Protesters ransack Muslim Brotherhood offices across the country as “Arab Spring” facade is further exposed.
Riding upon a wave of Palestinian blood, Egyptian president Mohammed Morsi has opportunistically used the afterglow of an alleged “ceasefire” he claims to have brokered between Hamas and Israel to announce a sweeping power-grab many are calling a “coup.” As a result, protests and attacks have been reported across the country targeting the Muslim Brotherhood and its offices.
While we are told that in Egypt, “democracy” has prevailed resulting in the ascent of the Muslim Brotherhood into power, the reality is that the vast majority of Egyptians do not support the Muslim Brotherhood, and the country itself is far from the sectarian extremist cesspool it is portrayed as turning into.
The Brotherhood is simply the best funded, most organized, loudest, most violent and assertive political movement in Egypt, with its opponents being divided, co-opted, and scattered, hopelessly weak in comparison, despite their numerical superiority. The Muslim Brotherhood, despite its performance at the polls, and like many prevailing political movements around the globe (e.g. the US and Thailand), is in fact a minority.
The money and organizational skills the Brotherhood has, are owed to their long standing support from the US, Israel, and its regional partners through whom Western money and support is laundered – namely Saudi Arabia and Qatar. Morsi and the Brotherhood, like Mohammed ElBaradei’s opposition movement in Egypt, are creations and political manifestations of Western foreign policy and their regional, hegemonic objectives.
Angry protesters have now risen up across the country, and while fellow foreign collaborator ElBaradei attempts to pose as the face of this opposition, it is clear that the protesters represent a much larger and diverse segment of the population. With ElBaradei already exposed and diminished politically, Morsi and his Muslim Brotherhood remain one of the West’s last viable footholds in the country. Morsi’s fall would be a tremendous setback, one that ElBaradei will be unlikely able to salvage.
And because Morsi’s fall would be so catastrophic for his Western sponsors and their overarching agenda, it should be expected that extraordinary measures will be taken to ensure either he remains in power, or that a suitable replacement takes over his office.
The Brotherhood’s “Credentials.”
The Muslim Brotherhood is a faux-theocratic sectarian extremist movement – a regional movement that transcends national borders. It is guilty of decades of violent discord not only in Egypt, but across the Arab World and it has remained a serious threat to secular systems from Algeria to Syria and back again.
Image: Mohamed Morsi – hardly a “hardline extremists” himself, he is the embodiment of the absolute fraud that is the Muslim Brotherhood – a leadership of Western-educated, Western-serving technocrats posing as “pious Muslims” attempting to cultivate a base of fanatical extremists prepared to intimidate through violence the Brotherhood’s opposition. Failing that, they are prepared to use (and have used) extreme violence to achieve their political agenda.
Today, the Western press has decried Egyptian and Syrian efforts to hem in these sectarian extremists, particularly in Syria where the government was accused of having “massacred” armed Brotherhood militants in Hama in 1982. The constitutions of secular Arab nations across Northern Africa and the Middle East, including the newly rewritten Syrian Constitution, have attempted to exclude sectarian political parties, especially those with “regional” affiliations to prevent the Muslim Brotherhood and Al Qaeda affiliated political movements from ever coming into power.
And while sectarian extremists taking power in Egypt and attempting to take power in Syria may seem like an imminent threat to Western (including Israeli) interests – it in reality is a tremendous boon.
Morsi himself is by no means an “extremists” or an “Islamist.” He is a US-educated technocrat who merely poses as “hardline” in order to cultivate the fanatical support of the Brotherhood’s rank and file. Several of Morsi’s children are even US citizens. Morsi will gladly play the part of a sneering “anti-American,” “anti-Israeli” “Islamist,” but in the end, no matter how far the act goes, he will fulfill the West’s agenda.
Already, despite a long campaign of feigned anti-American, anti-Israeli propaganda during the Egyptian presidential run-up, the Muslim Brotherhood has joined US, European, and Israeli calls for “international” intervention in Syria. Egypt has continued to collude with the West, even as it feigned support for Gaza during its recent conflict with Israel. Alongside the CIA, Mossad, and the Persian Gulf State despots of Saudi Arabia and Qatar, the Muslim Brotherhood’s Syrian affiliates have been funneling weapons, cash, and foreign fighters into Syria to fight Wall Street, London, Riyadh, Doha, and Tel Aviv’s proxy war.
In a May 6, 2012 Reuters article it stated:
“Working quietly, the Brotherhood has been financing Free Syrian Army defectors based in Turkey and channeling money and supplies to Syria, reviving their base among small Sunni farmers and middle class Syrians, opposition sources say.”
The Muslim Brotherhood was nearing extinction in Syria before the latest unrest, and while Reuters categorically fails in its report to explain the “how” behind the Brotherhood’s resurrection, it was revealed in a 2007 New Yorker article titled, “The Redirection” by Seymour Hersh.
The Brotherhood was being directly backed by the US and Israel who were funneling support through the Saudis so as to not compromise the “credibility” of the so-called “Islamic” movement. Hersh revealed that members of the Lebanese Saad Hariri clique, then led by Fouad Siniora, had been the go-between for US planners and the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood.
Hersh reports the Lebanese Hariri faction had met Dick Cheney in Washington and relayed personally the importance of using the Muslim Brotherhood in Syria in any move against the ruling government:
“[Walid] Jumblatt then told me that he had met with Vice-President Cheney in Washington last fall to discuss, among other issues, the possibility of undermining Assad. He and his colleagues advised Cheney that, if the United States does try to move against Syria, members of the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood would be “the ones to talk to,” Jumblatt said.” –The Redirection, Seymour Hersh (2007)
The article would continue by explaining how already in 2007, US and Saudi backing had begun benefiting the Brotherhood:
“There is evidence that the Administration’s redirection strategy has already benefitted the Brotherhood. The Syrian National Salvation Front is a coalition of opposition groups whose principal members are a faction led by Abdul Halim Khaddam, a former Syrian Vice-President who defected in 2005, and the Brotherhood. A former high-ranking C.I.A. officer told me, “The Americans have provided both political and financial support. The Saudis are taking the lead with financial support, but there is American involvement.” He said that Khaddam, who now lives in Paris, was getting money from Saudi Arabia, with the knowledge of the White House. (In 2005, a delegation of the Front’s members met with officials from the National Security Council, according to press reports.) A former White House official told me that the Saudis had provided members of the Front with travel documents.” –The Redirection, Seymour Hersh (2007)
It was warned that such backing would benefit the Brotherhood as a whole, not just in Syria, and could effect public opinion even as far as in Egypt where a long battle against the hardliners was fought in order to keep Egyptian governance secular. Clearly the Brotherhood did not spontaneously rise back to power in Syria, it was resurrected by US, Israeli, and Saudi cash, weapons and directives.
Likewise, its rise into power in Egypt was facilitated by Western-backed and funded destabilization, sometimes referred to as the “Arab Spring.”
ElBaradei Still Lies in Wait.
Mohammed ElBaradei’s own movement eventually exposed him as an agent for Western interests. His fall from grace helped set the stage for Morsi’s ascent into power. It appears that ElBaradei and his movement are now attempting to position themselves once again to cover the West’s bases in the event Morsi falls, sabotaging once again any real legitimate opposition Egyptians attempt to rally together. ElBaradei and his Western trained, funded, and directed opposition movement are currently leading one of several factions now in Egypt’s streets and have been gladly afforded publicity across the Western press.
Image: ElBaradei, despite frequent anti-Israeli rhetoric, literally sat around the same table as the Israeli president, the Israeli foreign minister, and the governor of the Bank of Israel, as a fellow board member and adviser to the Wall Street-London funded International Crisis Group. ElBaradei and his Muslim Brotherhood counterpart Morsi, play “good cop-bad cop” versus the Egyptian people, both as clear agents of Western corporate-financier interests.
It should be remembered that like the Muslim Brotherhood, ElBaradei directly represents Western interests, ElBaradei himself a board member of the Wall Street-London funded International Crisis Group, which features US financiers like George Soros and Larry Summers, Neo-Conservative warmongers like Richard Armitage and Kenneth Adelman, and perhaps more inexplicable considering ElBaradei’s feigned “anti-Israeli” rhetoric, the President of Israel, Shimon Peres, former Foreign Minister of Israel Shlomo Ben-Ami, and Stanley Fischer, the governor of the Bank of Israel.
Like the Brotherhood, ElBaradei’s rise to political power was made possible by a movement trained, funded, and directed by the US government and organizations such as the US Congress-funded National Endowment for Democracy, years before the “Arab Spring” would actually unfold.
In an April 2011 article published by the New York Times titled, “U.S. Groups Helped Nurture Arab Uprisings,” it was stated:
“A number of the groups and individuals directly involved in the revolts and reforms sweeping the region, including the April 6 Youth Movement in Egypt, the Bahrain Center for Human Rights and grass-roots activists like Entsar Qadhi, a youth leader in Yemen, received training and financing from groups like the International Republican Institute, the National Democratic Institute and Freedom House, a nonprofit human rights organization based in Washington.”
The article would also add, regarding the US State Department-funded National Endowment for Democracy (NED):
“The Republican and Democratic institutes are loosely affiliated with the Republican and Democratic Parties. They were created by Congress and are financed through the National Endowment for Democracy, which was set up in 1983 to channel grants for promoting democracy in developing nations. The National Endowment receives about $100 million annually from Congress. Freedom House also gets the bulk of its money from the American government, mainly from the State Department. “
In 2008, Egyptian activists from the above mentioned April 6 movement were in New York City for the inaugural Alliance of Youth Movements (AYM) summit, also known as Movements.org. There, they received training, networking opportunities, and support from AYM’s various corporate and US governmental sponsors, including the US State Department itself.
Shortly afterward, April 6 would travel to Serbia to train under US-funded CANVAS, formally the US-funded NGO “Otpor” who helped overthrow the government of Serbia in 2000. Otpor, the New York Times would report, was a “well-oiled movement backed by several million dollars from the United States.” After its success it would change its name to CANVAS and begin training activists to be used in other US-backed regime change operations.
The April 6 Movement, after training with CANVAS, would return to Egypt in 2010, a full year before the “Arab Spring,” along with UN IAEA Chief Mohammed ElBaradei. April 6 members would even be arrested while waiting for ElBaradei’s arrival at Cairo’s airport in mid-February. Already, ElBaradei, as early as 2010, announced his intentions of running for president in the 2011 elections. Together with April 6, Wael Ghonim of Google, and a coalition of other opposition parties, ElBaradei assembled his “National Front for Change” and began preparing for the coming “Arab Spring” where his more presentable “pro-democracy” front would cover for large masses of Muslim Brotherhood followers in Tahrir Square as well as violence the Brotherhood carried out nationwide before the fall of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak.
While the Western press attempts to portray Elbaradei and the Muslim Brotherhood as opponents, they are in reality complimentary – a Western-backed, “good cop-bad cop” routine attempting to control both ends of Egypt’s political spectrum.
Caution as Opposition Builds Vs. the Muslim Brotherhood.
Clearly, both the Brotherhood and ElBaradei represent neither the people of Egypt, nor Egypt’s best interests. In the coming days, weeks, and months, as the Muslim Brotherhood faces increased opposition, Egyptians and onlookers around the world must carefully examine and delineate between the different opposition groups coming forward to challenge the current ruling government and ensure that real opposition prevails, while collaborators like ElBaradei are exposed and sidelined.
There is real, legitimate opposition in Egypt, and it is essential that is avoids the common tricks used to neutralize and subdue legitimate activism. Those falling into ElBaradei’s camp must recognize that while their intentions may be noble, the movement they are helping hold aloft is not, and stands opposed to their very political convictions and future aspirations.
Those amongst the Muslim Brotherhood’s supporters must sincerely ask themselves why, for decades, their leaders’ ambitions have consistently and “conveniently” dovetailed with Western designs against real progress in the Arab World.
