The Muslim Brotherhood

You may have read that the Muslim Brotherhood has been making significant political gains through Egypt's elections. This is not good news. The Muslim Brotherhood has served as the foundation for much of the modern Islamist terror network. As Dr. Rachel Ehrenfeld and Alyssa A. Lappen correctly note in today's Front Page Magazine:

The MB is the fountainhead from which Sunni terrorist organizations such as Al-Qaeda, Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Gamaat Islamiyyah, Hizb-ut-Tahrir, and the Abu Sayyaf group have sprung. Their ties to the MB are clearly evident from their identical strategic agenda.

Here are some other useful examples of how Muslim Brothers have gone on to become key members of the terror network:

1) The most obvious example is Ayman al-Zawahiri, leader of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad and al Qaeda's number 2 man. His Egyptian Islamic Jihad was a direct outgrowth of the Egyptian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood. Many of its leaders were once Muslim Brothers. Mohamed Atta's family was and is particularly faithful to the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood.

2) Hassan al-Turabi, once the leader of the Sudanese branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, welcomed al Qaeda with open arms in the early 1990's and gave bin Laden sanctuary there until he finally relocated to Afghanistan. Turabi's vision for Sudan was to make it into a terrorist incubator for various alliances to come together and confront the West. It was in his Sudan that bin Laden and his cohorts met with Saddam's intelligence operatives in the early 1990's.

3) Here is an example you probably have not heard: Former members of the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood (Imad Yarkas, Abu Musab al-Suri) went on to become key players in al Qaeda's European terror network. I will have a lot more to say about this example in the near future.

The bottom line: The Muslim Brotherhood - in all of its variants - was and is a terrorist organization. The U.S. has to walk a fine line in dealing with this group.