About Eeyore

Canadian artist and counter-jihad and freedom of speech activist as well as devout Schrödinger's catholic

36 Replies to “White House considers listing Muslim Brotherhood a terrorist group as well as IRGC”

    • Sounds good but I don’t think we can deport a US citizen unless they are naturalized citizens who have committed nasty crimes. Theoretically he could be impeached for violating the US constitution by usurping the authority of the President. I say theoretically because it is unlikely that we could get enough votes in the Senate to remove him from the Bench.

      Remember most of the Republicans in Congress are members of the self proclaimed elite and don’t like President Trump anymore then the Dems. They are going along with his policies and appointments because they are afraid fo the voters but would probably rebel at removing a Judge because the Judge is violating the Constitution. That has been occurring for decades and nothing has been done.

      As far as I can see the best way to change things is a Convention of the States, 2/3rds of the states have to call for a Convention to amend the Constitution and then Congress must convene one. Then any amendment voted out of hte Convention would have to be ratified by 3/4th of the State Legislatures. I don’t know if one will be called but it is probably the best way out of this mess.

      • One liberal group that is opposed to the idea says that right now we are 6 states short of a convention to vote on a Balanced Budget amendment. They seem to think that if one is voted out of a convention the states will pass it.

        There is some question if the convention could be limited to just one amendment although it is possible to limit the convention to amending the Constitution.

    • ~ decades ago ~
      But now we have members of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence who facilitating access to enemy agents:

      …Last year, eight members of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence issued a demand that their staffers be granted access to top secret classified information.

      The signatories to the letter were Andre Carson, Luis Guiterez, Jim Himes, Terri Sewell, Jackie Speier, Mike Quigley, Eric Swalwell and Patrick Murphy. All the signatories were Democrats. Some had a history of attempting to undermine national security.

      Two of them have been linked to an emerging security breach.

      The office of Andre Carson, the second Muslim in Congress, had employed Imran Awan. As did the offices of Jackie Speier and Debbie Wasserman Schultz; to whom the letter had been addressed.

      Imran Awan and his two brothers, Jamal and Abid, are at the center of an investigation that deals with, among other things, allegations of illegal access. They have been barred from the House of Representatives network.

      A member of Congress expressed concern that, “they may have stolen data from us.”

      A MUSLIM BROTHERHOOD SECURITY BREACH IN CONGRESS
      http://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/265729/muslim-brotherhood-security-breach-congress-daniel-greenfield

        • I saw you were getting a foot or better of snow. Today the high will be 29 tomorrow it is suppose to be 61, welcome to Missouri if you don’t like the weather wait 5 minutes and it will change.

            • OT: Thank-you, thank-you!
              Gave almost everybody an extra vacation day. A full white-out, wild and windy.
              There’s evidence such days correlate with a conception bonus: Snow Babies! What fun!

              • Dear Yucki,

                I think it impossible to believe that you disagree with me about how a truly serious snowfall returns our world to a “virginal” state (all sexual connotations aside). Wherein the contours of humanity are quite frequently lost beneath a carpet of frozen “purity”, in a major snowfall.

                Not that snow (or winter) brings us any return to an absence of sin or malicious intent. Rather, that our outside world (astonishingly) returns to a (sometimes) amazingly pure environment that is (temporarily) free of all the marks of human civilization.

                As someone who cannot blindly credit the divine, this seasonal return to the (almost) supernatural is spiritual in every way.

                Even for a devout Agnostic like me.

                I sincerely hope that this clarifies everything between us in terms of our mutual search for beauty and meaning.

          • Not the way the temp shifts make my back feel, if it will get cold and stay cold the pain will ease a lot. If it gets hot and stays hot the pain will ease a lot. Bouncing like it does means that moving and at time setting or laying still it feels like an ice pick is being shoved into my back.

  4. That it has to be “considered” isn’t cause for optimism. Lots of influential Americans will be required to do some fancy dancing to keep their Saudi partners calm. Not putting a spotlight on the MoBros might be the price to pay to keep that partnership going. Maybe they will force W out in public to give a couple of speeches on the beauty of Islam again.

    • Not the Saudis, but Turkey, Morocco, and especially Qatar. Western ramparts in the UK and Switzerland. Headquarters of the MB-international is London, where they own considerable commercial real estate and other critical assets.

  5. politico – CIA Memo: Designating Muslim Brotherhood Could ‘Fuel Extremism’

    An agency report warns the Trump administration risks driving Muslims into the arms of Al Qaeda and ISIS.

    Trump administration officials pushing to designate the Muslim Brotherhood as a foreign terrorist organization face at least one significant obstacle: analysts at the Central Intelligence Agency.

    CIA experts have warned that so labeling the decades-old Islamist group “may fuel extremism” and damage relations with America’s allies, according to a summary of a finished intelligence report for the intelligence community and policymakers that was shared with POLITICO by a U.S. official.

    The document, published internally on Jan. 31, notes that the Brotherhood—which boasts millions of followers around the Arab world—has “rejected violence as a matter of official policy and opposed al-Qa’ida and ISIS.”

    It acknowledges that “a minority of MB [Muslim Brotherhood] members have engaged in violence, most often in response to harsh regime repression, perceived foreign occupation, or civil conflicts.” Noting that there are branches of the group in countries such as Jordan, Kuwait, Morocco and Tunisia, it cautions that some of America’s allies in the region “probably worry that such a step could destabilize their internal politics, feed extremist narratives, and anger Muslims worldwide.”

    “MB groups enjoy widespread support across the Near East-North Africa region and many Arabs and Muslims worldwide would view an MB designation as an affront to their core religious and societal values,” the document continues. “Moreover, a US designation would probably weaken MB leaders’ arguments against violence and provide ISIS and al-Qa’ida additional grist for propaganda to win followers and support, particularly for attacks against US interests.”

    The CIA declined to comment, and the White House did not respond to a request for comment. But the document threatens to pit the agency against a president who has dismissed its intelligence assessments and angered many in the intelligence community when he appeared before the agency’s Memorial Wall and exaggerated the size of the crowd at his inaugural address.

    And it would seem to put the agency’s analysts at odds with its new director, Mike Pompeo, who as a member of Congress co-sponsored a bill to ban the Brotherhood and once warned in a radio appearance that Islamist groups were infiltrating the United States. “There are organizations and networks here in the United States tied to radical Islam in deep and fundamental ways,” Pompeo told host Frank Gaffney, who heads the Center for Security Policy and often promotes a conspiratorial view of Muslims. “They’re not just in places like Libya and Syria and Iraq, but in places like Coldwater, Kansas, and small towns all throughout America.”

    Even before President Donald Trump took office, outside groups like Gaffney’s and some members of Congress had been pressuring his team to make the designation, a process that usually takes months and requires teams of analysts sifting through reams of intelligence reports to determine whether an organization fits the legal definition of a terrorist organization.

    In January, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart (R-Fla.) re-introduced twin bills that would require the State Department to inform Congress “whether the Muslim Brotherhood meets the criteria for designation as a foreign terrorist organization” and, if not, explain why not. Days before Trump’s inauguration, an anti-Islamist coalition called Faith Leaders for America held a news event in which speakers repeatedly urged the incoming president to make the designation.

    Since then, news outlets have tracked a growing debate within the administration over whether Trump should pull the trigger, possibly in the form of an executive order directing the State Department to evaluate whether the Brotherhood meets the necessary legal standard. A State Department source said the White House had contacted the department’s legal officials, as well as multiple bureaus, about what would be involved. But momentum seems to have stalled in recent days.

    “Basically, they wanted to know if an executive order would be enough or if there was a process that had to be followed,” the source said. “It received a great deal of pushback, and it looks like the White House team actually looked at the legal requirements to designate a foreign terrorist organization. It’s still lurking, but I haven’t heard it’s on the front burner again.”

    Former U.S. officials and experts on the Muslim Brotherhood are highly skeptical that the Trump administration could meet that bar, and scoff at the basic wisdom of the idea.

    • “I think it would be an incredibly stupid thing to do,” said Daniel Benjamin, who served as the State Department’s coordinator for counterterrorism under Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. “The top reason being that it’s not a terrorist group.”

      Designating the group would also pose serious complications for U.S. diplomacy throughout the Middle East. The Muslim Brotherhood has loosely affiliated branches throughout the Arab world, and some of them even hold positions of power in certain countries. The head of the government of Morocco, for instance, is a member of a party aligned with the Brotherhood. Ennahdha, a popular Islamist party affiliated with the Brotherhood, is part of the ruling coalition in Tunisia. Depending on how a designation was structured, “We could not meet with the Tunisian government going forward,” said Tom Malinowski, who recently stepped down as assistant secretary of state for democracy, human rights, and labor in the Obama administration. Malinowski also noted that many of the local councils the United States works with in Syria have ties to the Brotherhood, long one of the only sources of organized opposition to the rule of President Bashar Assad. And a designation could damage relations with Turkey, a NATO ally whose volatile Islamist president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, is an avid backer of Brotherhood offshoots around the region.

      “It’s not well thought through,” said Will McCants, a former State Department senior adviser for countering violent extremism, who called designating the Brotherhood a “fringe idea that I guess has now made its way into the mainstream.”

      Trump, despite otherwise evincing little interest in foreign affairs before launching his presidential bid, has been critical of the Brotherhood in the past, blasting then-President Barack Obama repeatedly in 2012 for hosting Egyptian President and Brotherhood member Mohamed Morsi, who was elected after mass protests ousted longtime strongman Hosni Mubarak.

      “@BarackObama’s budget funds the ‘Arab Spring’ with $800B and the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt $1.3B in military aid. He loves radical Islam,” Trump tweeted in February 2012. “Obama now wants to give another $450M to the Muslim Brotherhood. Money we don’t have going to people that hate us. Moronic,” he wrote later in October, one of two dozen tweets on the subject over the course of 2012 and 2013.

      Morsi was ousted amid a fresh wave of demonstrations backed by the Egyptian military, which helped installed one of its own, Gen. Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, as the country’s new president. Trump and Sisi have hit it off: The Egyptian strongman was the first foreign leader to congratulate Trump on his election, which came weeks after the two men met in New York on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly. “There was good chemistry there,” Trump said after their encounter. “He’s a fantastic guy.” Trump also hailed Sisi, who presided over a brutal crackdown on the Brotherhood that killed or injured thousands, for consolidating power after Morsi’s tumultuous short tenure. “He took control of Egypt,” Trump gushed. “And he really took control of it.”

      Egypt outlawed the Brotherhood in December 2013, labeling it a terrorist organization, as did other U.S. allies in the region, including Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. Those governments have been pressing the United States for years to make a similar designation, but found little traction until Trump’s victory ushered into office a group of advisers who see Islamist groups like the Brotherhood as a threat to Western civilization itself, and make little distinction between mere ideologues and violent extremists.

      National security adviser Michael Flynn, for instance, has described Islam itself as a “cancer” and a “political ideology” rather than a religion. “Fear of Muslims is RATIONAL,” he once wrote on Twitter (his account has since been deleted).

      Steve Bannon, the president’s chief strategist and the former head of Breitbart News, has often promoted anti-Muslim activists such as Gaffney, who has accused former President Barack Obama of being a secret Muslim and is one of the leading advocates for cracking down on alleged Brotherhood front groups inside the United States. According to the Washington Post, a 2007 summary of one of Bannon’s film projects described the Brotherhood as “the foundation of modern terrorism.”

      Even Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, in his confirmation hearing, associated the Brotherhood with more radical groups like Al Qaeda and “certain elements within Iran,” likely an allusion to the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps.

      Some former officials fear that autocratic Arab states like Egypt could use a terrorist designation to lure the United States into endorsing violent crackdowns on their internal critics. “If there’s no pushback from leadership, I worry that we could be manipulated by countries that are just trying to enlist us in their campaigns against their political opponents,” Malinowski said.

      Benjamin thinks there’s little chance that career officials inside the Treasury and State Departments would find that the Brotherhood, whose leadership in Egypt renounced violence in the 1970s, is a terrorist group. “Professionals will look at it and say this doesn’t meet our criteria,” Benjamin said. “With the system as it is currently configured, this would not pass muster.”

      One problem is that it’s hard to define what the Brotherhood is, given its loose structure and culture of secrecy. “What you have is a disparate network of groups that may or may not meet criteria,” said Jonathan Schanzer, a former Treasury Department analyst now with the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. Schanzer thinks the Muslim Brotherhood’s “mothership” in Egypt wouldn’t qualify, but other parts of the movement, such as the Islah party in Yemen, might if the Trump administration took a more targeted approach. Otherwise, “it’s trying to hit a grand slam and it’s probably going to lead to a strikeout,” he said.

      “Ideologically, I’d say it’s closest to being a hate group,” said Eric Trager, an analyst at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy who believes the Trump administration is right to be concerned about the Brotherhood. “These are not good guys. These are not moderate politicians. They support, on an ideological level, terrorism. They cooperate with terrorists. They give a platform for terrorists. But there is not sufficient evidence to show they send their own members to commit terrorism, and that is the standard for a designation.”

      Still, advocacy groups in the United States are worried they might be singled out or accused of having ties to the Brotherhood or other foreign Islamist groups, and are preparing to mount aggressive defenses if necessary. They note that the Cruz/Diaz-Balart legislation, like the earlier bill sponsored by Pompeo, explicitly mentions the Council on American-Islamic Relations, which Gaffney and others have accused of being a Brotherhood front (a charge the group denies).

      “American Muslim organizations have been under scrutiny for a long time. And it’s important to emphasize that neither the Bush nor the Obama administration gave into what is a bigoted effort by people who were once in the fringe,” said Hina Shamsi, a lawyer at the American Civil Liberties Union who herself was recently detained and questioned by Customs and Border Patrol while returning from a trip abroad.

      “The deep concern here is that designation of the Muslim Brotherhood, whatever that is and how it is defined (which is a complicated question in itself), could result in government attacks on American Muslim civil society by opening the doors to the use of over-broad and unfair legal regimes relating to designation and designated entities,” Shamsi said.

      Robert McCaw, government affairs director at CAIR, said that groups like his were the real target of the anti-Brotherhood campaign. “The U.S. Islamophobia network and its political allies are pushing this designation to create a new era of religious McCarthyism where being an American Muslim or an advocacy organization pushing back against anti-Muslim rhetoric is enough to disqualify you from civic participation,” McCaw said.

      Even some of the Brotherhood’s biggest detractors, however, aren’t too worried about its alleged influence inside the United States, and urge the Trump administration to focus on more realistic threats.

      “The Muslim Brotherhood could not control Egypt—where it is from, where it has existed for over 80 years, and where it could not keep control for more than a year,” said Trager. “It sure as hell is not going to take over America.”

      The greatest danger, warns Benjamin, is that a move to treat the Brotherhood the same as groups that actually do engage in terrorism could push some Muslims into the arms of more radical extremists: “We don’t need more enemies.”

      http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/02/cia-memo-designating-muslim-brotherhood-could-fuel-extremism-214757

      • Useful idiots talking about their paymasters. The MB was founded as a radical Islamist group whose goals were to restore the Caliphate and defeat and destroy Western Civilization. As in the Cold War our problems in fighting the external enemy are compounded by internal traitors who are working to bring about the destruction of Western Civilization.

    • PJMedia – CIA That Funded the ‘Moderate Muslim Brotherhood’ Narrative Opposed to the Group’s Terror Designation

      The CIA has published an analysis claiming that designating the Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist organization could “fuel extremism,” Politico is reporting today.

      Quite conveniently, this internal CIA analysis found its way into the hands of Politico reporters.

      But oddly, the article fails to mention that the CIA and the U.S. intelligence community were directly involved in funding the experts who pushed the bogus “moderate Muslim Brotherhood” narrative beginning in the latter end of the Bush administration.

      This hand-wringing is in response to reports that the Trump administration is actively discussing such a designation.

      Needless to say, the Washington, D.C. foreign policy “smart set” and the media who have been openly disdainful of the White House’s considerations are wetting themselves at news of the CIA’s analysis.

      According to our late PJ Media colleague Barry Rubin, the CIA paid for the research and travel expenses for then-Nixon Center researcher Robert Leiken and his younger colleague Stephen Brooke to travel around the Middle East and Europe meeting with Muslim Brotherhood leaders. They reportedly met with Muslim Brotherhood members in Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Tunisia, the UK, Spain, and elsewhere.

      This resulted in a still-classified paper commissioned by the National Intelligence Council and, according to Barry Rubin, paid for through a CIA contract. Barry Rubin was hired to write the rebuttal to the Leiken/Brooke paper.

      This became the basis for an article by Leiken and Brooke in the March/April 2007 issue of Foreign Affairs entitled, “The Moderate Muslim Brotherhood.” This one article became the basis for virtually every single talking point in support of the Muslim Brotherhood parroted by the “smart set” and the media.

      There is proof of Barry’s claim about the U.S. intelligence community’s role in hyping the “moderate Muslim Brotherhood” narrative, namely the admission by Leiken himself.

      https://pjmedia.com/homeland-security/2017/02/08/cia-that-funded-the-moderate-muslim-brotherhood-narrative-opposed-to-the-groups-terror-designation/

      • “CIA That Funded the ‘Moderate Muslim Brotherhood’ Narrative Opposed to the Group’s Terror Designation”

        Effing FIRE the lot of them without pay or pension. Fecking traitors.

      • That they dare mention Barry Rubin [of blessed memory] as a reference for nefarious pseudo-scholarship is an outrage. Not exactly a contract hack like most of the K-Street lobbyists that are commonly referred to as “think-tanks”.

        Upon the death of Prof. Rubin, Jonathan Spyer become the director of the Institute at Herzliya. Description:
        __The Rubin Center for Research in International Affairs (formerly the Global Research in International Affairs (GLORIA) Center), founded by the late Professor Barry Rubin, is a research center located at the Interdisciplinary Center (IDC) Herzliya, Israel’s first private institution of higher learning.
        The Rubin Center produces up-to-date, accurate analysis and reporting on modern Middle East affairs, using primary sources and exclusive on-the-ground contacts throughout the region. Rubin Center researchers regularly visit the region, witnessing developments first-hand. In addition to its frontline reporting, the Rubin Center offers consultancy services to government, news media, and academic institutions.
        ………
        The website is a cornucopia almost too good to share:
        http://www.rubincenter.org

    • The document, published internally on Jan. 31, notes that the Brotherhood—which boasts millions of followers around the Arab world—has “rejected violence as a matter of official policy and opposed al-Qa’ida and ISIS.”

      It doesn’t take much study to discover that the MB spins off groups to do their dirty work as the extremists while remaining in control of those groups. Al Qaeda, ISIS and others are just puppet groups for the MB. The reason that they experts are saying to to do this is because they are part of the corrupted organizations. During the Obama years we concentrated on the MB members that were working in the White House but ignored the infiltration of our intelligence ogrinizations. Trumps advisors are busy trying to root out the moles but it is hard to tell a useful idiot from an active more of either MB or alt left.

    • @ Martin:
      “n agency report warns the Trump administration risks driving Muslims into the arms of Al Qaeda and ISIS.”

      Well, most of them won’t have to move then !!!

      Fed-up to the back-teeth with this vulgar black-mail !!!!

      • “Well, most of them won’t have to move then !!! ”

        Too right, Rita!

        While most Muslims are not advocates of terrorism, nonetheless, they either are cowed into, or willingly participate in, allowing jihadists to infiltrate their midst.

        Ergo, “moderate” Muslims are the ocean in which the jihadist fish swim.

        Until that stops, ALL Muslims will continue to be enemies of the West.

    • er ……. and we were told that AQ and ISIS have nothing to do with Islam ….
      … and that Muslims are peace loving people….
      etc….

    • They are also showing themselves to be dangerous opponents to our survival, they have just shown themselves to be people who need to be watched.

  8. Jonathan’s latest article is relevant here:
    The Mirage of the Mid-East “Moderate Alliance”

    In recent years, it has become customary in much analysis of the Middle East emerging from Israel to divide Middle Eastern countries into a series of alliances or ‘camps.’ These camps are identified in a variety of ways. But the most usual depiction notes a tight, hierarchical bloc of states and movements dominated by the Islamic Republic of Iran. An alliance of ‘moderate’ states opposed to Iran and including Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, United Arab Emirates and Israel itself is seen as the principal adversary and barrier to the hegemonic ambitions of the Iran-led bloc. Some depictions also posit the existence of a smaller alliance of states and entities associated with Muslim Brotherhood-style Sunni political Islam (Qatar, Turkey, the Hamas enclave in Gaza). The picture is then completed with the addition of the rival Salafi Islamist regional networks of al-Qaeda and Islamic State.

    This picture is pleasing to the eye both in its coherence and elegant simplicity. It posits a powerful regional alliance of which Israel is seen as a member. It is much more questionable, however, whether it conforms to reality.

    http://www.rubincenter.org/2017/02/the-mirage-of-the-mid-east-moderate-alliance/

  9. A biggie, also 2014:
    Qatar’s Rise and America’s Tortured Middle East Policy
    How did it happen that Washington has such close relations with a country actively and massively sponsoring terror, even after 9/11?
    […]
    Qatar has emerged in recent years as the main diplomatic and financial backer of Hamas and its enclave in the Gaza Strip. The current conflict shows how this is reflected in regional diplomacy, as Qatar uses it to carve out a central role in the Mideast, to the dismay and anger of the rival Sunni bloc of Cairo and Riyadh.

    Qatar’s regional strategy is based on support for and sponsorship of the Muslim Brotherhood, the destabilizing of its fellow Sunni Arab neighbors, and hedging its bets on American regional leadership with warmer ties with Tehran. Support for Hamas constitutes a part of this. The Muslim Brotherhood is an anti-Western, anti-Jewish movement, and Hamas is a designated terrorist organization.

    Yet, for the present time at least, Qatar’s deep links to this movement, far from incurring penalties, are enabling it to reap rewards. This worrisome trend derives from a short-sighted Western attitude toward Hamas, and to a lesser extent toward the Muslim Brotherhood in general. Hamas is not favored, but neither is the extent of the movement’s commitment to its genocidal ideology—or the danger it represents—properly acknowledged, let alone accepted in various capitols.

    In the U.S. case, strained relations with the government of Egypt, which fiercely opposes Hamas, are further contributing to the willingness, if not outright desire, to award a central diplomatic role to Qatar, in spite of its championing of violent anti-Western, anti-Israel, and anti-moderate-Arab forces across the region.

    This indulgence of terror sponsoring Qatar ought to end, and there are small signs that this complacency is ebbing, at least outside the confines of the White House and Foggy Bottom. U.S. legislators are circulating a letter questioning Qatar’s behavior, beginning to voice deep objections to their dangerous and unacceptable actions.

    Congressional leaders must continue to call out Qatar for its support for Hamas, and the administration for its apparent support for Qatar. In Europe, it is possible that Qatari financial investment and gas exports make adequate opposition to the Emirate hard to imagine. But neither of these constraints exist in the U.S., where the main reason for its stance toward Qatar and its terrorist allies is a naïve view of the region.

    http://www.thetower.org/article/qatars-rise-and-americas-tortured-middle-east-policy/