RUTHFULLY YOURS

As the 50th anniversary of the Cultural Revolution approaches some of the former students who participated in its Red Guard terror have been trying to make amends to their victims. If China’s former leftist fanatics feel some remorse for the atrocities they participated in, the same can’t be said of their American counterparts.

Even as the Cultural Revolution was dying down in China, it flared up in the United States. The Weather Underground drew inspiration from China’s Red Terror. Their founding manifesto cited the Red Guard as a model for a “mass revolutionary movement.”

Bill Ayers, among others, had signed a letter, “Long live People’s China. Love live Comrade Mao.”

The American counterparts of China’s Red Guard remain largely unrepentant because here the Cultural Revolution never ended. Instead it went mainstream. Its members were never disavowed and their acts of terror continue to be celebrated and whitewashed by a left that finds them alternately embarrassing and thrilling.

The terrorists became celebrities and the radicals became part of the system and set the rules. There was less violence, but more authoritarianism. Instead of carrying on a futile campaign of bombings and bank robberies, the radicals used the vast wealth and power of the system to train the next generation of the Red Guard. And that next generation did the same thing.

Each wave of the Cultural Revolution in the United States has eroded civil rights and illiberally undermined a liberal society. Though the Red Guards chose to work within the system, they are animated by an unmistakable contempt and hatred for the country and its institutions.

Their endgame has not changed. Only their tactics have.

Boko Haram’s leader Abubakar Shekau recently made a video in which he taunted the mothers of the girls he kidnapped and bragged, while praising Allah, how he will sell them on the market.

Frontpage editors have decided to shed light on the Islamic context of Shekau’s barbaric acts and words by reprinting a segment of an interview from our November 23, 2007 issue, in which Dr. Bill Warner discussed the inspiration and sanctioning that Muslims find in Islam for slavery and rape:

*Frontpage Interview’s guest today is Bill Warner, the director of the Center for the Study of Political Islam (CSPI) and spokesman for politicalislam.com. CSPI’s goal is to teach the doctrine of political Islam through its books and it has produced an eleven book series on political Islam. Mr. Warner did not write the CSPI series, but he acts as the agent for a group of scholars who are the authors. The Center’s latest book is The Submission of Women and Slaves, Islamic Duality.

FP: Bill Warner, welcome back to Frontpage Magazine. This is the second part in our two-part series with you on the Center’s most recent book. In the first part we discussed Islam and its doctrine on the submission of women. In this second and final part we will discuss the matter of slavery.

Warner: It is a pleasure to work with Frontpage.

FP: So tell us in general where Islam stands on slavery.

Warner: Islam’s stand on slavery is based on its political principles of submission and duality. The principle of submission could not be clearer. By definition a slave is the most submissive of all people. You become a slave only when you have no more choices. A slave has completely submitted to a master.

The principle of duality is shown by the fact that Islam does not enslave Muslims, only kafirs (non-Muslims). Since only kafirs are enslaved, it assures that more of the world submits to Islam.

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/the-war-against-the-jews?f=puball

Nearly seventy years after the end of the Holocaust and its recent commemoration, Jews frequently recite the pledge of “Never Again”; yet, the war against the Jews continues and with the exception of a few lone voices, no one within government, Jewish leadership, the media, or authority is responding.

The war against the Jews did not end with the defeat of Nazi Germany. While there may have been a respite for a few decades, it has raised its ugly head once again, and presently threatens European Jewry, Israel, and increasingly North American Jewry. From Western European capitols to Ukrainian cities in the east, anti-Semitism is on the rise, while we in North America are witnessing an ever increasing climate of anti-Semitic hate on college campuses and the Internet.

The Nazi uniform of yesterday has been replaced by young Muslim men hiding under their keffiyehs (terrorist scarves) chanting “death to the Jews” and “death to Israel”. Under the guise of freedom of speech, they terrorize Jewish youth on the streets of Paris, American campuses or as in NYU, their dormitories. The Muslim Student Association, a branch of the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas, with over 1000 chapters across our college campuses is permitted to incite and wreck havoc upon young Jews that would never be permitted against Muslims or Blacks. During Israeli Apartheid Week, young Jews are called Nazis, racists and baby killers. Where are the cries of the righteous among us? Where are the voices of the Chancellors, the Presidents, Board of Directors, and the faculties in the halls of academia? Their eerie silence speaks volumes and their tolerance of evil is a moral failure that will haunt their universities for time to come.

Israel, the only Jewish state, with half of the Jewish population has been earmarked for destruction by those who wish for a Judenrein Middle East. While Muslims have a majority in 49 countries with an Arab land mass of over 5 million square miles, Jews with a sliver of land to call their own are begrudged the right to self-determination, a right allotted to all other nations. Condemnation for the Jewish ancestral homeland is a favorite pastime at the United Nations, the European Union, and this American administration. On April 25th of this year, John Kerry, warned Israel at a meeting with world leaders that “Israel will become an apartheid State if it doesn’t make peace soon.” Note that this warning was not directed at the “Palestinians” who refuse to even recognize a Jewish state, but at a Jewish democratic ally who has traded land for peace, only to receive acts of terror in return.

There is much more than meets the eye to those little labels proclaiming foodstuffs fit to be consumed by the Prophet’s dutiful adherents. Much more than statements of religious purity they represent a concerted and organised attempt to further Islamic influence in the West.

“As Islamic violence, increasingly macabre, rages throughout the Middle East and Africa and sporadic attacks occur in too many other areas to mention, as Christians are abused, murdered and their churches destroyed in foreign lands, Australians are being encouraged to purr over the concept of “halal ecosystems” and halal-approved “freshness”; and purr the writer of this Monash article certainly did. Had journalistic curiosity been a factor, the article might have asked about “endangered or over-fished” Middle East Christians, or whether the knives of the Prophet’s head-lopping militants are kept very sharp and in full accordance with halal requirements.”

The Byron Bay Cookie Company must have been shocked by the number of angry comments on its Facebook page regarding “halal-certified Anzac biscuits”. The company had cheerfully declared that it would be “sending cookies to the Australian troops stationed overseas for Anazc day. If you would like to send them a special message, please comment on this post and we’ll collate all your messages.” No mention was made of the halal certification, but the word was out, courtesy of the sleuths at Boycott Halal in Australia.

The comments ranged from bafflement to fury at the company’s alleged betrayal of Australian values — “Halal certified cookies which finance the spread of the very ideology that motivates the killers of our sons and daughters? Your moral compass needs a serious re-adjustment”, ” for example. There were vows never again to buy Byron Bay Cookie Company products, as well as expressions of support for Australian troops and their sacrifices. The company responded that it was trying to be “respectful and inclusive”, which drew further lashings of ire.

Multiculturalism, that brilliant policy by which people in all Western countries, that is, all developed nations, were to enjoy “unity in diversity” and become “strong” by means of non-discriminatory and fast-paced immigration (in Kate Lundy’s earnest but hilarious words, “One of the reasons I believe Australians are so good at sport is because we are so culturally diverse”) appears not to be producing another iteration of the post-World War II immigration boom’s “New Australians” so much as as a re-made Australia. It hardly needs to be said that deep divisions are appearing in the overall population on which the policy was imposed.

Even some of the most ardent “tolerance and diversity” enthusiasts are becoming uneasy about the ever-burgeoning demands by Muslim arrivals, whose more enterprising members have found ways not only to extract expensive privileges to do with “religious requirements” (prayer rooms, special Muslim officers in councils, and so on) but also to promote the halal-certification business.

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2014/05/rubbish-history-books-national-curriculum/

The National Curriculum’s Bogus History

Gross errors of fact, ideologically tinted misrepresentations of the past, the mis-identification of historical figures — welcome to the tosh being fed to schoolchildren by the educational establishment. If Johnny can’t grasp how the past shapes the present and future, blame his textbooks.

Since Christopher Pyne announced the review of the national curriculum in January this year, the national curriculum has been a topic of heated debate, and no area of the curriculum has received more attention than history.

On the one hand, proponents of the history curriculum — many of whom were directly involved in the drafting process — have accused Pyne of “politicising history” and have claimed the existing document is somehow immune to bias and is entirely objective. On the other hand, critics of the national curriculum have maintained that the existing curriculum is biased in many respects, and that it denigrates Australia’s Western heritage and reflects a distinctly socialist and materialist view of history.

While the debate rages on, Labor’s history curriculum has already been rolled out into many Australian classrooms. A number of history textbooks that closely reflect the contents of the curriculum are appearing on booklists everywhere,.

We came across the some of these textbooks while writing our critique of the national curriculum at the Institute of Public Affairs. These books contain so many outrageous statements and factual errors that they were worthy of a critique on their own.

The errors and distortions in these textbooks are not just problematic for their own sake: they reveal the fundamental ideological biases of the national curriculum itself. Most schools across Australia are now using at least one of them for Year 7 to 10 history classes. Especially popular are the Jacaranda History Alive books (or the equivalent Retroactive series in New South Wales), the Oxford Big Ideas—History books, and the Pearson History series.

We took a sample of history textbooks from all the major publishers. The sample included the Year 7 Pearson, the Year 8 Macmillan, the Year 8 Cambridge, the Year 9 Jacaranda, and the Year 10 Nelson/CENGAGE Learning. We also had a look at the Oxford Year 7, 9 and 10, because these books most closely reflect the contents of the national curriculum and were written by some of the academics who were involved in the drafting process.

Not everything about these textbooks is bad. The best of them are glossy, colourful, filled with bright and interesting images, and pleasant to leaf through. Some are much better than others. The content and quality of some sections is also excellent. Usually, they provide very good—if somewhat superficial—introductions to the two world wars, and generally they provide some excellent content on technological advances and economic changes during the Industrial Revolution. Nevertheless, these history books are notable for their factual errors, controversial statements and unwarranted generalisations.

Just a brief survey of the Pearson Year 7 chapter on “Ancient Rome” reveals some of the fundamental problems that pervade most of the textbooks. My short assessment of this thirty-nine-page chapter found sixty-one obvious factual errors. These errors are not statements that are debatable or contested in scholarship, although there were many of these as well; there are sixty-one factual errors that can be refuted swiftly with easily available evidence.

Some errors were as basic as confusing “BC” and “AD” or citing the wrong dates. For example, the textbook claims that the Romans built the main part of the Appian Way in 32 BC. The correct date is 312 BC, around the time Rome established control over Italy. It also says that Cicero became consul in 63 AD. The correct date is 63 BC, before the Republic collapsed. It also says in a timeline on page 222 that Caesar became consul in 50 BC and invaded “France, then Britain”. In fact, Caesar was consul in 59 BC, and after his consulship ended he led campaigns in Gaul, Germania and Britannia from 58 to 50. He returned to Italy and crossed the Rubicon in 49, thus beginning the Civil War. Once again, the chronology in the textbook is wrong.

We can’t defeat hate with hate.

We’ve all but given up on the War on Drugs and the War on Terror has been scaled down to a few drones occasionally taking out a gang of Jihadis in Pakistan or Yemen.

Even the original kind of non-metaphorical war has been slashed to the bone with the military barely having enough metal left to scare off a flock of crows.

But the War on Racism has never ended. And it will never end.

The left has claimed that the War on Terror and the War on Drugs and even every real war were pretexts by the military-industrial complex, the prison industry and all the other industries to seize power by manufacturing a crisis.

But they are the ones who maintain a state of racial emergency long after the crisis has passed.

According to them, terrorism and crime are imaginary crises. Racism is the real threat. We have been fighting the War on Racism for over a century and even though the United States is less racist and more tolerant than most of the world, including Latin America, Asia and Africa, they are determined to keep the war going.

The Sterling case is only the latest production of racial outrage theater in which a minor incident that usually involves someone privately or semi-privately expressing a politically incorrect opinion that most people disagree with, but that they have the right to express, is blown up into a crisis with non-stop media coverage, political pressure and a ritual beheading.

These cases are not about punishing the powerful. Donald Sterling might be a wealthy and powerful man, but Justine Sacco wasn’t. The purges are opportunistic. Sterling dodged a racial bullet for years until his private conversation was taped and publicized. The next Sterling or Sacco might be anyone.

And that’s the larger message. It’s not about tolerance; it’s about a wave of political terror.

http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/frontpagemag-com/the-real-apartheid-john-kerry-wont-name-on-the-glazov-gang/print/

This week’s Glazov Gang was joined by Civil Rights Activist Ernie White, Hollywood Actor Basil Hoffman (“Rio I Love You”) and Orestes Matacena, a Filmmaker, (“Two de Force”).

They joined the show to discuss The Real Apartheid John Kerry Won’t Name, The Declassified White House Benghazi Emails, John Kerry’s Jewish Best Friends, Is Holding Lois Lerner in Contempt Un-American?, How Conservatives Must Fight, and much, much more:

As Hillary Clinton contemplates running for president in 2016, does she have dreams conjuring up the Benghazi tragedy and cover-up and repeating in her sleep, “What difference does it make?” Even Lady Macbeth had her moment of guilt when, imagining a spot of the murdered Scottish king’s blood on her hand, she exclaimed: “Out, damned spot!”

Hillary just cannot get rid of the Benghazi stain on her record. Every time she thinks it is safe to go back into the water and leave Benghazi behind, another bit of the truth is revealed that calls into question the honesty of the Obama administration, including its former Secretary of State, about what happened before, during, and after the September 11, 2012 Benghazi jihadist attack. And every time, we can count on spinmeisters in President Obama’s camp such as White House Press Secretary Jay Carney to say things like Benghazi is old news and that Republicans are engaging in unfounded conspiracy theories. Carney’s line sounds like a re-booting of Hillary’s old lament about vast right-wing conspiracies. We can also count on Democratic partisans like Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi complaining: “Benghazi, Benghazi, Benghazi! Why aren’t we talking about something else?” In another re-booting of a famous Hillary Clinton line, Pelosi is essentially asking – what difference does it make? Isn’t it time that we just moved on?

The answer is that the truth matters. The American people have a right to know how their commander-in-chief and possible future commander-in-chief were handling the Benghazi crisis, which led to the first killing since 1979 of a U.S. ambassador in the line of duty. And certainly the families of the fallen Americans have a right to know the full truth in order to reach closure.

Speaker John Boehner announced last week that he will call for a vote to establish a new House select committee to investigate. Speaker Boehner has announced that his choice to lead the committee is former federal prosecutor Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.). What prompted this action was news last week that the administration had deliberately withheld from Congress a crucial e-mail written by a senior White House official just two days after the attack, which clearly shows it was the Obama White House that was playing partisan politics rather than telling the truth.

BERNARD AVISHAI’S ANIMUS TO ISRAEL IS BEST SUMMED UP IN THE TITLE OF HIS OPUS MINIMUS : The Tragedy of Zionism: How Its Revolutionary Past Haunts Israeli Democracy…RSK

It has been a week since John Kerry apologized, with a certain recalcitrance, for having suggested, in an address to a closed-door meeting of the Trilateral Commission, that Israel was at risk of becoming “an apartheid state.” While Israel prepares to celebrate its Independence Day on Tuesday, the White House has declared a “pause” in its peace efforts, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) has rallied lawmakers to admire “the lone stable democracy in the Middle East,” and Martin Indyk, the chief U.S. negotiator, has returned to Washington. Susan Rice, who was known to be skeptical of Kerry’s gambit, is coming to consult with Prime Minister Netanyahu about the Iranian nuclear negotiations. It seems as if Israel has managed to ditch the talks while keeping its friends.

Israelis who seek a stable democracy, however, are feeling betrayed by the Obama Administration’s hasty retreat, and they are regretting Kerry’s expression of regret not because they like the word “apartheid” but because they don’t like American effeteness. These Israelis have been heartened by Kerry’s strong drive to achieve two states (which Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon dismissed as “messianic”)—and to mobilize a democratic Israeli majority against a fierce minority who take occupation for granted. In clarifying his original statement, Kerry insisted, “I will not allow my commitment to Israel to be questioned by anyone.” But one cannot simply have a “commitment to Israel”; one must be committed to one or the other vision of Israel’s future—to one group of Israelis over another.

This idea remains difficult for people outside the country to grasp. The risk for the future is not that the Green Line separating Israel from the West Bank will disappear, and the Israeli majority—and hence Israeli democracy—will be compromised. The risk is that the forces of “settlement” are winning. Over time, these forces—whom Netanyahu has drawn into his coalition, and with whom he probably sympathizes but cannot easily control—have assumed commanding positions in the Likud Party, in key ministries, in the Army, and in the legal system. It would be insensitive, given the horrors of Jewish history, to call these people fascists. So let us say that they include ultra-nationalists who traffic in xenophobic grievances, religious messianists who are unashamed of racist claims, militarists who regard liberal Tel Aviv as decadent, proponents of civil solidarity who scoff at legal constraints, wards of the state who depend on a command economy, and acolytes of authoritarian “spiritual leaders.”

“[T]he organization of the Muslim Brotherhood is a terrorist organization, and anyone who asks either to reconcile with them, to join them or to ally with them is himself a terrorist.” — Refaat Saïd, leader of Egypt’s Socialist party, al-Tagammu’, and previously close friend of former Muslim Brotherhood Supreme Guide, Mahdi Akef.

It should come as no surprise, then, that the motto of Ansar Bayt al-Maqdis is also the verse singled out by Hassan al Banna: “Fight them until there is no fitnah [discord], and [until] the religion, all of it, is for Allah.” [Qur’an, Sura VIII, verse 39]

The link between the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas is clear, and confirmed by Article 2 of the Charter of Hamas, which reads: “The Islamic Resistance movement is one of the wings of the Muslim Brothers in Palestine”.

A new terror group, Ansar Bayt al-Maqdis [ABM], just officially entered the scene. Both the U.S. State Department and the British government included it, at the beginning of April, in their list of proscribed terrorist organizations.

The United Kingdom justified its decision as follows: “ABM is an Al Qa’ida inspired militant Islamist group based in the northern Sinai region of Egypt. The group is said to recruit within Egypt and abroad and aims to create an Egyptian state ruled by Sharia law. ABM is assessed to be responsible for a number of attacks on security forces in Egypt since 2011. The attacks appear to have increased since the overthrow of the Morsi government in July 2013. The group’s reach goes beyond the Sinai, with the group claiming responsibility for a number of attacks in Cairo and cross-border attacks against Israel. ABM has undertaken attacks using vehicle-borne improvised explosive devices and surface-to-air missiles. Examples of attacks for which the group has claimed responsibility include: an attack on the Egyptian Interior Minister in which a UK national was seriously injured (September, 2013); an attack on a police compound in Mansoura, killing at least 16 people, including 14 police officers (December 24, 2013), and an attack on a tourist bus in which three South Koreans and their Egyptian driver died (January 16, 2014).”

The decision taken by the British government against Ansar Bayt al-Maqdis came almost at the same time as the decision to start investigations on the activities of Muslim Brotherhood [MB] and its possible links with terrorism.

Terrorists from the group Ansar Bayt al-Maqdis.

There is however a link between ABM and the Muslim Brotherhood: the justification of jihad, based on the Koranic text.

Although in January 2014, after the December 24 attack — linked by the British government statement to ABM — the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood issued a declaration in which it denied any connection with ABM, Refaat Saïd, the leader of the Socialist Party, Tagammu’, said otherwise.

Saïd pointed out, during the visit of Catherine Ashton to Egypt on the eve of its presidential elections, that Ashton “wants to open channels for a reconciliation with the Muslim Brotherhood despite knowing perfectly well that Dr. Mohammed Morsi himself imported the organization of Ansar Bayt al-Maqdis and placed it in the Sinai. Morsi released many of its members from prison so they could carry out terror attacks in the Sinai region to take him back to power.”

Saïd bluntly added that “the organization of the Muslim Brotherhood is a terrorist organization, and anyone who asks either to reconcile with them, to join them or to ally with them is himself a terrorist.”[1]

Saïd, previously a close friend of Mahdi Akef, the former MB Supreme Guide, knows the Brotherhood closely.

In September 2013, after an attack on the Egyptian Minister of the Interior, Major General Ahmad ‘Abd al-Halim explained that “Ansar Bayt al-Maqdis is an organization including 15 organizations acting and working in Gaza and belonging to the sphere of al-Qaeda and Hamas.”[2]

Colonel Farouq Hamdan — an aide to former Egyptian Interior Minister — also commented that “the attack was carried out with the blessing of, and consultation between the organizations of the Muslim Brotherhood and Ansar Bayt al-Maqdis, which was funded by the Brotherhood.”[3]

The connection between Ansar Bayt al-Maqdis, al-Qaeda and Hamas — already on the official lists of proscribed terrorist organizations in the West — and the Muslim Brotherhood — which is already presently on the proscribed terror organizations of Russia (February 2003), Syria (21 October 2013), Egypt (25 December 2013), Saudi Arabia (7 March 2013) and the United Arab Emirates (9 March 2014) — is sometimes a direct one, and sometimes an ideological link.

The link between the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas is clear and straight, and confirmed by Article 2 of the Charter of Hamas, which reads: “The Islamic Resistance Movement is one of the wings of the Muslim Brothers in Palestine. The Muslim Brotherhood Movement is a world organization, the largest Islamic Movement in the modern era. It is characterized by a profound understanding, by precise notions and by a complete comprehensiveness of all concepts of Islam in all domains of life: views and beliefs, politics and economics, education and society, jurisprudence and rule, indoctrination and teaching, the arts and publications, the hidden and the evident, and all the other domains of life.”

It would appear rather more difficult to demonstrate the link between the Muslim Brotherhood and some markedly jihadist movements such as Al Qaeda, Gamaat al-Islamiyya — also internationally recognized as a terrorist organization — and Ansar Bayt al-Maqdis.

In 2005, Sylvain Besson published, for the first time in a Western language, a document in his book, The Conquest of the West: The Secret Project of Islamists, often referred to as “The Secret Project.”

The document, “Towards a global strategy of Islamic politics (starting points, elements, essential conditions and missions),” was found in 2001 by Swiss authorities in the house of Youssef Nada, one of the leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood in the West

A similar version of the “Secret Project” was also aired in 2012 in a documentary film about the MB in the West by American journalist Glenn Beck. What is strange is that no one has given due importance to the contents of both documents.

“The Secret Project” explains the twelve starting points of the strategy of the Brotherhood in the West. For example:

“Step 5: Work to establish the Islamic state, in parallel make progressive efforts aiming at controlling the local centres of power through institutional work.

“Step 6: Work with loyalty alongside Islamic groups and institutions in various fields by agreeing on a common ground in order to cooperate on points of convergence while putting aside the points of divergence.

“Step 7: Accept the principle of temporary cooperation between Islamic movements and nationalist movements […]”

In Step 9, jihad is finally mentioned: “Build a permanent force of the Islamic preaching and support movements engaged in jihad in the Islamic world, in different ways and within the limits of the possible….Get in touch with any new movement engaged in jihad wherever in the planet, with Islamic minorities, and create walkways, according to requirements, to support and establish a partnership. Keep the jihad on alert in the umma [Muslim community] […].”

“The Secret Project” calls for a bond, a better collaboration with jihadi movements and it would seem that strategically, leaders and members of the MB consider both jihad and jihadi movements fundamental to achieve their goals.

Hasan al-Banna, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood in 1936, issued a call to “kings and princes, members of legal organizations and Islamic societies, to those who own judgment and sense of honour in the Muslim world,” to the so-called “Fifty requests” to return to a true Islamic society.

The third request reads: “Reinforce the army, multiply sections of young people and inflame them on the grounds of Islamic jihad.”

Jihad appears always to have been part of MB ideology. Sayyid Qutb, possibly the most important MB ideologue, in his commentary of Koran, In the Shade of Qur’an, defines jihad: “Islam gives the name jihad to such cumulative efforts. This includes efforts to change people through verbal advocacy. It also includes the possible armed struggle to end an oppressive system and establish justice. […] among the radical concepts of the revolutionary party named “Muslim” the most foundational is to engage every rebellious force that comes in Islam’s way: fight them, muster everything possible to replace them.”

Sayyid Qutb’s books and his theory of jihad have been fundamental in building the foundation of Al-Qaeda ideology as Ayman al-Zawahiri clearly states in his book Knights under the Prophet’s Banner.

In 1978, a Sudanese reformist and political leader, Mahmud Muhammad Taha, who was sentenced to death for apostasy in 1985, wrote, in the first part of his reflection, These are the Muslim Brothers: “In this age when humanity was predisposed to spread Islam at the scientific level based on persuasion, on reconciliation and peace, when the world opinion was inclined to renounce violence and not to resort to war to solve problems, here came the organization of the Muslim Brotherhood calling Muslims to jihad! Here is the shaykh Hasan al- Banna, the founder of their preaching, consecrating a letter of his to jihad, ‘The Letter of jihad.’ He quotes many Koranic verses calling for jihad […] He concludes the document with the following invitation: ‘Brothers, the umma is a factory of death […] and Allah reserved you the precious life on earth and eternal bliss in the afterlife, what a fragility leads us to love this life and hate death, be ready for an important action and long for death since it will give you life.'”[4]

In a letter about “teachings” (Risalat al-ta’alim), in “Point 7,” the paragraph dedicated to action, Hasan al- Banna wrote: “We must be the masters in spreading the Islamic preaching in every place, ‘And fight them until there is no fitnah [upheaval] and [until] the religion, all of it, is for Allah’ (Surat al-Anfal, VIII:39) […] and I want jihad as an obligation of the past that will continues until the Day of Judgment and that has as its main purpose the hadith of the Messenger of Allah — upon him the greetings and blessing of Allah: whoever dies without having fought and without having any intention of fighting is as if he had died in the era of ignorance.'”

The importance of jihad in the history of MB is further underlined by the title of an essay that Yusuf al-Qaradawi, one of its main theologians: “The Muslim Brotherhood. Seventy years of preaching, education and jihad” (Beirut 2001).

Al-Qaradawi states that, “the movement engaged in real jihadi battles against the Zionists in Palestine and the British in Egypt and the movement sent the best of its sons to sacrifice.” (page 235)

It should come as no surprise, then, that the motto of Ansar Bayt al-Maqdis is also the verse singled out by Hassan al Banna: “Fight them until there is no fitnah [discord], and [until] the religion, all of it, is for Allah.” [Qur’an, Sura VIII, verse 39].

As stated in “The Secret Project” of the Muslim Brotherhood, the MB and Islamist movements are merely different but complementary ways to implement the goals of jihad.

Whereas the Muslim Brotherhood preaches jihad with pragmatism and “moderation,” the ABM, Hamas and al-Qaeda preach and practice it bluntly and with no delay. But whenever the Brotherhood enters what could be perceived as resistance, then open violence becomes permissible, as now in Egypt.

Recent statements to the Sunday Times by Ibrahim al-Mounir, whom many regard as the leader of the Brotherhood in Europe, sound as if they are a veiled threat: “If this [ban] happened, this would make a lot of people in Muslim communities think that [peaceful] Muslim Brotherhood values … didn’t work and now they are designated a terrorist group, which would make the doors open for all options.” When asked if he meant that the group was open to violence, he replied: “Any possibility.”

There can be no doubt about the ideological link between ABM and MB: both believe in jihad, in the conquest of power by Islam. The most important thing the West has to understand is the blunt pragmatism of MB, that is what Mohammed Charfi, former Tunisian minister of education, wrote in his essay, Islam et liberté: “Today the observers call a “moderate” Islamist the person who, with Westerners, uses reasonable language and who does not choose an openly violent action. However even though his style is calm and the rejection of violence seems sincere, since the movement is always linked to sharia and the sacralisation of history, his moderation remains provisional and indicates a strategy of waiting, because the ingredients of radicalization have not disappeared.”

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[1] Website of the newspaper al-Shourouq, April 11, 2014.
[2] Al-Wafd, September 9, 2013.