The Brotherhood: America's Next Great Enemy (25 page)

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Authors: Erick Stakelbeck

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BOOK: The Brotherhood: America's Next Great Enemy
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Likewise, Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad—who, as of this writing, was still clinging to power amid that country’s bloody civil war—may be a murderous tyrant, but in his assessment of Erdogan, at least, he is on target. “Erdogan thinks that if the Muslim Brotherhood takes over in the region and especially in Syria, he can guarantee his political future. . . .” al-Assad told an interviewer in 2012, referring to Erdogan’s open support for Syria’s Brotherhood-heavy rebel factions. “He personally thinks that he is the new sultan of the Ottoman [Empire] and he can control the region as it was during the Ottoman Empire under a new umbrella. In his heart he thinks he is a caliph.”
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Jordan’s King Abdullah has expressed a similar view of Erdogan. A 2013 profile of the Jordanian monarch in
The Atlantic
magazine reported that he is “wary” of Erdogan and views Turkey, along with Egypt, as part of a new “Muslim Brotherhood crescent.” According to the piece, Abdullah correctly “sees Erdogan as a more restrained and more savvy version of Mohammed Morsi.”
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El-Erian, al-Assad, and Abdullah are no dummies. Although each comes from a vastly different ideological viewpoint, they all realize that Erdogan is a force to be reckoned with: a hugely popular figure in the Muslim world who, as head of a NATO member nation, also has the ear of Western leaders. Not to mention Turkey boasts a strong military, growing economy, and a long and fairly recent history of leading the caliphate. Fronted by an ambitious, politically astute despot who is fawned over by the U.S. president and idolized by legions of restless young Muslims worldwide, Turkey is an emerging juggernaut. At the time of this writing, Istanbul was a finalist to host the 2020 Summer Olympics—a bid that, if successful, would make Turkey the first Muslim nation to hold the Games. Erdogan has also announced plans to build a mega-mosque in Istanbul that will boast the tallest minarets in the world. Since he took power in 2002, Turkey has added an astounding 17,000 new mosques and counting.
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Right about now, Ataturk is turning in his grave.
Erdogan, seeing the potential for another Arab fascist domino to fall en route to a revived caliphate, has been at the forefront of funding and supporting Sunni Islamist rebels against the Assad regime in neighboring Syria. In short, he seems to be everywhere these days, and his AKP’s “Turkish model” of patient, gradual Islamization, combined with its so-called “Zero Problems with Neighbors” foreign policy, is all the rage among younger Muslim Brothers whom I’ve interviewed. They cite it, repeatedly and with admiration, as a model for Islamic governance. Ironically enough, so do the same clueless Western officials that Erdogan would like to subjugate.
“When we look at the region, we will find that Saudi Arabia, Iran, Egypt, and Turkey are the most important countries. For this reason, there has to be some sort of cooperation among these nations.”
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When he made these remarks during his 2011 visit to Cairo, Recep Tayyip Erdogan showed that he was well aware of Turkey’s main competition for Middle East supremacy. What was more relevant, however, is what Erdogan didn’t say: that he would indeed like “cooperation” among these major Muslim powers, but under the aegis of Turkey. Turkey has many things working in its favor in this regard—including Erdogan smartly positioning himself as a major player at the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), the Muslim world body that, as we saw in Chapter Two, already provides a framework for the caliphate.
The problem for Erdogan is that the Islamist regimes in Riyadh, Tehran, and Cairo also aspire to lead a renewed caliphate. Additionally, Turks are not Arabs, and Arab Islamists are fiercely supremacist and loathe ceding authority to non-Arabs like Erdogan. Iran faces the same ethnic-based problem, as would Pakistan.
As for Saudi Arabia, its vast oil wealth combined with its status as the birthplace of Islam and Mohammed ensure that it will always at least be part of the conversation. The Saudi Royals—custodians of the Two Holy Mosques in Mecca and Medina—have long viewed themselves as the standard bearers for Muslims around the world and have used billions of their petro-dollars to build radical mosques and madrassahs on six continents. The Saudis have money, oil, and the sentimental value of being the birthplace of not only the very first caliphate, but of Islam itself, all working in their favor. But their chances of emerging at the head of a pan-Islamic union are slim to none.
Although the Saudi regime was largely untouched by the so-called Arab Spring, unemployment and discontent remain rampant among its heavily Islamist citizenry. It’s no stretch to say that the Saudi Royals, along with Jordan’s King Abdullah, could very well be the next dominoes to fall in the region. Islamists worldwide consider the Saudis as corrupted, decadent pawns of the West who are unworthy of presiding over Islam’s holiest sites. At the end of the day, the Saudi regime just does not possess the prerequisite Islamist street cred or military might to be taken seriously as a caliphate leader. By the time you read these words, the House of Saud could be history. That’s how rapidly—and unpredictably—things are moving in the Middle East these days.
Then there is Egypt—currently ruled by an organization that has long been the most vocal advocate of a revived caliphate. Remember, the death of the Ottoman Caliphate in 1924 spurred Hassan al-Banna to create the Muslim Brotherhood. His dream, like that of Sayyid Qutb and every Ikhwani that has come after them, was to restore the caliphate and unite the Muslim ummah. It is the main reason for the Brotherhood’s very existence. Now that the MB has taken control of Egypt—the Arab world’s most populous and influential country—you’d think its leadership of the caliphate would be inevitable. The Brothers also have billions in Western aid and military hardware at their disposal and lead the world’s most influential Islamist movement.
Yet the situation inside Egypt at the moment appears far too precarious for Mohammed Morsi and the Brotherhood to be able to lead the Islamic world, though that is exactly what the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood is planning to do. That requires quelling the continued civil unrest that has plagued its short reign, and ensuring that the Egyptian military doesn’t launch a coup. At the same time, Egypt is wracked by rampant poverty and food shortages for which the Brotherhood has yet to provide an answer. These serious domestic troubles would seemingly make it difficult for the Brotherhood to fix its sights outside of Egypt in the foreseeable future. Still, the Brothers are saber-rattling against Israel, forging closer ties with Iran, and encouraging their satellites to rise up everywhere from Syria to Jordan to the UAE.
Mohammed Morsi is not one to stand pat. He has essentially abandoned the longtime Brotherhood strategy of gradualism and is moving at warp speed to push through everything the Brothers have been waiting to accomplish for the past eighty-five years. If Iran, as I suspect, is due to have its military capabilities and prestige weakened by an Israeli first strike against its nuclear weapons facilities, the Brothers have little standing in their path to Islamic domination other than Turkey—which is led by a Brotherhood acolyte and ally in the form of Erdogan. Either way, the Brothers win. And as we’ve seen with Erdogan, a healthy dose of Israel-baiting—the type of which Egypt’s Brothers regularly engage in with glee—will take the Muslim Brotherhood a long way in its quest to win Muslim hearts and minds.
No other Islamist movement or regime can match the MB’s reach, which extends to at least eighty countries, or its influence as a powerful, seminal source of modern Islamism. If the Brotherhood’s satellites and allies continue to gain power across the Middle East and North Africa, there is an excellent chance that the seat of the revived caliphate will be in Cairo, with the Brotherhood’s Supreme Guide as a de facto caliph and the famed Al-Azhar University serving as an ideas-and-propaganda factory.
Iran’s mullahs, however, have other ideas.
I can just hear the deep thinkers that comprise the Obama administration’s foreign policy team on this one: “Stakelbeck, you really are a right-wing fearmonger, aren’t you? News flash: Iranians are Shia. And practically every other country that would belong to this Callystrate—or whatever it is you’re raving about—is Sunni. Everyone knows that Sunni and Shia can never work together—they hate each other! Always have and always will. Take your cockamamie analysis someplace else. Besides, we’ve got Iran under control. Trust us.”
Ah, the Left’s favorite canard about the Middle East: Sunni and Shia Islamists hate each other even more than they hate Christians and Jews; so much, in fact, that they would never work together under any circumstances. Don’t get me wrong: there is no love lost between Sunni and Shia. The two factions share a longstanding enmity and are at each other’s throats today in Syria, Iraq, Pakistan, and elsewhere. But there is one holy cause that unites both Sunni and Shia and is able to achieve a truce—however temporary—in their Islamic family feud. And that is working toward the destruction of Israel and the West. In other words, as Iran expert Ken Timmerman has phrased it, “when it comes to killing Christians and Jews, Sunni and Shia get along just fine.”
The Iranian regime is the main driver of this Sunni/Shia jihadi cooperation. A few examples:
• In December 2011, A U.S. district court in New York City ruled—to the complete obliviousness of the mainstream media—that the Iranian government and Hezbollah, both Shiite, materially and directly supported Sunni al-Qaeda in carrying out the 9/11 attacks. A federal magistrate judge later ruled that Iran, along with al-Qaeda and the Taliban, should pay $6 billion in damages to the relatives of 9/11 victims.
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Given that Iran’s regime is busy spending most of its funds right now on building nuclear weapons and is devoted to America’s destruction, that payout will likely take a while.
• Shortly after the 9/11 attacks, Shiite Iran began providing safe harbor to senior al-Qaeda leaders and bin Laden family members—something that continues to this day.
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• Shiite Iran is the main supplier of both weapons and money to Sunni Hamas. Iran’s Shia proxy, Hezbollah, also has close ties to Hamas.
• Shiite Iran provides arms to the Sunni Taliban that are used to kill American troops in Afghanistan.
• Shia Hezbollah and Sunni al-Qaeda have a longstanding relationship that dates back to the mid-1990s, when al-Qaeda operatives visited Hezbollah training camps.
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The above list is just the tip of the iceberg. Yes, the interests of Shia and Sunni jihadists diverge violently in Syria, where Iran and Hezbollah are locked in a death match against al-Qaeda–linked groups and the Muslim Brotherhood over the fate of the Assad regime, an Iranian proxy. The two sides also clash in Iraq, where Iran is attempting to make its predominantly Shia neighbor an Iranian client state—and largely succeeding—over the fierce opposition of al-Qaeda in Iraq and other Sunni jihadists.
The theological—and in the examples just mentioned, strategic—differences between Sunni and Shia Islamists are well documented. Yet, in the larger scheme of things, both Sunni and Shia consider wiping Israel off the map and subjugating the hated, infidel West, led by the United States, as the more pressing jihad and overriding priority. The enemy of my enemy is my friend in this regard, and intra-Islam squabbling must always be put on the shelf when the opportunity arises to work together toward the demise of the Great Satan, America, and the Little Satan, Israel.
The Iranian regime sees the so-called Arab Spring as an opportunity to do just that. In the mullahs’ view, the rapid rise of Islamists across the Middle East and North Africa is not an Arab Spring but an “Islamic Awakening”: a divine signal from Allah that the return of the Muslim messiah is nigh. This messiah figure—known in Iranian Shia eschatology as the “Mahdi” or “Twelfth Imam”—will unite the Muslim world across sectarian lines and lead it to a final, bloody victory over all non-Muslims. In essence, the Mahdi is the ultimate and final caliph, and the Iranian regime believes it has been divinely designated to help usher in his return.

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