Conspiracy of Brothers

Conspiracy of Brothers [Excerpts]

November was just about done and Chris Matthews, the MSNBC host voted most likely by his own staff to have a poster of Barack Obama over his bed, was cheerfully coming to the end of his sideshow list. With the White House in the background, Matthews sneered about the “weak conspiracy” claim by Congressman Gohmert that the Obama Administration was taking advice on Middle East policy from a bunch of Muslim Brotherhood operatives.

At Mother Jones, David Corn sneered at Franklin Graham for promoting the Muslim Brotherhood “conspiracy theory.” But both Matthews and Corn were a little behind the times. That summer when Hillary Clinton arrived in Egypt, she was confronted by shoe-throwing protesters denouncing her for supporting the Muslim Brotherhood.

Think Progress, the left’s shiniest spin machine, explained that the Egyptian protesters had gotten the peculiar idea that there was a Muslim Brotherhood conspiracy from American “Islamophobic” bloggers. Several months later, the object of the fanciful conspiracy theory, Mohammed Morsi, orchestrated a seizure of power, rammed through an Islamist Constitution and sent gangs out to brutalize and torture protesters with no direct condemnation from the White House or Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

A month after Matthews had sneered at the idea that Muslim Brotherhood members were exercising inappropriate influence over American foreign policy; the venerable Egyptian magazine Rose El-Youssef ran an article about the six Muslim Brotherhood operatives, including two in the Department of Homeland Security, who were influencing American foreign policy on the Brotherhood’s behalf.

While Rose El-Youssef had been a pro-government magazine, during the revolution its journalists had locked out the pro-Mubarak CEO and a new editor had been appointed by the Council of Ministers. Nor could the article be characterized as propaganda or even opinion journalism. Shawki simply laid out the biographical details of the Muslim Brotherhood figures without any trace of indictment or blame.

Shawki listed six men, Arif Alikhan, the assistant secretary of Homeland Security for policy development; and Mohammed Elibiary, a member of the Homeland Security Advisory Council. He also listed Rashad Hussain, the U.S. special envoy to the Organization of the Islamic Conference, as well as Salam al-Marayati, co-founder of the Muslim Public Affairs Council, Imam Mohamed Magid, president of the Islamic Society of North America and Eboo Patel, a member of President Obama’s Advisory Council on Faith-Based Neighborhood Partnerships. Not to mention Huma Abedin.

The article carefully avoided drawing any conclusions; the magazine had earlier faced legal charges for “smearing” President Morsi by discussing his outreach to Hamas. Instead the article let the facts about the six men speak for themselves.

Arif Alikhan, was described as a Qutb-ist, after the Brotherhood’s Sayyid Qutb, who saw the most serious American national security documents. Elibiary’s organization, it mentions, was financed by the Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party. And so on down the list it goes concluding with Eboo Patel’s relationship with the family of Hassan al-Banna of the Brotherhood.

MSNBC and Mother Jones naturally could not be bothered to cover the Rose El-Youssef story. And neither could slightly more mainstream liberal outlets like CNN or the New York Times. Like Patterson, they were still pretending that Egyptian suspicions of the Brotherhood’s power grab and their distrust of Obama for supporting the Brotherhood were some strange Islamophobic idea that they had picked up from, as Think Progress put it, “conservative blogs.”

http://frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/conspiracy-of-brothers/