I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: No matter how much the Muslim Brotherhood (MB) may try to paint itself as a nonviolent political entity, it is, always had been and always will be a terrorist organization.
With the visit of Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi to Washington earlier this month to meet with U.S. President Donald J. Trump, the Brotherhood has shoved its image makeover scheme into full gear in an effort to convince the U.S. Congress that it is a moderate group aimed at disseminating ideology, not terror.
But Washington should not be fooled by the ploy, and neither should anyone else.
Ever since its conception in Egypt back in 1928, the Brotherhood has publicly endorsed and encouraged the use of violence among its followers as its primary means of obtaining power and establishing a universal sharia-based caliphate.
And while the MB may occasionally spout platitudes of having renounced violence in favor of peaceful political undertakings, the facts speak for themselves when it comes to the horrifying crimes the MB has committed.
The MB wants the United States to believe that it is a much maligned and persecuted organization that may have a few renegade members who have committed acts of violence, but, as a whole, is a peaceable group of individuals who want nothing more than to help fellow Muslims and spread “multinational understanding and tolerance.”
And, yes, the MB has its pretty face of social service that it uses to gain access to Muslim communities around the globe.
But under that guise of moral teachings and good works, it maintains its core apparatus of hatred and terror to accomplish its ultimate goal of global Islamic rule.
This is exactly the same sort of political charade that groups like Hamas and Hezbollah operate in the Palestinian territories.
The Brotherhood’s overt acts of social services are a ruse to cover up its more covert and nefarious objective, which is to impose the law of Islam across the globe and to exterminate any persons who refuse to accept Mohammed as their prophet.
The organization’s official motto is plain evidence of that fact: “The Prophet is our leader; jihad is our way; death for the sake of Allah is our wish.”
The organization’s patriarch and role model, Hassan al Banna, put it even more bluntly in the MB’s play-by-play handbook, “The Way of Jihad.”
“Jihad means fighting unbelievers, and involves all possible efforts that are necessary to dismantle the power of the enemies of Islam, including beating them, plundering their wealth, destroying their places of worship and smashing their idols,” he wrote.
“It is the nature of Islam to dominate, not to be dominated, to impose its law on all nations and to extend its power to the entire planet.”
Not exactly a shining example of “multinational understanding and tolerance.”
The MB playbook also states that the world is divided into two groups, “the Party of Allah and the Party of Satan,” and warns that any secular government not compliant with the Party of Allah should be rejected and overturned.
That pretty much negates any claim that the Brotherhood wants to function as a legitimate political party within a democratic system.
And then there is the heinous history of what the Muslim Brotherhood has wrought, not only in North Africa and the Middle East, but throughout the world.
Over the last nine decades, the Brotherhood has been responsible for the deaths of hundreds of innocent people, especially Christians and other infidels, but also any Muslims who dare to question its particular brand of Islam.
In Egypt — where it first took root with the financial and political support of none other than Adolf Hitler — it has been responsible for countless deaths and has officially been declared a terror organization.
It was Brotherhood militants who assassinated Egyptian President Anwar Sadat in 1981, and who plotted the assassination of President Gamal Abdel Nasser.
It is the Brotherhood that is the main sponsor of the barrage of assaults against civilians and the Egyptian military that are still ravaging the country today.
Furthermore, the Muslim Brotherhood has been a breeding ground for numerous terror-based offshoots, including Hamas, and has been an incubator for a laundry list of high-profile global terrorists, including al-Qaida’s Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri and the Islamic State’s Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.
The Muslim Brotherhood has openly endorsed and supported other terror groups, such as Boko Haram, which kidnapped hundreds of school girls in Nigeria in 2014 and auctioned them off as child brides.
Other countries — including Bahrain, Syria, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Russia — concur with Cairo that the group’s main objective is to inflict harm on civilians through terrorist acts and have labeled it as a terror organization.
The Muslim Brotherhood rhetoric may have changed in recent years, but its vicious acts of violence have remained steadfast.
Given the bloody history and ongoing mantra and activities of the Muslim Brotherhood, we are left with but one question: If the perpetration of indiscriminate violence as a means to political ends does not constitute terrorism, then what does?
Thérèse Margolis can be reached at therese.margolis@gmail.com.