The Muslim Brotherhood’s Problem with the West and America

We are never surprised by the exploitation by some of what was said about the Muslim Brotherhood’s internal discussions, especially the position expressed throughout this dialogue about the United States — in the context of the war of distortion America is launching against Islamic power, especially after the Syrian revolution — and the stance of this biased power against the Syrian people, to say nothing about the Brotherhood’s striking progress in the elections that were held after the Arab Spring. Their stance hasn’t changed up until now.

We are not surprised by this, because whoever concludes from the condition of a fraction of the Arab revolutions, which stem from the soul of the people, that they are an “American-Zionist” plot in the close-minded West will not hesitate to create distortions about any Islamic group, nor will they hesitate to lie about a plot between Muslim groups, the United States and the West.

The situation is that the position of the Jordanian Brotherhood, judging from its dialogue with the West, is a purely political position liable to change according to what comes to pass following the occupation of Iraq. The writer of these lines is convinced that any dialogue with the West won’t lead to any memorable result in terms of changed stances. God help them if the Islamists discard their convictions, since we know that the West, with the powerful arrogance that they wear on their sleeves, will never depart from their belief in the possibility that the ideological, revolutionary movements will waiver from their convictions in the political arena.

Whatever the affairs may be, the dialogue that has come about is not the problem, even the dialogue with the enemy, with the exception of the Zionists, who occupy the land and violate the Holy Sites. However, many engage in dialogue with the Zionists day and night, and it is not said that these negotiators are traitors… not because betrayal has changed into a matter of opinion — sometimes things like that happen — but rather because we realize that many of them, in contrast to the senior ones among them, are hard-liners who believe that this is the only possible approach considering the current political reality.

The situation is that the West is the party who is not in a position to engage in dialogue — not only with the Islamists — because things have changed from the past, when the dialogue game was confined to (previous) officials, centers of research and elements of the secret police wearing the garb of journalists and researchers. Their goal was nothing but luring victims and domestication. Today they take on an avowed political character, and sometimes at the highest levels. This is an opportunistic political position dictated by the Arab revolutions that surprised the West and squeezed it into a tight corner between contradiction with its avowed values and the need to deal with reality, or at least attempt to push reality off its path for the benefit of the West, or to minimize the Arab Spring in order to avoid going in the opposite direction.

Whoever believes that any political constraint dictated by the Arab Spring — in terms of changes to the previous systems — will be better for the West must not be thinking with a balanced mind, not only because he doubts the power stemming from the soul of the people, but rather because he deals with the Arab revolutions in the spirit of military coup d’états that permit new officers the right to disturb the paths of the countries from the direction that they desire. This is the view that seems to be vanity, because whoever rebelled in the face of the heavy-handed security regimes which received support from the West may possibly repeat this in the face of their replacements, that is, if their replacements do not act in harmony with the conviction, spirit and soul of the people.

The merchants ignore the doubt that the Islamic power — and at its head the Brotherhood — was not in agreement either with the countries described as regressive, or with those which are called advanced. The Islamic power was exposed to persecution by both parties, with varying degrees of persecution dictated by necessity, and not by a friendly relationship. There is no regime in the Third World that tolerates its opposition. Whether or not the regime extracts its opposition by the hands and teeth is dictated by internal dynamics for which there is no name other than keeping the state’s governing elite in control of state power and riches.

Whoever follows the latest pattern of anti-Muslim Brotherhood organization (which is, according to one actor, more dangerous than Iran) behaviors realizes the hopeless vanity of those who say that there can be an alliance between the Brotherhood and the West, especially when such proclamations are issued by the piercing regimes allied with the West and interested in preserving their interests. And these regimes’ permission of corrupt deals exceeds the imagination.

All of this must grab the attention of the Islamists and Brotherhood members about the truth of a new scene characterized by popular awakening, which cannot possibly collectively ignore the contradiction between slogan and practice. As for the internal context, or the context pertaining to the issues of Islamic society, I don’t think that the Islamists or the Brotherhood are oblivious to reality. This means that any dialogue must come in broad daylight, in public view, and on the basis of preserving the interests of the people and the issues of Islamic society generally.