Many of us who have watched U.S.-Mideast policy unfold for decades, accepted there was just no way for the U.S. government to designate the Muslim Brotherhood as a foreign terrorist group.
As noted historically in Kuwait, Jordan, Libya, Egypt, Syria, Turkey and most recently Qatar, the U.S. government works collaboratively with chapters of the Muslim Brotherhood.
The Muslim Brotherhood is the political arm of authentic Islam, and can be considered much like the umbrella organization for a host of different factions of Islamic fundamentalism.
The Brotherhood is the unified political voice of many regional chapters, each with a varying degree of authentic Islam behind it.
Qatar is the central bank for the Muslim Brotherhood; Turkey represents the Brotherhood’s biggest national support network, and Egypt is the intellectual or scholastic battleground where the values of political Islam are debated.
For many years several people, ourselves included, have called for the Muslim Brotherhood to be designated as a foreign terrorist organization. However, the duality of purpose of the Brotherhood was always given as a reason not to designate them.
Today, President Trump is trying to navigate this dynamic within his executive order [SEE HERE].
The executive order instructs the State Dept to officially begin the process to look at each chapter of the Muslim Brotherhood as a separate entity, and then see if the designation of a terrorist organization can apply to that chapter.
As noted in the Executive Order, “relevant here, its chapters in Lebanon, Jordan, and Egypt engage in or facilitate and support violence and destabilization campaigns.” It looks like Lebanon, Jordan and Egypt chapters of the Brotherhood will get the first review.
Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi already dealt with the extremist Muslim Brotherhood once, kicking their leadership out of Egypt. The leaders fled to Qatar, and then ultimately ended up in Turkey, where Recep Erdogan absolutely loves the usefulness of the Brotherhood.
Jordanian King Abdullah has been balancing the Muslim Brotherhood influence for years, and Lebanon is a hot mess with the Hezbollah faction of the Brotherhood. The Muslim Brotherhood, as a political structure, holds all kinds of extremist factions under its umbrella (al-Qaeda, al-Nusra etc.).
