Brotherhood’s ambitions shattered in first week of Biden’s rule

Sarah Rashad

New US President Joe Biden did not complete a week in the White House before there was escalating talk in American political circles that the Brotherhood was involved in attempts to destroy the United States.

Anti-extremism activist Brigitte Gabriel declared, “I hold in my hand the Brotherhood’s plan to destroy the United States written May 22, 1991. This plan was presented as evidence in the Holy Land Foundation trial, the largest terrorist trial ever in US history, where our government issued 108 convictions against American Muslims and Muslim-American organizations that raise funds to support terrorist organizations in the East.

“In fact, the documents led to hundreds of convictions of raising funds for terrorist organizations and conspiring with terrorist organizations to evade US government sanctions and administrations,” she added.

This coincided with US Senator Ted Cruz, a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, resubmitting a bill to designate the Brotherhood a terrorist organization.

The Cruz bill urges the US State Department to use its legal authority to consider the Brotherhood a foreign terrorist organization and stresses on its website the need to hold the Brotherhood accountable for its funding and support for terrorism.

The senator has based the bill on the terrorist group’s attempt to create chaos in the United States and its relationship with financing terrorist groups at home and abroad.

These accusations came during the first days of Biden’s rule, outside the expectations of the Brotherhood, which had dealt with the Democrats as a lifeline that might bring them back to power in the countries of the Middle East.

When the results of the US elections in November 2020 announced the victory of Biden, the terrorist group considered that the departure of former President Donald Trump would give it an opportunity to return again, relying on its experience with Democrats during the rule of former President Barack Obama, which paved the way for Islamist groups to gain power during his reign.

While the Brotherhood hopes for a restoration of the Obama era with Biden, indications go against expectations, as the reality today is completely different from the reality during the Obama era, and these groups are popularly shunned today.

Chasing a mirage

In press statements, Dr. Ahmed Kamel Beheiry, a researcher specializing in Islamist movements at the Al-Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies, said that all the Brotherhood wants from Biden is to have a new space in the public sphere, to stop considering it a terrorist group, and to enter the rules of the democratic game. However, it is unlikely that Biden would support the Brotherhood, in contrast to what the group’s media trumpets and social media pages are trying to promote.

Beheiry explained that Biden is closer to the traditional Republicans in orientation and stance towards political Islamism, evidenced by the fact that Biden had a great disagreement with Obama regarding the latter’s position on the Egyptian revolution in 2011, as he was for late Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak remaining in power and against supporting the Brotherhood.

For its part, the London-based Arab Weekly newspaper said that Biden will not make changes in the Middle East in order to install the Brotherhood, considering that the group’s ambitions for the new American president will not find an opportunity to be actualized.