Should we worry about the Muslim Brotherhood?

Should we worry about the Muslim Brotherhood

Hassan Hassan warns that the Brotherhood is not moderate.  His warning is based entirely on the pronouncements of one associated cleric, Yussuf al Al Qaradawi.  This, frankly, is not only ill-founded but dangerous.

Al Qaradawi, not a member of the Muslim Brotherhood, said suicide bombing was "permissible for Palestinians".  He restricted the practice to groups, not individuals, but in 2014 extended the permission to "civil wars in the Middle East", in particular Syria.  Hassan Hassan said this let the genie out of the bottle.

Suicide bombing in the Arab world goes all the way back to the spectacular attack on the US marine barracks in Beirut, in 1983.  In Palestine it goes back at least to 1996, five years before Al Qaradawi's original fatwa, so the cause-effect relation doesn't even get started.  He could have made it more prevalent, or not; neither Hassan Hassan nor, anyone else has the slightest idea.  What we do know is that no member of the Muslim Brotherhood in its main contemporary incarnations, in Egypt and Tunisia, engaged in a Muslim Brotherhood suicide bombing campaign.  Since both Brotherhood movements renounced violence of any kind, it's a little hard to see how Al Qaradawi's dastardly influence operated within the Brotherhood framework.  Yet Hassan Hassan seemingly wants to blame the Brotherhood, not only for Al Qaradawi's pronouncements, but for suicide attacks all over the world, even in Bangladesh, where the organizations involved have nothing to do with the Brotherhood.

So we are asked to believe that all branches of the Brotherhood are scary because a cleric, not a member of the Brotherhood but an 'intellectual influence' on the Brotherhood, approved of suicide attacks. In support of this position, we are to note some suicide attacks which had no connection with the Brotherhood, some of which took place in parts of the world in which the Brotherhood has no presence.  We are to fear the Brotherhood because of a pronouncement of this cleric.  The pronouncement is fearful because his theology purportedly encourages suicide attacks which, however, are quite adequately explained as a weapon of the weak, not as a response to some johnny-come-lately theological pronouncement.  This is not reasoning but fear-mongering. 

It gets worse.  Though Al Qaradawi said suicide bombing was permitted in Palestine, he retracted the permission as, he said, conditions had changed.  Hassan Hassan warns that he did not "disapprove of the practice in general".  Apparently this is meant to suggest that the Muslim Brotherhood is soft on terrorism, or covertly pro-terrorist, or something like that.  Yet today the majority of suicide bomb attacks  occur in Syria, a country to which Hassan Hassan draws our attention.  These attacks are carried out on military targets during assaults, which in turn are part of military offensive or even defensive operations.  They do not fit most definitions of terrorism.

If we are to be cautioned about the Brotherhood, how about this?  Their greatest success has been in Egypt, where they renounced violence almost forty years ago, where they were robbed of their electoral victory and then massacred.  In Tunisia, minus the massacre, something very similar happened.  Now the Brotherhood is hunted, persecuted.  Then analysts insist the Brotherhood is scary, dangerous:  they sign on to a demonisation that can only lead - we do live in the real world - to more arrests, more killings, more torture, all of it completely unjustified.  Ask yourself then, which pronouncements are likely to encourage 'radicalisation'?  Which counsels are likely to undermine moderation?  What warnings are likely to become self-fulfilling prophecies?