POSTED ON JANUARY 29, 2017 BY SCOTT JOHNSON IN ISLAM, LAW, TED CRUZ, TERRORISM

THE MUSLIM BROTHERHOOD REVISITED

In significant respects the Muslim Brotherhood is the progenitor of the Islamic terrorism that hit us on 9/11. Lawrence Wright therefore began his account of al Qaeda and the road to 9/11 with Sayyid Qutb, the “intellectual godfather” of the Brotherhood.

The avowedly genocideal and terrorist group Hamas is an offshoot of the Brotherhood. The Brotherhood itself is a little cagier, but it takes a case of willful blindness to miss the nature of this particular beast.

Senator Cruz urges designation of the Brotherhood as a terrorist organization under federal law. The text of Senator Cruz’s 2015 bill sets forth the evidence in support of such a designation and is posted here. Andy McCarthy endorsed the bill here (additional helpful background is summarized here). The bill as reintroduced in the current session of Congress is posted here.

The purported civil rights organization CAIR resists Senator Cruz’s proposed law through a campaign of disinformation. Adam Kredo calls foul on CAIR in the Washington Free Beacon story here.

In his invaluable book The Grand Jihad Andy devoted a chapter to the origins and purposes of CAIR, its roots in the Muslim Brotherhood’s Hamas-support network, and its aim to silence critics of Islamic supremacism. NRO has posted a version of the chapter here.
CAIR’s defense of the Muslim Brotherhood with its false disparagement of the Cruz bill makes out the point in its own way.

Lawfare editor in chief Benjamin Wittes argues that designating the Brotherhood “as a whole” a terrorist organization would be illegal. The linked post appears solely under Wittes’s name, but the text of the post refers to “[o]ne of the present authors” and elsewhere also seems to denote plural authorship (“we would never argue…”). Either I am missing something or a co-author is missing from the byline.

As I say above, Senator Cruz’s bill urges designation of the Brotherhood as a terrorist organization. It should be noted, however, that Senator Cruz’s bill calls for the Secretary of State, in consultation with the intelligence community, to submit a detailed report to the appropriate congressional committees that (1) indicates whether the Muslim Brotherhood meets the criteria for designation as a foreign terrorist organization under section 219 of the Immigration and Nationality Act (8 U.S.C. 1189); and (2) if the Secretary of State determines that the Muslim Brotherhood does not meet the criteria referred, to include a detailed justification as to which criteria have not been met