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Cameron's Muslim Brotherhood probe is already a fix

April 5, 2014 at 1:50 pm

David Cameron this week splashily announced a “review” into the activities of the Muslim Brotherhood in the UK. Right away, it seemed to me an obvious farce. The sheer hypocrisy and self-interest is laughable.


Speaking through its London lawyers, the Muslim Brotherhood responded that it “intends to openly engage with the British Government’s review and will make representations to assist the Government’s inquiry”. On its Twitter account it even said it “welcomes any investigations” by the government, because it has nothing to hide.

The Brotherhood is showing a political naïvety here. The “review” will be an exercise in politicised intelligence; a shady back-room deal from the same people who brought you the deliberately false “intelligence” that was used to hustle for the disastrous and criminal war on Iraq. A Dodgy Dossier on the Nile (or in the Arabian desert, actually, since it will probably be written in Riyadh).

The personnel announced to be working on the review makes this unambiguous. Even the foreign office is reportedly skeptical of the review, referring press enquiries to the prime minister’s office.

Cameron appointed Sir John Jenkins to lead the review. This career diplomat is the current British Ambassador to Saudi Arabia, the Brotherhood’s biggest regional enemy, and has no expertese or experience in Egypt. The man’s entire job is to merely appease the Saudi royal dictatorship, and promote the interests of British capitalism there – a brutal tyranny of absolutist monarchs – all the better to cement multi-billion-pound arms deals.

On what planet will this review be even remotely credible?

Whatever one thinks of the conservative – even reactionary – politics of the Muslim Brotherhood (as a leftist, I am not a fan), they are a popular political and electoral force in Egypt, and indeed throughout the entire Arab world via branches of similar or related organizations.

Before Egypt’s blood-stained generals reasserted their iron grip on power in July’s coup, the Brotherhood won election after election. The only reason the Saudi royal house of horrors is opposed to the Brotherhood is because in the region, it is often the only political current that has a chance of winning elections. As the Telegraph’s Peter Oborne put it yesterday, it offers “a democratic alternative to the Saudi kingdom’s ultra-conservative Wahhabi brand of Sunni Islam”.

The Brotherhood curries a popular support base and fights elections. The Egyptian coup regime by contrast shoots down thousands of unarmed protesters in cold blood, fixes elections and sentences 529 protesters to death after a two-day kangaroo court session.

The Saudis do not even bother to fix elections and simply run the the country as their own personal property, in alliance with the clerics – some of the the most fanatical religious extremists in the world. The Grand Mufti, for example, called in 2012 for all churches in the peninsula to be destroyed. More recently, the regime defined in law the mere act of “calling for atheist thought” as “terrorism”.

The kingdom is a serial and constant human rights abuser, last year alone executing by beheading at least 79 people. Women in the kingdom have zero rights, with even female members of the royal family literally imprisoned in their own homes – as the recent Channel 4 News story on four Saudi princesses has shown.

Yet billions of dollars and euros continue to flow in and out of the oil-rich country. Why?

Firstly, American and European capitalist governments are fundamentally anti-democratic at heart, and could not care less about the human rights of their own citizens, let alone for people elsewhere, and so act according to their own interests in securing oil and arms contracts.

Second, Saudi Arabia has for decades been the main counter-revolutionary force in the region and a significant one globally – arming reactionary imperialist terrorist forces such as the Contras in Nicaragua and the forerunners of the Taliban and al-Qaida in Afghanistan in the 1980s.

Thirdly, the regime is useful to the apartheid regime in Israel – they have a strong confluence of interests, which has become more and more open since 2011. Israel is, more than anything, against a democratic and independent Arab world, since it would immediately isolate Israel. The Saudis are against a democratic Arab world for obvious reasons.

On top of all this, banning the Muslim Brotherhood in the UK would give another major boost to al-Qaida.

That vile movement’s spokesmen have always argued that elections are, at best, fruitless, and that the Crusader governments of the West are waging a war against Islam, not against terrorism. The British state is once again, feeding into the al-Qaida narrative.

There’s also the question of hypocrisy. Britain will support the Brotherhood when it suits them. As CAABU’s Chris Doyle points out, Britain is very much supporting the main Syrian opposition coalition – an important component of which is the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood. Unlike their Egyptian counterparts (who, although a diverse movement, focus on political action and street mobilizations, and have consistently condemned recent al-Qaida-type bombings in Egypt) the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood makes no bones about the fact that it is involved in an armed insurgency against the government of Syria.

Will Sir John Jenkins mention that in his report? Don’t hold your breath.

An associate editor with The Electronic Intifada, Asa Winstanley is an investigative journalist who lives in London.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.