Of course there is nothing peaceful about the Muslim Brotherhood. Sponsor of Sheikh al-Rahman, bin Laden, Hassan Turabi, Yasser Arafat and Sheikh Yassin.
Bruce Talk to political Islamists in the Arab world http://www.dailystar.com.lb/article.asp?edition_id=10&categ_id=5&article_id= 14777 By Richard W. Murphy and Basil Eastwood Commentary by Wednesday, May 04, 2005 The Arab Human Development Report issued on April 5 highlighted the contradictions within U.S. and British policy toward the Arab world. President George W. Bush is intent on bringing democracy to the Middle East, and reform is at the heart of the Group of 8's Broader Middle East Initiative, which Britain as chairman is pledged to carry forward. However, the would-be democrats of the region are viscerally opposed to American policies there, which makes it the more necessary to talk to them. The Arab Human Development Report makes it clear that very little progress toward reform has yet been made and that democracy cannot just be imported (still less imposed). It was right for Bush to say in his inaugural address that the U.S. will "seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture." However, if it is not be counter-productive, outside pressure for democratization and reform needs to be exercised with great care and must complement the efforts of movements working for these goals within the states of the region In the Arab world, the awkward truth is that the most significant such movements that enjoy popular support are associated with political Islam - movements which seek by peaceful means to apply their faith to their state's politics. The Muslim Brothers now demonstrating vigorously for change in Egypt, or Ibrahim Jaafari of Al-Daawa, the new prime minister of Iraq, are good examples. For the United States to "seek and support" such movements will not be a comfortable process: most Islamist movements oppose their own governments - governments whose cooperation Washington needs to combat terrorism - and they share the general views of the Arab public that violence against occupation is legitimate and that British and American policies in the region are fundamentally misguided. We believe, however, that U.S. disagreement with Islamists, however vehement, is good reason for talking to them, not ostracizing them. For a year now we have been engaged in a dialogue with a small group of people familiar with some of the different national branches of the Muslim Brotherhood, with Hamas and with Hizbullah. They do not formally represent these movements, but we believe that they do speak with authority. Some of them have been imprisoned for their beliefs and they describe movements which are arguably more democratic than the Arab governments concerned (who habitually rig elections to ensure that such movements do not win). They deny vehemently that, once voted into office, they will hang onto power if subsequently voted out. Consciously or not, the movements seem to be adopting the theological belief that the voice of the people is in some sense the voice of God, which made possible the emergence of Christian democracy in Western Europe less than two centuries ago. Perhaps the best evidence in their favor is the fact that they are criticized bitterly by those Muslim extremists who do advocate violence to bring in authoritarian clerical rule. For, when it comes to politics, Muslims are no more united than Christians. Political Islam itself varies from country to country, but there are much greater differences both between political Islamists and "official Islam" on the one hand and between them and the Jihadists on the other. Even within Sunni Islam there are bitter divisions between the exponents of official Islam, the political Islamists who seek change but who do not advocate violence to overthrow regimes, and the Jihadists, the Islamic extremists who do. A spokesman for one of the Jihadist groups recently argued on a Jihadist Web site not only that all Arab regimes and the imams who support them (in other words official Islam), together with secularists, communists and nationalists, were heretics, but also that democracy was heresy. True believers, he insisted, should have nothing to do with the Muslim Brothers (who are the mainstream of Sunni political Islam) and their "defeatist secularist democratic program." (The spokesman was even highly critical of Hamas, which he described as merely fighting for land). It is such Jihadists, not the political Islamists, who see all Westerners as "Crusaders" and seek to throw them out of the Middle East. The popular Arab reaction to Western policies in Iraq and Palestine is strengthening the extremists at the expense of the political Islamists, but the extremists do not and probably cannot command a mass following. The annual Arab Human Development Report is written by cosmopolitan Arab intellectuals, but the political Islamists are unanimous in believing, too, that reform in the Arab world is needed, whether there is progress toward a settlement with Israel or not. They point out that for too long corrupt regimes have used the Palestine issue as an excuse to maintain their power. Some of them are explicit in arguing that only democratically elected (and thus in their view probably Islamist) governments will have the legitimacy to make real peace with Israel. That may well be an honest view: while excluded from power and themselves under threat from extremists, the political Islamists have no reason to tackle the difficult issues that making peace with Israel will require; but it is striking that in Turkey it is an Islamist government which was able to take the difficult decisions needed to move toward Turkey's integration with the European Union. We believe that G-8 governments must now, perhaps indirectly, enter into a dialogue with such movements and involve them in the civil society track of the Broader Middle East Initiative. It will not be easy but, if we are to avoid a clash of civilizations between Islam and the West (or, even worse, with Islam in the West), and if we are serious about reform in the Middle East, we must do business with those who are struggling to relate their faith to the world as it is - and not as it was at the time of the Prophet Mohammad. Richard Murphy served as U.S. assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs in 1983-89. Basil Eastwood was director of research and analysis at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office in 1991-96 and British ambassador to Syria in 1996-2000. They wrote this commentary for THE DAILY STAR. ------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor --------------------~--> DonorsChoose. A simple way to provide underprivileged children resources often lacking in public schools. 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