Dear friend,
I notice that you published a
report of the meeting last week at NYU on the Moslem Brotherhood. Your report
is, unfortunately, full of inaccuracies. I was one of the platform speakers and
you will find below my speech as it was delivered. Please compare it against the
spiteful and ill-written account from your correspondent. I would be very happy
for you to publish it in its present form or to reply to the ludicrous comments
in your article. Free speech anyone? Letter here
This is what the enemy does. This is their MO. They lie. It echoes ex-Nazi
Hilmar von Campe foreboding remarks at the Walid Shoebat event at Columbia here (audio here) who now lives in Alabama. He was 7 years old in 1933
when the Nazis came to power. He reminded the audience of Josef Goebbels, their chief liar, and the
constant repetition of lies, lies and more lies that infected the national
consciousness. Constant
rhetoric.
Alyssa A. Lappen,
Senior Fellow at the
American Center for Democracy, covered the New York University Center for Law and Security forum on the
Muslim Brotherhood on Oct. 19 for American Thinker here. Read it all before you continue.
The international press cried foul on October 19 after the U.S. denied a visa to a senior Muslim Brotherhood leader. Newsweek, Reuters, ABC News, The National Interest
and other media complained that the “moderate” Muslim Association of
Britain (MAB) founder Kamal Helbawy was barred from appearing at New
York University’s Center for Law and Security. The U.S. also barred entry to Egyptian doctor and MB “guidance counsel” Abd El Monem Abo El Fotouh, who was scheduled to speak in the same discussion on the Muslim Brotherhood.
Helbawy claims to be “moderate.” The U.S. should not prevent “moderates from talking and discussing,” Helbawy stated after being pulled off his flight. El Fotouh is purportedly also temperate.
“At the end of
the day, [Islam and the West] have a set of common humanist values:
justice, freedom, human rights and democracy,”
he told The Economist in September 2003. Arabists consider El Fotouh “one of the brightest stars” of the MB’s so-called “middle generation.”
The Department of Homeland Security didn’t explain their actions. One can only surmise—and applaud.
[..]
Today, the MB still calls for “Building the Muslim state…Building the Khilafa…Mastering the world with Islam.”
MB spiritual
leader Yusuf Qaradawi, an Egyptian member of the European Council for
Fatwa and Research, likewise calls for an Islamic conquest of Europe
(starting with Rome and Italy). “[T]he patch of the Muslim state will
expand to cover the whole earth....,” he writes. Qaradawi also praises suicide bombing, readily accepts wife beating and calls upon Muslim women to detonate themselves in order to kill Jews.
Despite all evidence to the contrary, on Oct. 19, the Open Forum on The Muslim Brotherhood
nevertheless praised Helbawy and El Fotouh as peaceful moderates, and
their organization as a peaceful, just, and moderating influence on
Middle East and global politics. Their absence was yet another strike
against the Bush administration, executive director Karen Greenberg
stated. “This center tries to educate one another, policy makers and
the public,” she added—a job Greenberg apparently considers more
important than public security.
Former Sunday Times
senior reporter Nick Fielding then took the floor. He denied the risks
the MB poses to the West. Helbawy is “a wonderful human being,” he
stated, adding that the 2005 election of 22 Muslim Brothers to Egypt’s
parliament-and the Hamas victory in the January 2006 Palestinian
Authority votewere cause for celebration. Fielding objected only to
“the reward” Muslims received for their free elections-”the silence of
the U.S. State Department in the face of Egyptian government abuse,”
and the U.S. and international boycott of the Hamas-controlled PA.
The MB is
“reformist,” according to Fielding. It provides “the best possibility
in the Middle East of leaders who can make deals and stick to them,” he
stated, noting their solid political backing in Jordan, Tunisia,
Morocco, Algeria Kuwait and Yemen. The MB, he insisted, has “for the
past 30 years…[consistently] followed a non violent” path. The
brotherhood’s only problem, Fielding claimed, is its ostracization by
such analysts as “The Counterterrorism blog,” whose data he derided.
True democracy
would never take root in the Middle East, Fielding predicted. It’s
“about as likely as Shari’a being adopted in Washington D.C.,” he
joked.
Since then, Lappen has advised me that American Thinker has received
complaints from both Mr. Debat and Mr. Fielding as to her representations of
their comments.
Lappen's respective replies to Mr.
Debat and Mr. Fielding were published yesterday here , and today,
here. Go over to American Thinker and read them both ...now.
Dear Editor—
It
is interesting, and ironic, that both Mr. Debat and Mr. Fielding accuse
me of leveraging their respective comments on the Muslim Brotherhood
for political gain, when their presentations were both so blatantly
political.
Indeed,
an altered, and shorter, version of Mr. Fielding’s ostensibly neutral
Oct. 19 analysis has been posted at the “official” Ikhwan
website. Presumably, he sent them this text. In any case, the
“official” Brotherhood apparently views Mr. Fielding’s remarks as a
political endorsement—similar to Democracy Now’s far-left political “analysis” of the MB’s purportedly softening line.
Everything on which I quoted Mr. Fielding, he said.
Unfortunately,
Mr. Fielding’s supposed “speech as it was delivered” is neither
complete nor a precise duplicate of his remarks. Possibly, the text he
provided to American Thinker and the “official” Ikhwan website
served as his outline. In any case, in his delivered remarks, Mr.
Fielding strayed from the above-cited text, and added many other points
besides. Certain of Mr. Fielding’s quoted statements hailed from the
question and answer period, which the above text also excludes.
And
some of those remarks—unaccountably not contained in the text of Mr.
Fielding’s “speech as it was delivered”— were also cited elsewhere. Mr.
Fielding not only described senior Muslim Brotherhood leader and Muslim
Association of Britain (MAB) founder Kamal Helbawy as a “wonderful
human being,” (as I reported), but also as a “voice of reason,” as he
was quoted in the New York Post. The New York Sun likewise reported on the panel’s praise for the MB and its absent speakers.
But
Mr. Fielding and Mr. Debat should not pretend to be vindicated by any
audio tape of the event, to be posted on the Center’s website( as
promised on Oct. 25) “before the end of the year at the latest”—unless
it is complete and unedited. But that may not be in the cards. Asked if
the Center would post the entire session, including the question and
answer period, a spokesman stated, “We are considering editing the
content,” a process that could easily also exclude many controversial
remarks that I quoted from the respective experts. The excuse is time
limitation, although streaming digital MP3 downloads are not limited by
time. Who is dishonest now?
In
another comment not documented above, Mr. Fielding stated, “Saudi
Arabia has never adopted the program of the Muslim Brotherhood.” On
this point, moderator Peter Bergen challenged him, noting that Saudi
Arabia opened its arms to the MB. Indeed, as I have previously reported
with Dr. Rachel Ehrenfeld, the kingdom granted the MB business
monopolies, while King Saud funded their establishment of the Islamic University in Medina.
Any
Muslim Brotherhood support for terrorism, Mr. Fielding later contended,
springs from “wayward connections.” Reports of MB terror financing
result from “over imaginative conclusions about how money moves,” he
argued. Mr. Fielding admitted that there are “a number of cases where
links [can be] seen,” yet he also avowed that the guilty parties in
such instances most likely were only “individuals involved.” He
concluded, “the Muslim Brotherhood is not a jihadist organization or
bent on the destruction of the West.”
The
question of whether Islam could politically dominate Europe within a
few decades, Mr. Fielding dismissed as “garbage”—“It’s just not true,”
he said. Citing Britain as a case in point, he estimated its current
Muslim population at “less than two million.” While first generation
migrants have a high birth rate, Mr. Fielding said that, barring “mass
conversion,” Britain will never be politically ruled by Islam—a point
that the audience greeted with laughter.
Mr.
Fielding stated that “sometimes the Muslim Brotherhood feels like the
Masons,” suggesting a parallel between the Islamist MB and the Freemasons, whose spiritual Masonic Order has been targeted by unfounded conspiracy theories and persecuted by totalitarian regimes. The MB undeniably backs jihad, terror and plans for global domination; the Masons, by contrast, merely open their doors to those interested in joining.
Finally,
Mr. Fielding indeed blamed the West’s refusal to recognize Shari’a law
in Islamic countries as a “reason for militancy.” He added, in citing
another scholar, that countering the spread of jihad organizations
requires the West “to address the grievances”—many of them
legitimate—of the jihadist movement. Furthermore, Mr Fielding
stated—another political comment—that the Muslim Brotherhood should be
“supported as strongly as possible” by the West.
If
these quotations sound “ludicrous” to Mr. Fielding, I would not
disagree. Therefore, he should be more careful when making statements
in public forums.
Lappen adds in her correspondence to me [emphasis mine];
As you will note in my reply to Mr. Fielding, I was very disturbed
Wednesday
to see a text he sent to the American Thinker, and apparently to the
official
Ikhwan website, which he claims is a copy of his speech. In fact, this
text
is NOT a precise transcript of his remarks, and it is dishonest for him to
claim otherwise. That may well be the text he wrote in advance of the
event,
but he veered from it; He added other comments (as do most speakers), and
expressed certain points in different language.
Moreover, upon checking with the NYU Center yesterday as to when a tape of
the event would be published, I was told it would be before the end of the
year, at the latest, but that the Center was "considering editing the
content." If this is true, this is even more disturbing.
Needless to say, it is unfair and unethical for either Mr. Debat or Mr.
Fielding to now deny having made statements they made, or having implied
their clear sympathy for the Muslim Brotherhood. I took copious notes and
marked who said what, and there were hundreds of other witnesses to their
remarks as well.
While my analysis may not be one for which the speakers might have hoped,
others also reported on their support for the Muslim Brotherhood.
Mr. Debat and Mr. Fielding have a right to their opinions. But in a
democratic society, at war with a totalitarian ideology, I daresay that
reporters, too
Mr. Debat and Mr. Fielding do indeed have a right to their opinion but they have no right to lie, deceive, and mislead an uninformed public. This is the way of Islam and the more people know about the NYU event the better.
The Muslim Brotherhood have a plan outlined here and here. ArcticGold did a YouTube vid on the Muslim Brotherhood project here.
