Muslim Brotherhood

Photoshop.

It is odd to hear Westerners, hopelessly permeated with Marxism, dissect the nationwide Iranian protests as primarily an economic eruption, the suggestion being that the demonstrators are not that dyspeptic about the nature of the Islamic Republic. The New York Times’s Thomas Erdbrink, the Dutch…

Back in the heady days when the Western world was still enthralled by what was then known as the Arab Spring, the 2012 Egyptian presidential elections represented a watershed – if albeit a mixed one, given the victory of the Muslim Brotherhood candidate, Mohammed Morsi. The coming-to-power of Morsi…

London

On October 2, Arab media reported that a Kuwaiti radical Muslim television preacher, Tareq Suwaidan, was prohibited from visiting Saudi Arabia. Suwaidan had sought to go to Mecca to perform “umrah,” a shorter version of the annual hajj pilgrimage.

For most of those who were so hopeful when the Great Arab Revolt downed the dictator Hosni Mubarak two years ago, the travails of Egypt’s fledgling democracy have been depressing. Many in the West expected the country’s hodgepodge of secularists—the young men and women who were the cutting edge of…

In assessing Egyptian defense minister Abdul-Fattah el-Sisi’s decision to remove President Mohamed Morsi from office July 3, there are two key points to keep in mind. The first concerns the army, and the second concerns what is now, given the escalation of violence over the last two weeks, its…

Elliott Abrams, writing for National Review Online:

In a phone call today between the two leaders, President Barack Obama thanked Egyptian president Mohamed Morsi for helping to assist with the ceasefire between Hamas in Gaza and Israel.

Jerusalem

There is one curious beneficiary of the September 11 attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi that cost four American lives: Egypt’s new Muslim Brotherhood government. The attack in Libya and subsequent controversy has almost entirely obscured the siege that same day of the American embassy in…

Egyptian president Mohamed Morsi’s housecleaning over the last two weeks—dismissing several top army officers and an intelligence chief and abrogating constitutional amendments limiting presidential power—has left observers trying to figure out the grand design behind Morsi’s actions. Some think…

While in Egypt over the last several, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton met with the Muslim Brotherhood. But not everyone would meet with Clinton: Coptic Christians and Evangelicals refused, because, they claim, "the US administration has demonstrated their support for Islamism over other…

In a remarkable development, the people of Libya on Sunday voted against the seemingly-irresistible advance of the Muslim Brotherhood (MB) in the “Arab Spring” countries of North Africa. Until Libyan ballots began coming in, Western media seemed assured that the MB would repeat, in that country,…

In a rousing speech in Tahrir Square on Friday, Egypt’s new president, Mohamed Morsi, told the crowd that he will work to free Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, aka the “Blind Sheikh.” Rahman is currently serving a life sentence in a U.S. prison for his role in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and a…

News channel France 24 hosted a panel Monday night to discuss Egypt’s first civilian president, the Muslim Brotherhood’s Mohamed Morsi. One of the guests on the panel, via satellite from Cairo, was Nader Amram, a member of the Freedom & Justice Party’s foreign relations committee. (The Freedom &…

Either the Iranian regime is lying or Egypt’s new president, Mohammed Morsi, gave an interview that will raise some eyebrows.

White House spokesman Jay Carney issued the following statement in response to the Egyptian presidential election:

From failing European economies to staggering murder rates in Central America, there’s no shortage of crises on the agenda as the International Monetary Fund holds its annual spring meeting in Washington this week. Of all the problems within the IMF’s purview, however, the ongoing economic…

Now that runoff results are in from the first round of Egypt’s parliamentary elections, it’s clear that the Islamists are running the board. As Samuel Tadros writes in the National Review, that includes not only the Muslim Brotherhood but also one faction of the Salafist Alliance that the State…

Last week, Jordan's new prime minister Awn Khasawneh boldly announced that Jordan’s 1999 decision to deport leaders of the Palestinian jihadist group Hamas was a political mistake and a violation of the constitution. With U.S. regional influence in decline and Jordanian stability on the line, the…

Recently the Obama administration confirmed that it intends to resume official contact with Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood, the Middle East's first, and foremost, Islamist organization. A few days ago, Michael Totten sat down with Brotherhood official Esam El-Erian in Cairo for a long interview. Totten…

It can’t give many Americans much lasting pleasure that the Israeli prime minister humbled our commander in chief this week on his home turf. To be sure, a president who seems to relish provoking public confrontations with an ally may have had it coming, but in the end Netanyahu’s speech before…

Judging the likely trajectory of post-Mubarak Egypt requires assessing the depth of public support for Islamism, and usually this has meant assessing the strength and intentions of the Muslim Brotherhood. While the Brotherhood remains central, however, the country is also facing a frequently…

Tariq Ramadan is the latest in a long chorus to criticize the Obama administration for killing Osama bin Laden. The organization that his grandfather Hassan al-Banna started, the Muslim Brotherhood, along with its Palestinian branch Hamas, mourned the death of the holy warrior, while more moderate…

NATO agrees to oversee no-fly zone.

Cairo -- Polling places are packed today as Egyptians are casting their votes to ratify six amendments to the country’s constitution in what may be Egypt’s freest and fairest election ever. Because the military is running the show, penalties are stiff for voter fraud, and very few seem tempted to…

Cairo

After Hosni Mubarak’s fall in Egypt, there was a whorl of ambiguous media commentary that either tried to present the Muslim Brotherhood as a conciliatory Islamist movement posing no threat to Egypt, its neighbours (read: Israel) or the West, or tried to challenge the Brotherhood about its core…

The controlled public rage against corruption, oppression, and marginalization at the hands of tyrannical Arab regimes that has unfolded in recent weeks is unprecedented and probably unstoppable, but it caught most Western observers by surprise. While they accept the Arab revolt for what it is—a…

Writing for the Daily Beast, Bruce Riedel, a former CIA officer and adviser to the Obama administration, argues that the U.S. can coexist with a Muslim Brotherhood-dominated Egypt. The Obama administration “should not be afraid of the Muslim Brotherhood,” Riedel writes. “Living with it won’t be…