Posted on 06/30/2011 1:32:33 AM PDT by lbryce
The United States has decided to resume formal contacts with the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, a senior U.S. official said on Wednesday, in a step that reflects the Islamist group’s growing political weight but that is almost certain to upset Israel and its U.S. backers.
“The political landscape in Egypt has changed, and is changing,” said the senior official, who spoke on condition of anonymity. “It is in our interests to engage with all of the parties that are competing for parliament or the presidency.”
The official sought to portray the shift as a subtle evolution rather than a dramatic change in Washington’s stance toward the Brotherhood, a group founded in 1928 that seeks to promote its conservative vision of Islam in society.
Under the previous policy, U.S. diplomats were allowed to deal with Brotherhood members of parliament who had won seats as independents — a diplomatic fiction that allowed them to keep lines of communication open.
Where U.S. diplomats previously dealt only with group members in their role as parliamentarians, a policy the official said had been in place since 2006, they will now deal directly with low-level Brotherhood party officials.
There is no U.S. legal prohibition against dealing with the Muslim Brotherhood itself, which long ago renounced violence as a means to achieve political change in Egypt and which is not regarded by Washington as a foreign terrorist organization.
But other sympathetic groups, such as Hamas, which identifies the Brotherhood as its spiritual guide, have not disavowed violence against the state of Israel.
The result has been a dilemma for the Obama administration.
Former officials and analysts said it has little choice but to engage the Brotherhood directly, given its political prominence after the February 11 downfall of former President Hosni Mubarak.
(Excerpt) Read more at weaselzippers.us ...
the Brotherhood, a group founded in 1928 that seeks to promote its conservative vision of Islam in society.
Jihad and Sharia law for everyone!
I lived 3 years in Cairo. The Egyptians are terrified of the Muslim Brotherhood and Gamaaa Islamiyah. This policy is crazy and will lead to the annihilation of the Coptic Christians, and increased extremism among muslims. When I lived there the islamists were blowing up buses of tourists in front of the egyptian museums and outside hotels, attacking churches, and hacking tourists to death at Hatchepsut’s Temple in Luxor. It was not pretty.
Bump.
“The United States has decided to resume formal contacts with the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, a senior U.S. official said on Wednesday, in a step that reflects the Islamist group’s growing political weight but that is almost certain to upset Israel and its U.S. backers.”
The “United States has decided”? If you put it that way, it sounds as though Obama has little to do with it...Yeah, right!
The result has been a dilemma for the Obama administration.
More like his failure to show leadership,he’s dangerous.
Meanwhile, we screw Israel, our only consistently friendly ally in the Middle East.
One is prompted to wonder if Obama is simply a moron or if he really believes he can get the Moslems to love us.
Or does he deliberately seek to destroy the United States with demented foolishness in foreign policy.
The danger is from, and the traitors are in,
Congress which created the false documents,
encouraged the perjury,
and DID NOTHING to protect America or the Constitution.
And cookies, too.
Can’t forget the cookies.
Another reason to replace congress at next election.
If my memory is correct, it is the MB that has had a big role in the recent protests in Egypt. But correct me if I am wrong.
Must build caliphate.
LLS
He is the enemy. The Muslim brotherhood are his brothers.
I wonder where the leader of the chocolate reich got his training to make poses like that?
The furher of the third reich had extensive training in posturing like that for effective crowd manipulation.
Doesn’t Barry’s Secretary of State have a link to the Muslim Brotherhood grafted to her amble hip, usually found holding a CrackBerry, who is married to a Jewish snake handler? Sounds like this relationship with the Muslim Brotherhood will happen REAL fast, via Clinton’s surrogate daughter.
I lived in Alexandria for two years, and most people who you would want to govern Egypt were scared to death of the Ikhwan al-Muslimun. They hated the military, but they hated the Brothers even more. As for the Copts, they can expect no support from our cowardly State Department. And they must be about ten percent of the population.
How about that phrase that the US had decided to RESUME formal contacts with the arab terrorists.
So when where they in formal contact before? Before Mubarak was deposed? Did obama collude with the terrorists to get rid of Mubarak because of his peace with Isreal?
Bet so.
but obama is not a muslim. his press says so.
“but obama is not a muslim. his press says so.”
If he’s not a muslim, he’s a flaming assh*le.
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