Who Are America's Old Friends The Muslim Brotherhood?

A natural fit for Fox in the making

About a month ago, we looked at the stunning revelations about the GOP bringing thousands of Eastern European Nazi war criminals illegally into the United States, exposed on John Loftus' latest book, America's Nazi Secret. As I was reading it, I was also struck by Loftus' explanation of the decades-long cozy relationship between right-wing elements of the American foreign policy establishment-- going back to the Dulles Brothers-- and the Nazi-oriented Muslim Brotherhood. In the context of the freedom fighters in Egypt a skeptical Fox News may be demonizing them today but Fox and the Muslim Brotherhood are both extreme right-wing organizations with a great many shared values.

Loftus, who first betrayed the right-wing connections to the Muslim Brotherhood in his book The Secret War Against The Jews, wrote a column this week for Ami Magazine, "Who will be the next Pharaoh?" putting the relationship into the context of what has been playing out nightly on our TVs in Egypt and the Middle East. The column isn't available online but I'll quote a few passages of interest.

On December 30, 2008, The American Ambassador to Cairo transmitted a classified cable describing a meeting with an anonymous Egyptian youth leader. He had been trained in activist techniques by the US Government, and made the startling prediction that Mubarak would be overthrown in 2011. He claimed that “several opposition forces” had formed an alliance against President Mubarak and had “agreed to support an unwritten plan for a transition to a parliamentary democracy, involving a weakened presidency and an empowered prime minister and parliament, before the scheduled 2011 presidential elections.” The embassy’s source said the informant’s plan was “so sensitive it cannot be written down.”

It did not stay secret for long. The low-level State Department code was broken almost immediately by the Chinese. For the next three years, the crypto intelligence division of the People’s Liberation Army tracked the youth leader, and studied his conversations with other Egyptian activists.

...Only a few weeks earlier, China had listened from the shadows as the Tunisian dictatorship tracked the “secret” Facebook plotting of the naïve revolutionaries. Like a false front glued over an ATM cash machine, the Tunisian government created a “false flag” website to steal the Facebook passwords of an entire nation. But the Tunisian dictatorship waited too long. The government was overthrown just before the Facebook conspirators could be arrested. The Egyptian dictator was making the same mistake.

...Like China, Russian intelligence believed that President Mubarak’s days were numbered. The old man‘s health was deteriorating rapidly. After three decades of rule, he no longer had the iron fist needed to maintain his dictatorship. His vain plans to name his western-oriented son Gamal ( “Jimmy” to his western friends) as his successor was so obviously a non-starter. Jimmy would not last a week after his father’s death with all the wolves that were gathering. Russia knew a lot about wolves, and they knew a lot about Egypt.

In fact in a moment of weakness, Jimmy Mubarak had blurted out to the Americans that he feared that two of his father’s confidants would oust him for the Presidency. He had begged his father to get rid of Field Marshal Mohamed Hussein Tantawi, the head of the Armed Forces and General Omar Suleiman, the head of Egyptian intelligence.

To the horror of both father and son, the family plot was about to revealed. Wikileaks, desperate not to be ignored, released an American secret cable reporting Jimmy’s futile plot to have Daddy fire the two most powerful generals in Egypt. In order to protect his son, Mubarak immediately ordered that the internet be closed.

But as the day wore on, it was clear to President Mubarak that he could not protect his weak son forever. The next morning he told General Tantawi to stay on in close control of the Army, and he promoted General Suleiman to Vice President.

The Russians smiled. It was all working out as they planned. Their man now was the lawful successor to President Mubarak.

General Suleiman had received his military training in Moscow. He had been one of the rising red stars in the Egyptian officer corps during the heady days of Nasser’s rule, when Egypt was Russia’s ally against the west. Two disastrous defeats at the hands of the Israeli army had caused some officers like Anwar Sadat to dump the Russians and make peace with Israel and the west, a peace that had endured for thirty five years. Peace was not what Russia wanted. War along the Suez would keep oil
prices (and Russian profits) high.

With secret Russian help, Suleiman had not only endured over the years since Nasser, but had risen to become head of Egyptian intelligence. He bided his time until he could become the new Nasser, and restore Egypt to the glory days of the Russian alliance.

The Russians had a long history of patient meddling in Egypt. In 1928, an Egyptian ultra-rightist named Hassan Al Banna created the Muslim Brotherhood as the umbrella for a pan-Arab Nazi movement. The Brotherhood eventually grew to three quarters of a million members who believed “in heaven Allah, on earth Hitler.”

Hitler returned the adulation, and personally briefed the Brotherhood’s ambassador to Berlin on Nazi plans for the Holocaust, first killing all the Jews in Eastern Europe, then on to North Africa and Palestine. Hitler planned to use the Muslim Brotherhood to recruit several Muslim SS divisions, which Hitler would send to start a Nazi Jihad, an uprising in the soft southern underbelly of the Islamic states of the U.S.S.R.

Russian intelligence knew all along of the Brotherhood’s anti-Russian strategy. For years the COMINTERN had been telling young Egyptians not to support communism in public, but rather pretend to be fanatical Nazis and join the Muslim Brotherhood. All through World War II, Stalin used the Muslim Brotherhood to penetrate and deceive the intelligence service of the Third Reich. Al Banna’s right hand man was an Egyptian communist agent, but he did not know it.

Neither did the British. Kim Philby, a closet communist upper class Englishman posing as a fascist, convinced the British Secret Service to recruit the Muslim Brotherhood as a post war proxy army to crush the infant state of Israel. When Nasser ordered the Muslim Brotherhood into exile, Philby (and his father) convinced the Americans and the Saudis to take them in.

During the cold war, the Eisenhower administration used the Muslim Brotherhood as a proxy army against the Arab communists. During the Reagan administration, Vice President Bush used the aging Arab Nazi movement to recruit a new generation of Mujahedeen in Afghanistan.

Despite the fact that the Brotherhood was the parent organization of Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and Al Qaeda, America remains the only western power to refuse to declare it a terrorist organization. The gullible Americans even prevailed upon the Egyptians to let the Brotherhood back in. It was a fatal mistake.

The Russians knew that Field Marshall Tantawi was the Pentagon’s choice to replace the Mubarak dynasty. As soon as the revolution erupted, Tantawi had flown to Washington for secret meetings at the White House.

According to the Israelis, Field Marshall Tantawi “warned them that by advocating a soft hand with the demonstrators and responsiveness to their demands, American officials were doing more harm than good. Without a crackdown, he said, the regime was doomed.”

The Obama administration would not back a crackdown to keep Mubarak on the throne. Tantawi was told to keep his army neutral, and let the people vent their wrath on Mubarak (and later against his new protégé, Vice President Suleimani.)

...For the moment, the Americans have decided that non-intervention is best. Let the Egyptian
people decide the future for themselves. Let the Army stay on the sidelines and wait to move against the Muslim Brotherhood when they show their hand. Democracy will triumph in the end.

Yes, the Israelis say. Just like in Gaza, where an election brought the Muslim Brotherhood’s Hamas faction to power.

“Maj.-Gen. (res.) Giora Eiland, a former national security adviser, and a senior research fellow at Tel Aviv University's Institute for National Security Studies (INSS), said, "There's a reasonable chance that if a revolution takes place in Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood would rise to power. That would be bad not just for Israel but for all democracies." The true struggle in Egypt was not between "Mubarak and pro-democracy elements, but between Mubarak and the Muslim Brotherhood," Eiland said. Shlomo Brom, director of the program on Israel-Palestinian relations at the INSS, said, "We can't forget that in Iran, at the end of the 1970s, the uprising against the shah was led by [pro-democracy] youths who took to the streets-- but this was taken over by Islamists in the end." (Jerusalem Post)

For the time being, Israelis politicians are biting their tongues and praying that this time, the Americans are right.

And Loftus isn't alone among historians, as opposed to cable news anchors, who knows something about the Muslim Brotherhood. In his feature, The Arab World Is on Fire, at In These Times this week, Noam Chomsky puts Mubarak in the context of tyrants and kleptocrats like Ferdinand Marcos, Jean-Claude Duvalier, Chun Doo Hwan, Zia ul-Haq, Suharto and many other of Ameroca's once useful gangsters.

A common refrain among pundits is that fear of radical Islam requires (reluctant) opposition to democracy on pragmatic grounds. While not without some merit, the formulation is misleading. The general threat has always been independence. In the Arab world, the United States and its allies have regularly supported radical Islamists, sometimes to prevent the threat of secular nationalism.

...“The traditional argument put forward in and out of the Arab world is that there is nothing wrong, everything is under control,” says Marwan Muasher, former Jordanian official and now director of Middle East research for the Carnegie Endowment. “With this line of thinking, entrenched forces argue that opponents and outsiders calling for reform are exaggerating the conditions on the ground.”

Therefore the public can be dismissed. The doctrine traces far back and generalizes worldwide, to U.S. home territory as well. In the event of unrest, tactical shifts may be necessary, but always with an eye to reasserting control.