The "Ultra-Secretive" Muslim Brotherhood

Since I enjoy subjecting myself to large doses of online wingnuttery, I was reading an article in Human Events, the self-proclaimed "Headquarters of the Conservative Underground." In the the minds of its publishers, conservatism in the United States has been somehow driven "underground."

According to the headline by Rowan Scarborough, the "FBI Partners With Jihad Groups!" Oh noes! Which Jihad groups?

A former agent told HUMAN EVENTS the bureau is dealing with the groups that maintain an under-the-radar alliance with the Muslim Brotherhood. The ultra-secretive Muslim Brotherhood, with chapters worldwide, is the glue for a network of Islamic groups.

"ultra-secretive", eh? Wow. That's between mega-secretive and terra-secretive, right? I wonder if it's possible to find traces of this shadowy organization on Ye Olde Internets.


Conveniently, they are at http://www.ikhwanweb.org . Of course, one can't expect to find any meaningful information on the Brotherhood's site. You're probably never going to find the celebrated manifesto, for instance, where members of the Brotherhood propose a "kind of grand jihad in America." It's probably all just propaganda, codewords, and side-of-nose-tapping to signal execution of plans made three years earlier in a musty room with a single swinging lightbulb somewhere near a railway track.

Let's try searching the site for the terms "grand jihad," :

Reporting The Muslim Brotherhood

In a federal courtroom in Dallas last October, the leadership of the now-defunct Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development, once the nation’s largest Muslim charity, stood accused of using the charity as a Hamas fundraising front. It was the federal government’s most important terrorism fundraising case to date.

By Rod Dreher

What follows is a damning exposé of the Brotherhood's alleged role in fomenting radical interpretations of Islam in the United States, along with the same quotation from the manifesto produced above.

So not only is the Muslim Brotherhood no more "ultra-secretive" than, say, any major political party anywhere (and it is Egypt's largest opposition party, despite being banned by Mubarak's repressive regime), it also publishes withering criticism of itself on its own website. Either the Ikhwan (Arabic for brotherhood) are true believers in open debate and ideological forthrightness, or they are very careless about what they post on their website.

So why the hyperbole in the Human Events article? Simple: to make people scared. As one lone commenter added after the article:

The hypocrisy festering below the surface of this, and most articles I read on this website, astounds me. Who armed the jihad groups in the first place in the 1980s? And have you seen the photos from that same decade, of U.S. politicians shaking hands and smiling and being buddy-buddy with Saddam and other dictators (ahem, Rumsfeld, Bush I, etc.)

I'm a scientist. As such, I understand that the search for truth (if it can be found) fundamentally depends on identifying my own assumptions and biases. This website and almost everything in it fails to meet this most basic principle. You play on emotions and fear and this is irresponsible journalism at best, and anti-american and anti-humanity at worst.

- Casey, Clemson

At which point, the anti-intellectualism of the "Conservative Underground" necessitated a pile-on.

Obituary for Samuel Huntington

The man who coined the phrase "Clash of Civilizations" died on Christmas eve. The Hindustan Times recently carried this short, but informative article about the man:

. . . If the Huntington thesis survived, it was because of 9/11 and all that came afterwards. Today the most fanatical Huntingtonians are Osama bin Laden, the Arab street and the Bajrang Dal. It remains the best intellectual fit for their own conspiracy theories to explain the decline of the Arab world and legitimise their biases.

Huntington continued to produce books based on interesting concepts for which he had no supporting evidence. Among his last was a claim that Mexican immigrants to the US were endangering the country because they, unlike other immigrants, weren’t integrating fast enough. It was as weak as the Clash, but no crisis helped to propel this thesis into the limelight. . .

I started into (but never finished) most famous book, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order back in the late nineties, not too long after it came out. I was sort of impressed by it at the time - it did provide a framework to understand the post-Soviet era, and I hadn't done that much reading in the field at that point. Huntington made the interesting observation that both Islamic and Western philosophy and theology were dualistic and universalist - they believe in Good and Evil, and they believe that they have the right answer for everyone. For this reason, said Huntington, they were destined forever to be in conflict.

The thesis, however, has increasingly been proven to be nonsense, its fundamental weakness being in its definition of a "civilization." The only "civilizations" it reasonably described were "the West" and "Islam," while everyone else got an awkward label that didn't really seem to fit. The "Sinic" civilization didn't seem to say much more than "Post-Mao China and current allies." The "Orthodox" civilization didn't say much more than "Latent Russian sympathy for ethnoreligiously similar peoples."

More importantly, the dualism and universalism that Muslims and Westerners share has never been shown to be the reason for their conflict. Bin Laden, for example, in his video after the New York/Washington attack, made fairly reasonable, fairly material demands: troops out of Arabia, end the occupation of the Palestinians, and end the sactions on Iraq. There is no evidence that the subsequent hostility create by the "Global War On Terror" had anything to do with ideology - everybody knows that America didn't invade Iraq to install a democracy, and that Muslim militants aren't travelling to Brazil or Ireland in a search for defenseless Christians to blow up.

Samuel Huntington's Clash got it wrong. Joe Strummer's Clash, on the other hand, was definitely on to something.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-dOv-UaWJ7M

They should have made him a prof at Harvard.