Though the current upheavals in the Middle East were not initiated by the Muslim Brotherhood, the Islamist parties in Egypt, as in Tunisia and Libya, have been the chief beneficiaries of the collapse of long-standing authoritarian repressive regimes across North Africa. In Egypt itself, the two largest Islamist groups, the Brotherhood and the Salafists, won about three-quarters of the ballots in the second round of legislative elections held in December 2011, while the secular and the liberal forces took a battering.
The Brotherhood, an organization founded by Egyptian schoolteacher Hassan el Banna back in 1928, has never deviated from its founder’s central axiom:
“Allah is our objective; the Prophet is our leader; the Koran is our law; Jihad is our way; dying in the way of Allah is our highest hope.”
It is this radical vision, which animates all those in the region who seek a fully Islamic society and way of life.
The Muslim Brotherhood has always been deeply anti-Western, viscerally hostile to Israel and openly anti-Semitic — points usually downplayed in Western commentary on the “Arab Spring.”
Indeed, the anti-Jewish conspiracy theories promoted by the Brotherhood and its affiliated preachers are in a class of their own. This is especially true of Egyptian-born Yusuf al-Qaradawi, undoubtedly the most celebrated Muslim Brotherhood cleric in the world.
The still vigorous 84-year-old, often misleadingly depicted in the West as a “moderate,” flew in from Qatar to Cairo’s Tahrir Square on Feb. 18, 2011, to lead a million-strong crowd in Friday prayers, thereby ending 50 years of exile from his native land.
He called for pluralistic democracy in Egypt while at the same time offering the hope “that Almighty Allah will also please me with the conquest of the al-Aqsa Mosque [in Jerusalem].”
Regarding Israel and the Jews, fundamentalist Muslim attitudes have never deviated since the 1940s. Islamist ideologues, despite their virulent anti-Westernism, have had no problem in drawing on Western sources for their radical anti-Semitism, whether these libels come from Protocols of the Elders of Zion forgery, Henry Ford’s “The International Jew,” Hitler’s “Mein Kampf,” or have their origin in medieval blood libels or contemporary Holocaust denial in America and Europe.
The current swelling of Islamist ranks within Egypt and across the Arab world has hardly improved matters. On Nov. 25, a Muslim Brotherhood rally in Cairo’s most prominent mosque sought to promote the “battle against Jerusalem’s judaization.”
There were explicit calls for jihad and liberating all of Palestine, as well as references to a well-known hadith concerning the future Muslim annihilation of the Jews.
This kind of incitement and the pressure from the Egyptian street does not mean that the fragile peace treaty with Israel will be canceled overnight. But calls for such a step have been repeatedly heard in recent months, even from the “liberal” and more “progressive” sectors of the political spectrum as well as from the Islamist parties.
Dr. Rashad Bayoumi, the deputy leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, bluntly told the Arabic daily al-Hayat on the first day of 2012 that his organization will never “recognize Israel at all”, whatever the circumstances. Israel, he emphasized, is a “criminal enemy” with whom Egypt should never have signed a peace treaty in the first place.
In the face of this mounting fundamentalist danger, Israel has no choice but to consolidate its deterrent capacity, close ranks and treat with the upmost skepticism any siren voices calling on it to take unreasonable “risks for peace.”
At the same time it will have to develop a new regional strategy that takes into account the seismic changes currently shaking the Middle East.
Professor Robert S. Wistrich is director of the Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Antisemitism at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
