US Support for the Muslim Brotherhood in the White House and Egypt

“If your listeners want to understand where our foreign policy is getting twisted into some type of support for the Islamists, it must be related to the advice that President Obama and his entire team are getting from the Islamists that they bring in under the cover of the White House,” Zuhdi Jasser advised Secure Freedom Radio’s Frank Gaffney on Monday.

Jasser, who is founder and president of the American Islamic Forum for Democracy, expressed his irritation on the show with the mainstream media’s relationship with the Muslim Brotherhood and its affiliates. On one hand, he says, the media makes excuses that Huma Abedin, Hillary Clinton’s former Deputy Chief of Staff, continues to support her scandal-ridden husband Anthony Weiner because “she is colored by the misogyny of the Saudi culture that she came from, and thus has to sit and take this.” Yet on the other hand, Jasser argues, the media ignores the very threats that come from the culture Abedin associates with.

“It’s certainly interesting how they use the Wahhabi Islamist connection when it doesn’t fit their paradigms…The DHS guidelines came out and said to avoid reformers because supposedly we have a political agenda while they [the pro-Muslim Brotherhood side] don’t, when all the while this week CAIR came out and told Obama to condemn the violence against the Brotherhood and they were all silent when Egypt was being torn apart by violence against Christians and against minorities for the last year.”

Jasser also spoke at length about the political turmoil taking place in Egypt, saying that he supported what he saw “clearly was a course-correction. As we know in Iran, the longer the Islamists stay after a revolution, the more entrenched they become. It could have been a point of no return towards theocratic autocracy.”

“Now having said that, I do think that our government and President Obama need to begin laying out what our strategy is in Egypt,” Jasser continued. “It’s upsetting to me that he was quiet, with no criticism of the Brotherhood for a year, and now we’re beginning to talk about criticizing what was really a necessary course correction for the revolution.”

Jasser said he is strongly opposed to the violence the Egyptian military is committing against Muslim Brotherhood supporters. “Allowing the Brotherhood to become martyrs, this violence in this past few days and weeks—that’s how they got powerful. 60 years of dictatorship under Nasser, Sadat, and Mubarak did empower the Brotherhood. They themselves in power were destroyed in one year,” he says. “So I think time has shown the way to defeat the Brotherhood is to marginalize them with better ideas, to marginalize them with unifying the opposition.”

“We won the Cold War against the Soviets not by making the Communist Party illegal, but by marginalizing them globally and proving that their ideas are autocratic and incompatible with human rights and democracy.”