This site has already effectively dismissed the long Goldberg/Ibish op-ed article in yesterday’s New York Times. But one line in that tortured piece does deserve more scrutiny, especially with the uprising in Egypt.
Goldberg and Ibish contend that “. . . Gaza, of course, remains an intractable problem, since no peace treaty will end the conflict so long as Hamas is in power and loyal to the uncompromising Muslim Brotherhood ideology it espouses.”
The two are slyly implying that the Muslim Brotherhood is a violent, intransigent organization. In fact, the Brotherhood was founded in Egypt in 1928, and violence was part of its distant past. But for several decades now the Brothers have been committed to nonviolence, and hundreds of them have been regularly arrested, imprisoned and tortured. Because the Brotherhood tends to fill its leadership posts by seniority, some of the arrestees are elderly men, in their 70s and even 80s.
The Egyptian wing of Al-Qaeda split off from the Brotherhood partly because the organization refused to abandon nonviolence. The Brotherhood’s English-language website even has a regular feature “MB vs. Al-Qaeda” — which I suspect is a more effective anti-“terrorist” tool than the entire publicity budget of the U.S. State Department.
Many observers believe that if Egypt permitted genuinely free elections, the Brotherhood would emerge as the largest single force.
If I were Egyptian, I doubt I would vote for the Muslim Brotherhood. That fact does not prevent me from recognizing their courage, from demanding that their human rights be respected, and from defending them against gratuitous slanders.
