamist Extremism in Europe where various government officials outlined their initiatives to reach out to European Muslims. Particularly interesting was the testimony of the US Ambassador to Belgium, Tom Korologos, who explained how, over the past few months, together with the State Department, has been promoting various seemingly laudable initiatives in which American and European Muslim organizations meet with US officials, opening a dialogue that, in the Ambassador’s hopes, will “break stereotypes and foster networking opportunities.”

Dialogue with Muslim leaders, both in the West and in the rest of the world, is a crucial aspect of America’s war on terror, which, in the long run, is more important than any military or anti-terrorist operation. Yet Ambassador Korologos, and the State Department with him, seems to have completely missed the mark. The organizations that have been chosen to participate in his initiative, in fact, represent the gotha of the Muslim Brotherhood’s network on both sides of the Atlantic, raising serious doubts as to whether a genuinely open and constructive dialogue is being fostered...