Terror Trends Bulletin

posted by Christopher W. Holton

The Muslim Brotherhood is the forerunner of all modern Jihadist terror organizations: HAMAS, Al Qaeda, the Islamic State all can trace their origins to the Muslim Brotherhood.

In the case of HAMAS, it is in actuality THE Muslim Brotherhood in the West Bank and Gaza.

Islam provides the doctrinal basis for the Muslim Brotherhood and its modern offspring. But it is largely the Muslim Brotherhood and its ideologues–Qutb, al Banna and others–that provided the ideological underpinnings for Al Qaeda, the Islamic State and others.

Arab media is increasingly addressing the insidious role of the Muslim Brotherhood. The article excerpted and linked below would have been unheard of a dozen years ago.

The fight to uproot terrorism and extremism begins at its Muslim Brotherhood roots, with that organisation’s structure, doctrines and ideologues.

The US government has recently released to the public a large batch of documents that were recovered in the raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, in May 2011. What strikes one immediately, in these documents, is how the terrorist ideology that obsessed Bin Laden was rooted in Muslim Brotherhood ideology. The Al-Qaeda leader was steeped in the literature published by the Muslim Brotherhood’s founders and ideologues…

This phenomenon is hardly unique among prominent terrorists and their organisations. The Muslim Brotherhood had always served as the “incubator” and the primary school in which terrorists take their first steps towards embracing extremist thought and its violent applications. Leaders of such organisations as Al-Gamaa Al-Islamiya and the Islamic Jihad in Egypt emerged directly from the folds of Muslim Brotherhood thought and practice. Among the star students were current Al-Qaeda chief Ayman Al-Zawahri, Mohamed Ata, who led that terrorist attack against the World Trade Center in New York on 11 September 2001, and the mastermind of the whole operation, Khaled Sheikh Mohamed. Although some of those individuals and organisations had their differences with the Muslim Brotherhood at some later juncture, their collective “jihadist” thought had its origins with the founders of the Muslim Brotherhood, whether in its first edition (Hassan Al-Banna) or its second edition (Sayed Qotb). While Qotb is always regarded as the father of contemporary terrorists, his ideas and outlooks can be traced to Al-Banna and the birth of the Muslim Brotherhood in 1928.

Read the rest of this important article…

http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/News/23056.aspx