Former Harvard Student and Ultra Zionist Activist Now Active in Egypt 9/11 Truth Propaganda
The first article below is recent and describes the leading candidate in Egypt's elections as a 9/11 Truther. The article cites an interview by "Egypt scholar Eric Trager" as the source of that juicy and damning detail about Abdel-Moneim Abolfotoh. In another article reprinted below, that ran in The New Republic, Trager is identified as "Eric Trager, the Ira Weiner fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, is a doctoral candidate in political science at the University of Pennsylvania, where he is writing his dissertation on Egyptian opposition parties." The name Eric Trager rang a bell, and lo and behold it was the same Eric Trager I remembered--a Harvard student who posted antisemitic rants to the listserve of the Harvard Initiative for Peace and Justice under the pseudonym "Fabian Cooper" in a self-described attempt to test the group's toleration of anti-semitism. More on the Harvard group, of which I considered myself an active member until deciding some of the core members' support of the official conspiracy were likely disingenuous, can be found here.
9/11 ‘truther’ leading Egyptian presidential race
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2012/may/21/911-truther-leading-egyp...
By Ben Birnbaum
The Washington Times
Monday, May 21, 2012
An Islamist who believes that the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the United States were an American conspiracy is the front-runner in Egypt’s presidential race, a new poll shows.
Abdel-Moneim Abolfotoh, formerly a leading figure in the Muslim Brotherhood, led the field of 13 candidates with 32 percent of the vote in a survey released Monday by the Washington-based Brookings Institution.
Mr. Abolfotoh expressed his views on the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon in an interview last year with Egypt scholar Eric Trager.
Mr. Trager, now with the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, quoted Mr. Abolfotoh as saying:
“It was too big an operation …. They [the United States] didn’t bring this crime before the U.S. justice system until now. Why? Because it’s part of a conspiracy.”
Egyptians will vote Wednesday and Thursday in their first presidential election since the toppling of Hosni Mubarak last year. If none of the candidates wins a majority, the two top vote-getters will compete in a runoff next month.
A ‘liberal Islamist’?
The 61-year-old Mr. Abolfotoh, who left the Brotherhood last year, has been dubbed a “liberal Islamist” by some reporters partly because he said he believes that a Christian should be able to run for president - a view that put him at odds with the Brotherhood’s leadership.
In a recent Egyptian television interview, Mr. Abolfotoh qualified that position. He said that, while parties are free to nominate whomever they want, Egypt “cannot have a president who does not have an Islamist orientation.”
The Washington Institute’s Mr. Trager said that “the notion that Abolfotoh is some kind of progressive is farcical.”
“He is a longtime Muslim Brother, a founder of the Islamist student movements of the 1970s, and somebody who still calls for implementing the Shariah,” he said. “His falling out with the Brotherhood was over differences regarding strategy and internal administration, not ideology.”
Mr. Abolfotoh has been endorsed by al-Gama’a al-Islamiya, a jihadist group the State Department designated as a terrorist organization.
“Given that he was endorsed by a terrorist organization and has called the peace treaty with Israel a national-security threat, it is highly unlikely that Egypt’s foreign-policy will remain friendly to U.S. interests if he’s elected,” Mr. Trager added.
Mr. Abolfotoh’s candidacy has seen several lucky breaks lately.
First was the disqualification last month of hardline preacher Hazem Abu Ismail from the race. The Salafist Nour Party, which had backed Mr. Abu Ismail, later threw its support to Mr. Abolfotoh.
In addition, the disqualification of the initial Muslim Brotherhood candidate, Khairat al-Shater, and his replacement with a less charismatic candidate, Mohammed Mursi, has caused a swing of Muslim Brotherhood support to Mr. Abolfotoh. Mr. Mursi, 60, was favored by only 8 percent of those polled in the May 4-10 Brookings survey of 773 Egyptian voters.
Closest rival
Mr. Abolfotoh’s closest rival in the presidential race appears to be Amr Moussa, a secular former foreign minister and Arab League chief. Mr. Moussa, 76, drew 28 percent support in the survey.
Mr. Moussa has repeatedly said that Egypt cannot afford “an experiment” in Islamist democracy, while Mr. Abolfotoh has blasted Mr. Moussa and another leading candidate, former Air Force commander Ahmed Shafiq, for their ties to the fallen regime. Mr. Shafiq, 70, received 14 percent support in the poll.
Mr. Abolfotoh and Mr. Moussa squared off recently in a four-hour televised debate that featured several sharp exchanges.
At one point, Mr. Abolfotoh called Israel “an enemy” and pressed Mr. Moussa to do the same. Mr. Moussa demurred, saying that Egypt’s next president should “not push it along with slogans towards a confrontation we may not be ready for.”
The winner of the election will have a large effect on the direction of the revolution that toppled Mr. Mubarak. The outcome could have far-reaching consequences in particular for the country’s besieged Christian minority, for Egyptian-Israeli relations and for the role of religion in public life.
Islamists so far have capitalized on the disorganization of liberal parties, winning two-thirds of the vote in the parliamentary elections.
The Brookings poll also shows that 66 percent of Egyptians support making Islamic law the basis of Egyptian law. But, in response to another question, 83 percent of Egyptians said they prefer applying Shariah in “spirit,” adapted to modern times.
Asked to pick a model for Egypt among six Muslim countries - Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Iran, Malaysia, Morocco, and Tunisia - 54 percent of those surveyed chose Turkey and 32 percent chose Saudi Arabia.
Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan also emerged as a favorite in the poll, with 63 percent of Egyptians naming him as the non-Egyptian world leader they admire most.
“Abolfotoh has said that he wants to be the Erdogan of Egypt, and I think that U.S. relations with Turkey may be a good example of what we could expect,” noted Stephen McNierny, executive director of the Project on Middle East Democracy.
“Turkey remains an important ally with whom the U.S. cooperates on a variety of shared interests. But on the surface, there is more tension between the two due to Erdogan’s inflammatory populist rhetoric and positions.”
Why Is the Middle East Still in Thrall to 9/11 Conspiracy Theories?
Eric Trager
September 3, 2011 | 12:00 am
18 comments
The 9/11 attacks catalyzed a tremendous shift in American foreign policy in the Middle East. Rather than prioritizing petrol, Washington targeted terrorist organizations, dethroned a dictator, and lobbied throughout the region for liberalization. Yet despite the billions of dollars spent policing Baghdad and protecting Benghazi, the unpopularity of the United States in the Arab world continues to be fueled by the belief that Islamist terrorists had nothing to do with 9/11, with many claiming the attacks were an American, Israeli, or joint American-Israeli conspiracy. In this sense, overcoming 9/11 revisionism is, perhaps, the greatest challenge facing American public diplomacy in the coming decade: So long as such conspiracy theories persist, Arabs will continue to view American policies aimed at preventing “another 9/11” as thoroughly illegitimate since, as they see it, 9/11 is just a big American lie.
In a report on Muslim-Western relations released on July 21 of this year, the Pew Research Center asked Muslim respondents in eight countries—including Lebanon, Jordan, Egypt, Turkey, and Pakistan—whether they thought groups of Arabs carried out the 9/11 attacks on the United States. In every country, less than 30 percent of respondents professed their belief for the idea, and in Jordan, Egypt, and Turkey the level of acceptance is lower today than it was in 2006. Indeed, the same revolutionary Arab Street that toppled Mubarak in Egypt also registered the highest level of denial among all the countries surveyed, with a full 75 percent of respondents recording their disbelief.
Pew’s poll numbers from Egypt track closely with my own experience in the country, where I lived and conducted doctoral research during parts of its tumultuous spring. Perhaps unsurprisingly, I found that 9/ll revisionism was particularly prominent among Islamists, for whom rewriting history is necessary for deflecting the accusation that their ideology motivates mass murder. “There is no Al Qaeda,” former Muslim Brotherhood Supreme Guide Mehdi Akef told me in complete seriousness. “It’s an American expression. It’s just an ideology, Al Qaeda. This ideology comes from America and their coalitions.” In Akef’s inversion of reality, 9/11 constituted an American attack on the Middle East, followed by an Islamist policy of self-defense. “When they fight in Iraq and Afghanistan, Al Qaeda thinks it’s a jihad because the fight is against occupation,” he said. “And it is jihad to fight occupation. And when Americans kill civilians everywhere, it’s a big crime against humanity.”
Younger generations of Muslim Brothers echo Akef’s distortions without fail. “America did [9/11] for some business interests,” Alexandria Brotherhood leader Ali Abdelfattah said to me. Abdel Monem Abouel Fetouh, a former Brotherhood leader whom The New York Times touts as a “liberal Islamist,” agrees: “I don’t believe it was jihadists—it was too big an operation,” he told me. “This was done by a country, not individuals. It’s not a conspiracy theory—it’s just logical. They didn’t bring crimes before the U.S. justice system until now. Why? Because it’s part of the conspiracy.” Even Islam Lotfy, who recently left the Brotherhood to establish his own political party and works as a contractor for USAID in Egypt, finds American complicity in 9/11 plausible. “I can’t imagine someone flying for twenty minutes and nobody realizes it, and then another plane goes and crashes and then another in Pennsylvania,” he said. Sobhi Saleh, a former parliamentarian who is considered among the Brotherhood’s top legal thinkers, had a slightly different theory. “The Jews and the Zionist lobby [did it],” he said, referencing a book that a Lebanese Christian cleric gave him. “And this study is well known in America and it’s on the Internet. … It was a scientific research.”
Yet Islamists were hardly the only group I encountered in Egyptian society that denied Al Qaeda’s complicity in 9/11. Revolutionary socialists, who comprise an important segment of the youth activists that catalyzed the January anti-Mubarak revolt, see the machinations of global domination at work. “Personally, I think the imperial interests needed something like this,” Mustafa Shawqi, a leader in the Coalition of Revolutionary Youth, told me. “Gas tycoons—blocking any attempt for democratic change in the Arab world and serving the security of Israel.” And a number of self-proclaimed liberals sounded awfully like the Islamists when asked who was responsible for 9/11. “The CIA knows who did it. I don’t know,” said liberal Wafd party youth activist Mohamed Fouad. “It will remain a question mark. Al Qaeda is part of the theories, but it was organized with others. And let’s not forget that Al Qaeda is made and supported by the Americans.”
Perhaps most alarmingly, 9/11 revisionism also remains alive and well within Egypt’s transitional government, despite its ostensible strategic alignment with the United States. In late August, I called Egyptian Minister of Social Solidarity Gouda Abdel-Khalek and asked him who he thought was responsible for 9/11. I assumed that Abdel-Khalek, a former Fulbright scholar who has taught economics at USC and UCLA, would dismiss my query as both ridiculous and obvious, but he took the question seriously instead: “I don’t know if anyone can answer this question,” he said. “Can you?” After a few digressions, he finally responded. “From what I read—and I don’t have the capacity of information gathering that intelligence agencies have—my follow-up led me to believe that the theory that Al Qaeda did it lacks evidence. The United States made it look like Al Qaeda did it. And you must have seen some of the works by Michael Moore—Fahrenheit 9/11.”
Next, I called Egyptian Vice-Prime Minister Ali ElSalmy, an American educated economist who served in Anwar Sadat’s cabinet during the 1970s and, later, as vice-president of Cairo University. Like Abdel-Khalek, ElSalmy considered my question both fair and decidedly undetermined. “I’m not sure who was responsible for 9/11,” he told me. “If the U.S. cannot know, neither can I. I can’t accuse people unless there are trials.” Yet, unlike Abdel-Khalek, ElSalmy declined to accuse the U.S. or Israel. “I don’t think that these conspiracy theories are applicable anymore, so I don’t want to argue with these theories unless there [are] proven ideas or facts.”
Of course, not every Egyptian with whom I spoke subscribed to 9/11 revisionism. For example, prominent leftist Egyptian activist George Ishak ascribed blame for 9/11 in four easy words: “Al Qaeda, of course.” But sadly, people like Ishak are the exception—and, given the overwhelming public consensus that blames America for 9/11 while absolving Al Qaeda, they are typically too timid to correct the revisionists in public.
The difficult task of fighting 9/11 revisionism thus falls to Washington, which must view the pervasiveness of Arab 9/11 conspiracy theories as a fundamental challenge to the legitimacy of our ongoing fight against terrorism. The more deeply that 9/11 revisionism becomes ingrained in Arabs’ views of history, the harder it will be to advance policies for preventing another attack.
Eric Trager, the Ira Weiner fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, is a doctoral candidate in political science at the University of Pennsylvania, where he is writing his dissertation on Egyptian opposition parties.
http://www.tnr.com/article/world/94546/middle-east-radical-conspiracy-th...
more background on Trager, and introducing Joachim Martillo
Interestingly, the Crimson never mentions that "Joachim Martillo" is himself Jewish, though he apparently at some point converted to Islam. He posts on twitter as "ThorsProvoni" and has a blog (now behind a google sign in page) on blogspot called Ethnic Ashkenazim Against Zionist Israel (but not 9/11 truth!). Possibly Adam Pearlman lite?
You Say You Want a Resolution?
By Daniel J. Hemel, CONTRIBUTING WRITER
Published: Thursday, December 04, 2003
A fragile peace prevails in Lowell House small dining room, site of a student-led Israeli-Palestinian dialogue, last Monday night. But Joachim C. S. Martillo ’78 promptly shatters it.
The others have barely finished exchanging pleasantries when Martillo drops his first rhetorical bombshell.
“Emerson supported terrorism against slaveholders, and I don’t see much of a difference between Zionism and slavery in terms of the evils they cause,” says Martillo, formerly a physics concentrator in Adams House.
To some participants in the dialogue, a fledgling effort to engender friendlier Arab-Jewish relations on a campus frequently polarized by Middle Eastern conflict, Martillo is a known commodity. With the approach of his 25th Harvard reunion last year, Martillo began to mull a donation to his alma mater, and started carefully observing campus debate over Israeli-Palestinian issues. He didn’t like what he saw, so he jumped into the fray. Since then, he’s gained notoriety for his incendiary comments at pro-Israel events and his provocative posts on e-mail list-serves.
“He’s pretty nuts,” says David B. Adelman ’04, former president of Harvard Students for Israel (HSI). But Martillo, a Boston-based entrepreneur who started selling computer products in the Palestinian territories after the 1993 Oslo Peace Accords, is no dilettante when it comes to Middle Eastern issues, although his views lie well beyond the mainstream. “The first time I went through a checkpoint and had to experience this as Palestinians did... I began to believe that we [in the United States] were on the wrong side,” he says.
Last spring, Martillo and HSI secretary Eric R. Trager ’05 sparred in a volley of e-mails on HIPJ-Open, the now-abolished e-mail list hosted by the Harvard Initiative for Peace and Justice, a student activist group. The heated exchanges between Martillo and Trager underscore the deep rift between pro-Israel and pro-Palestinian activists on campus.
At an institution that prides itself on facilitating free discourse, the debate over Israel tests the limits of tolerance and the possibility of dialogue. As Adelman asks, “If we can’t do this at Harvard, what does that say about the people who are trying to do it in Tel Aviv and Ramallah?”
Harvard students may not reach a peace treaty resolving Israeli-Palestinian conflict—at least not before graduation—but they can arrive at a cease-fire to defuse the tension that has marred on-campus debate. To accomplish this, the brash ideologues on campus must make room for more measured voices to set the tone of discourse.
More than a year since his September 17, 2002 address in Memorial Church grabbed headlines nationwide, University President Lawrence H. Summers’s words still reverberate on campus, casting an expansive shadow over Israeli-Palestinian discourse.
On that autumn morning, Summers told congregants, “Serious and thoughtful people are advocating and taking actions that are anti-Semitic in their effect if not their intent.” He specifically referenced a petition signed by 75 Harvard faculty members calling on the University to divest from companies with holdings in Israel.
Summers’ remarks drew mixed reactions within the Harvard community. “I was unhappy with the statement because it made people afraid to talk about Israel and Palestine,” says Ilana J. Sichel ’05, a literature concentrator in the Dudley Co-op who describes herself as a “leftist-Zionist.” She says that Summers’ speech “made me afraid to voice criticism of Israel for fear of being labeled a self-hating Jew.”
But for Trager, Summers’ Memorial Church address was a rallying cry. “Larry Summers, he makes me so proud to be a Jew,” says Trager, who after the speech went to Summers’ office hours to congratulate him personally. “He is willing to stand up to sentiments that—when accepted on the academic level—challenge the Jewish people and their international existence.”
Trager, a government concentrator in Kirkland House, spent the summer after his freshman year in Jerusalem as an intern for a right-of-center member of the Israeli parliament. The sharp-tongued Queens, N.Y. native is now on a mission to expose what he sees as HIPJ’s sordid underside.
“For a group like [HIPJ] to display a significant amount of anti-Israel sentiment to the point where it embodies anti-Semitism is disturbing,” he says. “If you don’t believe Israel has a legitimate right to use its army amidst this clear threat, then you oppose its secure existence, and that’s anti-Semitic.”
Trager claims that Martillo’s posts “came without any rebuke or organizational distancing from HIPJ,” although some suggest that may simply reflect HIPJ’s non-hierarchical power structure.
But active HIPJ members note that neither Trager nor Martillo is actually affiliated with the group. “These two nutcases essentially had a fight on our list, and it had nothing to do with us,” says Suvrat Raju, a HIPJ member and second-year physics doctoral candidate.
The antics of Trager and Martillo led HIPJ moderators to shut down the list last spring, but Trager remains dogged in his battle with the group. In the most recent round, Trager seized upon an e-mail Raju sent to HIPJ members upon his return from an Oct. 25 Washington, D.C. rally protesting America’s presence in Iraq.
“At various points, chants like ‘the only solution: revolution’ and ‘long live the intifada’ were taken up enthusiastically,” Raju wrote in that e-mail. “If 50,000 people could turn out for a largely socialist rally that wasn’t afraid of cheering the intifada then what would happen if we had large organizational structures and some time to build the movement? The mind boggles!”
The term “intifada,” Arabic for shuddering, is widely used in reference to the waves of anti-Israel violence and suicide bombings that have left thousands dead. From that perspective, Raju’s remarks bolster Trager’s case. But Raju maintains, “Intifada to me means resistance. It doesn’t mean support for terrorism. I hope that’s completely clear.”
The fastidiously polite Raju, who hails from Delhi, India, is a relative newcomer to Middle Eastern issues. “I feel really badly about what is happening there,” he says. “The occupied territories are on the verge of a humanitarian catastrophe.” As he settles into his new role as a pro-Palestinian activist, he seems shell-shocked by the ad hominem attacks that characterize debate at Harvard, including a recent e-mail from Trager:
“Suvrat, I would be very interested in knowing why you, personally, hold such enmity for the State of Israel,” Trager writes. “Are you Palestinian? Are you Muslim? Are you Arab? Are one of your parents one of the above? Are you dating/married to one of the above? Have you been to the West Bank or Gaza or Israel? Or are you just a run-of-the-mill Marxist Jew-hater?”
Raju does characterize himself as a Marxist, but he emphasizes that the ideological label does not extend to HIPJ as a whole. According to a statement on its website, the organization was founded hours after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks as “a group of people working to…do our part to stop the ill-conceived wars that now surround us.”
Raju says that the group’s foray into Israeli-Palestinian issues accelerated this fall as a “reactive process,” spurred by clashes with HSI. On Nov. 3, HIPJ and the Society of Arab Students (SAS) hosted Amer Jubran—a local activist then facing deportation to Jordan—in a Science Center auditorium, where he delivered a speech decrying the USA Patriot Act. Jubran, who refuses to condemn Palestinian suicide bombings against Jewish targets, provoked protests from pro-Israel groups. HSI members emphasized that their objection was to Jubran’s appearance, not HIPJ’s civil libertarian agenda. One HSI sign read, “Patriot Act, No; Support for Terrorism, Never.”
The HSI-HIPJ rift widened on Nov. 22 when first-year physics doctoral candidate Phil Larochelle, a 2003 MIT grad, launched a “HIPJ Weblog” tracking human rights abuses and progressive movements worldwide. The Weblog’s first news summary featured a link to a Zmag.org article comparing the Israeli Defense Forces to the Nazi military. Bur Larochelle stresses that his controversial weblog isn’t specifically aimed against Israel, and that it levels even harsher criticism against other U.S.-backed regimes with checkered human rights records.
As Trager pushed for a publicity campaign aimed at exposing HIPJ’s anti-Semitic leanings, HSI President Joshua Suskewicz ’05 intervened in the row. “I sincerely hope that our clubs do not reach a point of confrontation,” Suskewicz wrote in an e-mail to HIPJ leaders.
More catapulting of the propaganda...
http://www.worldaffairsjournal.org/blog/michael-j-totten/egypts-presiden...
http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2012/05/former_muslim_brotherhood_me...
and more on Trager: http://www.erictrager.org/Trager/Welcome.html
More from Trager on Muslim Brotherhood's "conspiracy theories"
Eric Trager - Eric Trager is a Ph.D. candidate in political science at the University of Pennsylvania. He was a 2006-2007 Fulbright fellow in Egypt.
Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood Sticks With Bin Laden
By Eric Trager
May 3 2011, 7:00 AM ET 51
The Islamist political party has made devout moderation a cornerstone of their post-Mubarak strategy, but the group's statement after the death of Osama bin Laden suggests they may not be so moderate
Most of yesterday's headlines proclaiming the death of Osama bin Laden used epithets like "terror mastermind" or "bastard" to refer to the internationally feared mass murderer. (That latter headline is from the New York Post.) But in its first public statement on the killing of bin Laden, Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood used the honorific term "sheikh" to refer to the al-Qaeda leader. It also accused Western governments of linking Islam and terrorism, and defended "resistance" against the U.S. presence in Iraq and Afghanistan as "legitimate."
Osama Bin Laden
The Muslim Brotherhood's response to bin Laden's death may finally end the mythology -- espoused frequently in the U.S. -- that the organization is moderate or, at the very least, could moderate once in power. This is, after all, precisely how Muslim Brothers describe their creed -- "moderate," as opposed to al-Qaeda, which is radical. "Moderate Islam means not using violence, denouncing terrorism, and not working with jihadists," said Muslim Brotherhood youth activist Khaled Hamza, for whom the organization's embrace of "moderate Islam" was the primary reason he joined.
Yet the Muslim Brotherhood's promise that its "moderation" means rejecting violence includes a gaping exception: the organization endorses violence against military occupations, which its leaders have told me include Iraq, Afghanistan, Chechnya, Bosnia, and Palestine -- in other words, nearly every major conflict on the Eurasian continent. "I never fought in Afghanistan," Mehdi Akef, the former Supreme Guide of the Muslim Brotherhood, told me in January, just before the revolt. "But I encouraged them and sent money to Bosnia and Palestine until now." Muslim Brotherhood leaders have endorsed attacks on Israeli civilians as an exception to their no-violence-except-against-occupation exception, viewing all of Israel as an occupation. "Zionism is gangs," said Akef. "It's not a country. So we will resist them until they don't have a country."
The attacks of September 11, 2001, however, created a real problem for the Muslim Brotherhood's paradigms, since it was a violent attack against civilians on territory that could not be considered occupied. Rather than denounce the attacks, however, the organization chose to argue, outrageously, that Islamists were not responsible.
In some cases, Muslim Brothers have simply expressed doubts about the "theory" that al-Qaeda was behind the attacks. "I don't believe it was jihadists. It was too big an operation," said Abdel Monem Aboul Fotouh, a former member of the Muslim Brotherhood Guidance Office who is often touted as one of the organization's reformers. "This was done by a country, not individuals. It's not a conspiracy theory -- it's just logical. They didn't bring this crime before the U.S. justice system until now. Why? Because it's part of a conspiracy."
More frequently, Muslim Brotherhood leaders blame a more predictable target. "The Jews and the Zionist lobby," Muslim Brotherhood legal thinker and former parliamentarian Sobhi Saleh declared to me one March afternoon in his Cairo office, when I asked him who was responsible for the attacks. "And this study is well-known in America and it's on the Internet. And a Christian preacher in Lebanon gave me a book on this at a conference. And it was a scientific research."
Now in their most recent statement on the death of bin Laden, the Muslim Brotherhood has gone a step further. "The whole world, and especially the Muslims, have lived with a fierce media campaign to brand Islam as terrorism and describe the Muslims as violent by blaming the September 11th incident on al-Qaeda." It then notes that "Sheikh Osama bin Laden" was assassinated alongside "a woman and one of his sons and with a number of his companions," going on to issue a rejection of violence and assassinations. It goes on to ominously declare that the Muslim Brotherhood supports "legitimate resistance against foreign occupation for any country, which is the legitimate right guaranteed by divine laws and international agreements," and demands that the U.S., the European Union, and NATO quickly "end the occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq, and recognize the legitimate rights of the Palestinian people." It closes by demanding that the U.S. "stop its intelligence operations against those who differ with it, and cease its interference in the internal affairs of any Arab or Muslim country."
In a way, the Muslim Brotherhood's statement is vintage bin Laden: it's Muslim lands, not America, that are under attack; it's Muslims, not American civilians, who are the ultimate victims; and, despite two American presidents' genuine, effusive promises to the contrary, Islam is the target. It's an important indicator that despite its increased responsibility in post-Mubarak Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood may well remain deeply hostile toward even the one of the most basic and defensible of American interests in the Middle East -- that of securing Americans from terrorism.
http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2011/05/egypts-muslim-b...
Sounds like good news from a
Sounds like good news from a bad messenger. Happy to learn that a majority in Egypt doubt the AlQuaeda-9-11 myth. The ball is on US citizens to figure out that 9-11 is a farce and send home its troops.
more catapulting the propaganda... hope it's a good thing!
SO far so good--seems like the likely future leadership of Egypt is actually quite good on the issues!
Top Egyptian presidential candidate doubts al Qaeda role in 9/11
By Ben Birnbaum
-
The Washington Times
Thursday, May 31, 2012
**FILE** Egyptian presidential candidate Mohammed Morsi (Associated Press)
Enlarge Photo
**FILE** Egyptian presidential candidate Mohammed Morsi (Associated Press) more >
The longtime Muslim Brotherhood leader who is favored to become Egypt’s next president has long cast doubt on al Qaeda’s involvement in the Sept. 11 terror attack and even has called for a “scientific conference” to determine the real culprits.
“The U.S. administration has never presented any evidences on the identity of those who committed that incident,” Mohamed Morsi is quoted as saying in a 2007 posting on Ikhwanweb, the Brotherhood’s official English website.
“The Muslim Brotherhood and others demanded a transparent trial with clear evidence and to have court rulings,” he said after the sixth anniversary of the attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people. “We confirm that this isn’t a defense to those who committed these actions but we only seek the truth.”
While condemning the attacks “regardless of its doer,” Mr. Morsi lambasted the U.S. response to them, calling the Bush administration “the world’s terrorism leader” and accusing it of getting “in line with Israeli occupation forces in aggression, injustice, encroaching lands and raping women.”
Mr. Morsi last week won the most votes in the first round of Egypt’s presidential election, and is heavily favored to win a runoff next month against Ahmed Shafik.
According to the Brotherhood website’s characterization of his 9/11 remarks, Mr. Morsi said the U.S. invaded Afghanistan and Iraq “due to the U.S. administration claims that the doers of the 11 September attacks [were] Muslims, without proving such a thing until now.”
In 2008, Mr. Morsicalled on the U.S. to provide “scientific” proof for its account of events.
“We have officially demanded a fair trial for 9/11 suspects and the issuance of a detailed scientific report about the attacks, but the U.S. Administration did not respond till now,” Mr. Morsi told Ikhwanweb.
“This requires a huge scientific conference that is devoted to analyzing what caused the attack against a massive structure like the two WTC towers,” he said, referring to the World Trade Center. “Should this happen, we will stand firmly against whoever committed this horrific crime against innocent civilians.”
Mr. Morsi is not the only Egyptian presidential candidate to have voiced conspiracy theories about the Sept. 11 attacks.
The Washington Times reported last week that Abdel Moneim Aboul Fotouh — a former Brotherhood figure who finished fourth in last week’s race — said last year that he believes 9/11 was “part of a conspiracy.”
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2012/may/31/egyptian-candidate-doubt...
Is the Muslim Brotherhood a Western Tool?
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June 23, 2012
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From Egypt to Syria, the Muslim Brotherhood does the West's bidding
-- now joined by overt State Department fronts.
By Tony Cartalucci
Tony Cartalucci is a geopolitical researcher and writer based in Bangkok, Thailand.
Were anyone to still believe the rhetoric of the so-called "Arab Spring," one would be admittedly confused over the emerging political landscape in Egypt where the military establishment and the Muslim Brotherhood have emerged from what was supposedly a "pro-democracy" "popular uprising."
However, if anyone understood that the "pro-democracy" protesters were in fact US State Department-funded, trained, and equipped mobs providing cover for the attempted installation of the Muslim Brotherhood amongst many other potential Western proxies, the current political battle would make perfect sense.
The Egyptian military, like in many developing nations, may accept money from the West, may train with Western forces, and may even participate in Western machinations of global domination, but are ultimately nationalists with the means and motivation to draw lines and check the West's ambitions within Egypt and throughout Egypt's sphere of influence. The necessity for the West of removing not only Hosni Mubarak who had refused to participate in a wider role against Iraq and Iran, but the grip of the military itself over Egyptian politics and replacing it with the Muslim Brotherhood who is already hard at work in Syria attempting to overthrow one of Iran's primary regional allies, is paramount.
"Pro-democracy" movements, particularly the April 6 youth movement, trained, funded, and equipped by the US State Department, serve the sole purpose of giving the Muslim Brotherhood's installation into power a spin of "legitimacy" where otherwise none exists. Those within these "pro-democracy" movements with legitimate intentions will be inevitably disappointed if not entirely thrown under the wheels of Western machinations as regional war aimed at destroying Iran, Syria, and Lebanon's Hezbollah arch of influence slowly unfolds.
Muslim Brotherhood were, are, and will be Western Proxies
Despite the Brotherhood's lofty rhetoric, it has from its inception been a key proliferator of Western foreign policy. Currently, the Syrian arm of the Muslim Brotherhood has been involved heavily, leading in fact, the US, Israeli, Saudi, and Qatari-backed sectarian violence that has been ravaging Syria for over a year. 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."
While Reuters categorically fails to explain the "how" behind the Brotherhood's resurrection, it was revealed in a 2007 New Yorker article titled, "The Redirection" by Seymour Hersh, as 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:
" 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
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
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.
And most recently, as the West frequently does before elections it wishes to manipulate, premature claims by the Muslim Brotherhood of a victory during a presidential runoff were made headlines by the Western media in an effort to portray the Brotherhood as the victors and lay the groundwork for contesting any results other than a decisive win for the West's proxy of choice.
US State Department-run Radio Free Europe Radio Liberty's (RFE/RL) "Muslim Brotherhood Declares Victory In Egypt Election," amongst many other articles attempted to give readers the impression that the Muslim Brotherhood had indeed already won the election. In reality the official tallies had yet to be given and it was merely the Brotherhood's own rhetoric upon which the report was based. As election results were finalized, and the Brotherhood's candidate, the US-educated Muhammad Morsi, appeared not to have the decisive victory claimed by his party and the Western media, immediately accusations of voter fraud were leveled against the Egyptian government.
The West is already combining its various proxy fronts for what it sees as a pivotal showdown and perhaps another opportunity to overthrow any remaining nationalist tendencies within the Egyptian military. Despite the Muslim Brotherhood, allegedly being a theocratic sectarian party, the antithesis of what the secular April 6 Movement allegedly stood for, Ahmed Maher, the movement's founder threw his full support behind the Brotherhood.
Maher it should be remembered, had been in the US, Serbia, and back again to the US for a series of training and networking opportunities arranged by the US State Department before during and after the so-called "Arab Spring." What seemed like politically ideological opposites, between April 6 and the Muslim Brotherhood, in fact share a common denominator - they are instruments executing Western foreign policy.
Libya, Egypt, Syria and Beyond to Form United Front Against Iran
Weakening Egypt before NATO's assault on Libya was a crucial step in ensuring the latter's absolute destruction and the creation of what is now a Libyan terror-emirate shipping cash, weapons, and fighters east and west to destabilize and overthrow various governments on the Anglo-American's long "to-do" list. The West's ability to install a Muslim Brotherhood government in Egypt, with it's substantial regional standing and influence would be a serious blow not only to Syria, but to Iran as well. The Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt is already echoing calls by the US and Israel for "intervention" in Syria.
Along with Libya, Egypt and of course the Gulf States of Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the UAE, and with the possibility of the Brotherhood coming to power in Syria as well, a united front against Iran would be formed and prepared to fight a proxy war on the West's behalf against the Islamic Republic.
Such a reordering has not only been mapped out in US foreign policy documents like Brookings Institution's "Which Path to Persia?" report, but mirror designs against China where all of Southeast Asia is slated for destabilization, regime change, and realignment to carry out the West's ambitions to contain and even collapse a rising China.
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