Congressional efforts to classify Brotherhood as terrorist in US despite hurdles

Nahla Abdel Moneim

The Brotherhood’s branch in the United States plays a major role in the media promotion of extremist ideology, but it is apparently in harmony with the requirements of Western society, which is what the group has been carrying out over recent years to undermine the political campaigns demanding that it be declared a terrorist organization similar to the countries of the Middle East from which it emerged, especially Egypt.

Recently, some politicians in the Republican Party have been trying to reintroduce a bill to declare the Brotherhood a terrorist group, due to their fear of its danger to the democratic principles of the state and to prevent the group from exploiting political freedoms in order to organize campaigns to co-opt its own ideology of governance.

Republicans and classifying the Brotherhood as a terrorist group

The Clarion Project website, which specializes in monitoring extremist movements, indicated that Senator Ted Cruz, representing the Republican Party in Texas, with the support of Republicans Pat Roberts from Kansas, Jim Inhovey from Oklahoma, and Ron Johnson from Wisconsin, on December 1 re-submitted a bill to designate the Brotherhood as a terrorist group.

This law, which would require the US State Department to declare the Brotherhood a terrorist organization, was previously introduced in 2015. Clarion claims that it had the support of both the Democratic and Republican parties at the time, but the Brotherhood’s campaigns promoting Islamophobia in a misconception by linking itself as a representative of religion and all of its followers obstructed the bill’s progress.

Clarion quoted Cruz as saying that Republican Party members are happy to reintroduce the bill as a link in the framework of countering violent extremism in the United States and demanded the responsible agencies to provide all available information to facilitate the group’s classification as a terrorist organization, similar to Washington’s allies in the Middle East who classified the group as terrorist, such as Egypt, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and others.

Community network and social and media power

The Brotherhood was able to build a network of affiliated associations in the United States through multiple branches, most of which are pigmented in social and cultural work, allowing it in many situations to exploit the power of these groups in order to export a different image because they are a group whose members belong to Islam and not a group that expresses all Muslims.

The most dangerous Brotherhood-affiliated organizations in the United States are represented by the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), the Muslim American Society (MAS), the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), and other organizations accused of sponsoring terrorism, but the most dangerous is that they operate under the cover of intimidation from Islamophobia, meaning they classify any criticism of them as a fear of Islam in general, and this is clearly evident in their media reports on official websites to address their followers, as they adopt compatible lines that are united according to the controversy raised globally.

When African-American citizen George Floyd was killed at the hands of police, the Brotherhood’s websites adopted a massive campaign to donate to defend detainees held by the authorities for demonstrating in order to urge citizens to protest against the security apparatus, as well as donation campaigns to confront corona. Washington’s politicians are looking forward to the authorities attaching importance to monitoring this behavior, just as the countries of the Middle East do, to dry up the sources of terrorism.

In this regard, Saeed Sadiq, professor of political sociology at the American University in Cairo, told the Reference that the Brotherhood seeks to exploit societal and religious positions to profit from them politically by claiming that it represents all Muslims and protects their rights in Western countries, indicating that the group adopts Islamophobia discourse to undermine the chances of harming it or its exclusion from society.

It is noteworthy that the US Congress had previously discussed the problem of classifying the Brotherhood as a terrorist group, and the most prominent of these sessions was in July 2018, but it did not result in an official decision. So will the Republicans succeed in naming the group in light of the latter’s political ambitions, which it attaches to the new administration in the White House?