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The Muslim Brotherhood are turning into Leninists in Islamist dress. Egypt is in real trouble
Telegraph - UK ^ | November 5, 2012 | Alan Johnson
Telegraph - UK ^ | November 5, 2012 | Alan Johnson
The Muslim Brotherhood are turning into Leninists in Islamist dress. Egypt is in real trouble – Telegraph BlogsPaul Berman, the New York intellectual, is perhaps the most penetrating and imaginative essayist writing about Islamist movements and ideas alive today. In 2010 he published The Flight of the Intellectuals, a stylish account of the Muslim Brotherhood: the Islamist political movement founded in Egypt in 1928 by Hassan al-Banna (known in Arabic as al-Ikhwan al-Muslimeen). According to Berman, the party was shaped decisively in both its ideology and organisational methods by mid-century European totalitarianism and was a politically hardened, ideologically-driven and anti-Semitic movement. It was from this inconvenient truth that much of the western media and many public intellectuals were in flight.
When I praised Berman’s insights to a group of normally super-astute democracy promotion analysts in DC, to my surprise most took the view that Berman’s thesis was "crazy" and that the Muslim Brotherhood were really like the Christian Democracy in Europe; they had confessional roots, for sure, but were pragmatic folk and could be a force for "moderation". I responded that the Brotherhood was exactly like the CDU – apart from its party structure, ideology, rhetoric, policy, and goals.
Back in 2010 ours was an academic argument. Well, not any more. The Brotherhood will dominate the region’s politics over the next decade.......
.....Back in 2001 the Iranian sisters Ladan and Roya Boroumand wrote a seminal article, "Terror, Islam and Democracy". They warned that Islamist political movements, including the Muslim Brotherhood, confront the West with "Leninism in Islamist dress". Once again we confront "a power that saw itself as God on earth, organised as an all-powerful state, denying the right to individual belief, and reserving the right to define truth about and for the individual". It is time to see the Brotherhood plain. And to start playing hard ball on behalf of our true friends in that part of the world.