What makes the Leiken/Brooke articles so dangerous, apart from the fact that they were featured in a publication of the influential Council on Foreign Relations and have the endorsement of the Nixon Center, is that they are so fundamentally dishonest. The pair attempts to make their case by intentionally excluding the overwhelming evidence that contradicts their most basic assertions. As I mentioned in my previous article, they contend that the Muslim Brotherhood has “rejected jihad”, and yet their article of 15 pages only once makes mention of the Brotherhood’s Palestinian affiliate, the terrorist group HAMAS. And in that one mention, they never indicate any organizational connection whatsoever between HAMAS and the Brotherhood.
Then there is the Brotherhood’s international financial network of banks, especially the Al-Taqwa Bank led by the Brotherhood’s “foreign minister” Yousef Nada, which have served as the ATM for virtually every Islamic terrorist group in the world – a point made earlier this week by terrorist finance expert Douglas Farah, “The Ongoing Debate over the Muslim Brotherhood”. As recently as October 2000, Al-Taqwa even maintained an open revolving line of credit for Al-Qaeda’s terrorist operations, which prompted US Treasury authorities to designate it as a terrorist financing operation just weeks after 9/11 (among other reasons).
In a separate post, Farah expands on a point I raised in my own article, that we have a real-world working example of the kind of government the Muslim Brotherhood envisions in the genocidal National Islamic Front (NIF) regime of Sudan (Note: in my previous article, I mis-identified the NIF as the Islamic Salvation Front). The NIF came to power in 1989 in a military-backed coup that overthrew the democratically-elected government. The Bashir/Turabi NIF Brotherhood regime is responsible for millions of Christians and animists killed and starved in the South of the country during their tenure. And then there is the present crisis in Darfur, where the Arab Muslims of Khartoum are waging jihad against the non-Arab Muslims in the West, where more than 200,000 have been killed and many more displaced. Thus, the Muslim Brotherhood in Sudan is responsible for the greatest acts of genocide seen since the Holocaust. We should also recall that the Brotherhood regime in Khartoum gave Osama bin Laden and Al-Qaeda shelter after bin Laden’s Saudi Arabian citizenship was revoked.
For the purposes of the current discussion, it’s important to note that none of these facts about the involvement of the Muslim Brotherhood in ideological and financial support of terrorism are really under dispute, nor are the connections of the larger organization to HAMAS and the NIF regime in Sudan.
Then we turn to the issue of the Brotherhood’s “embrace of democracy”. The Brotherhood had an opportunity this week to demonstrate their commitment to democracy in Egypt, where they hold 88 seats in Parliament (about one-fifth of the total), in a constitutional referendum. The Muslim Brotherhood boycotted the vote, however, claiming that the amendments up for consideration were designed to limit their ability to engage in political activity – a claim with merit. One of the 32 amendments up for consideration bans religiously-based political parties, which directly targeted the Brotherhood.
I am certainly no apologist for the Mubarak regime, and I agree that many these amendments increase the powers of an already autocratic government, which is what makes the Brotherhood’s boycott of the referendum so hypocritical. Their non-participation in the referendum betrays their lukewarm (at best) adherence to democracy. The called boycott of the referendum only came after the Brotherhood was unable to defeat the amendments legislatively. Being in favor of democracy hypothetically for Western audiences is useless for establishing peace and stability in the Middle East (the intentions of the West) if the Muslim Brotherhood regularly renounces opportunities to practice democracy in actuality or participates only when it suits their purposes.
The constitutional amendments before the Egyptian electorate this week passed with 76 percent of the vote, and yet voter turnout was a meager 27 percent. If the Muslim Brotherhood believed that these amendments threatened their political existence, it would have been quite easy to defeat these amendments by mobilizing their supporters. Again, only 27 percent of voters showed up, and at least 24 percent of those voted against the amendments. But facing the risk of trying and possibly losing (and thus giving the results legitimacy), the Brotherhood opted out of democracy altogether.
In this instance, the Brotherhood boycotted the referendum and their chance to convince their skeptics at home and abroad that they were serious about democracy. The truth is that the Muslim Brotherhood is only interested in democracy as long as it’s to their benefit. Their commitment to democracy is not principled, but pragmatic; it is one option amongst many that they maintain, including turning to violence, which means they have no commitment to democracy at all. Their theoretical “embrace” of democracy is what they believe they need their supporters in the West to see and hear in order to obtain the international legitimacy they know will be essential to advance their Islamist agenda in Egypt, the Muslim world and beyond.
So I put the question to Robert Leiken, Steven Brooke, and the many promoters of the Muslim Brotherhood’s “moderation”: if their commitment to democracy is sincere, why the boycott on the referendum when a defeat of the amendments they opposed could have easily been had? If they are so committed to “embracing democracy”, as their Western supporters tell us, and the stakes so admittedly high for them in this constitutional referendum, why would they simply take a pass?
If the Brotherhood was really serious about “embracing democracy” they would not make it a policy of picking and choosing when they were going to do so. That they in fact do pick and choose, so clearly demonstrated in their boycott of the referendum this week, should indicate to policymakers in Washington that the Muslim Brotherhood’s “embrace” of democracy is tenuous at best, and duplicitous at worst.
For further reading on the Muslim Brotherhood, see this previous post, "More on the Muslim Brotherhood".
UPDATE: A colleague emailed and made this point:
"Not sure I agree entirely, this may be the wrong example. Even Egyptian judges say this election was a farce and the results should be ignored. As usual Mubarak went too far: he should have had a straight election with a typical 55% turnout, and let the MB's 25% showing reflect their marginal status."I responded:
"I would agree with your assessment regarding the referendum (and admitted as much in my post), but there's no indication that this election was anymore fraudulent than in the past. There really wasn't much need for excessive vote rigging with such low turnout. The simple fact is that the Mubarak regime is a reality; if the MB wants to play democratic, they are going to have to do so dealing with that reality, much like we have to do here with Democrats stealing elections when they are able (Woody Jenkins, Bob Dornan, Dino Rossi, et al.). If the MB wanted to protest the corruption in this election, they should have walked out of Parliament, not lost the vote legislatively and then called for a boycott on the referendum. It's precisely the picking and choosing when they are going to be democratic that shows their duplicity. I don't immediately see how the behavior of the Mubarak regime changes that.My friend's point is well-taken. He's right from a strategic point of view that Mubarak should have at least pretended that the referendum was more legitimate than it was, and let the MB walk the plank. The point I am raising though is the "he loves me, he loves me not" relationship of the MB to democratic action. Are boycotts ever acceptable democratic behavior? Historically speaking, they are not very successful in effecting regime change. But is it appropriate to lose an issue democratically, as the MB did when these constitutional referendum amendments were approved by the Parliament over the MB's dissent, and then turn around and boycott the referendum claiming corruption after they lost the issue legislatively? Are they allowed to have it both ways?
"From a strictly diplomatic point-of-view, we can't demand that the MB in Egypt act democratically and fault them for not doing so, then turn right around and question if there even is a democracy - this justifies the MB's position and propaganda with reference to the government. And it is precisely the diplomatic recognition of the MB on our end that's presently at issue."
