The Muslim Brotherhood

By Aziz P. -
Marc Lynch aka The Father of the Aardvark is an expert on Arab media and politics. He has done exhaustive research and journalism on the Muslim Brotherhood of Egypt, and has argued quite persuasively that the MB is indeed serious about its commitment to democracy. Unfortunately, the United States has largely looked the other way while the Mubarak regime systematically persecutes the MB invoking the rhetoric of state security - rhetoric that is revealed to be a lie when moderate, liberal and pro-Western members of the Brotherhood are imprisoned and or prohibited from leaving the country.

Lynch laments,

“I’ve grown tired of debating the finer points of the Brotherhood’s party platform searching for clues as to their true feelings about democracy at a time when large numbers of their members are once again being arrested for the crime of trying to participate in elections.”


For more of an inside look at the Brotherhood, read Lynch's interview with Abd el-Moneim Abou el-Fattouh, a key Brotherhood reformist. The debate about the Muslim Brotherhood in the United States' foreign policy circles is alive and well, though conspicuously absent from the top echelons of the present Administration.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A fair solution to Jerusalem

By Aziz P. -
I remember reading one of the books by Tom Clancy in which Jack Ryan was credited with coming up with a solution for Middle East peace which was pointedly never actually detailed in the novel. It was just a way to give his character some foreign policy cred, but ended up like that mysterious suitcase in Pulp Fiction. I couldn't help but be reminded of that, though, when I read former New York mayor Ed Koch's innovative solution to resolving the status of Jerusalem . Instead of putting the hot-button issue of Jerusalem last on the agenda, the issue should be addressed first. If the Jerusalem question is solved, everything else should fall into place more easily. I believe there is a way to keep Jerusalem unified. I am talking not only of the old walled city, which is a very small part of the city of Jerusalem, but the whole city, east, west, north and south. [...] My suggestion is to situate the new Palestinian capital in that part of East Jerusalem that is occupied overwhelming
Read more

Conservatism's shari'a, liberalism's ijtihad

By Aziz P. -
An interesting meta-debate by intellectual conservatives over conservatism's future is playing out. It started with David Frum's Waterloo essay, which led to his political excommunication. Julian Sanchez observed that this represented an epistemic closing of the conservative mind , a thesis that was validated by the retribution visited upon Jim Manzi for daring to suggest that conservatives will achieve more persuasion by using honest, strong arguments instead of weak, emotional ones. All of this has led John Quiggin at Crooked Timber to argue most wisely that as conservatism implodes, liberalism needs to find its own rationale that is more than just "not conservatism". Quiggin has a list of priorities for the liberal movement to address, and closes with the general plea, ...the left has to stand for something more than keeping the existing order afloat with incremental improvements. We need to offer the hope of a better world as an alternative to the angry tribali
Read more