
Finally, a U.S. president who understands the threat.
The Trump administration is considering officially designating the Islamist group known as the Muslim Brotherhood as a Foreign Terrorist Organization, a policy unimaginable during the terrorist-friendly Obama administration which championed the group as an ally.
“The president has consulted with his national security team and leaders in the region who share his concern, and this designation is working its way through the internal process,” White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said in a statement April 30.
The Trump administration’s deliberations over the prospective designation come weeks after President Trump designated Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps as an FTO to combat that theocratic dictatorship’s global campaign of terrorism. The designation gives the government more tools to fight terrorism.
“This unprecedented step, led by the Department of State, recognizes the reality that Iran is not only a State Sponsor of Terrorism, but that the IRGC actively participates in, finances, and promotes terrorism as a tool of statecraft,” Trump said in a statement. This designation, which took effect April 15, was “the first time that the United States has ever named a part of another government as a FTO.”
As Joseph Klein previously wrote at FrontPage, the mullahs’ regime “lives and breathes Islamic extremism, which it seeks to export through its global jihad terrorist network,” adding that the “IRGC sits at the center of that terrorist network,” providing “funding, equipment, training, and logistical support to terrorist proxy groups, including most notably Hezbollah in Lebanon and Syria.” The IRGC has also participated in attacks on Americans.
Although the Muslim Brotherhood still enjoys support throughout the Arab world, Bahrain, Egypt, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Syria, and the United Arab Emirates have already designated the group a terrorist organization, The Epoch Times reports. The Brotherhood-backed HAMAS organization has been designated a terrorist organization by the United States. Al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri was previously a member of the Brotherhood.
The UAE designated the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), a Brotherhood affiliate in the U.S. that poses as a Muslim civil rights group, a terrorist organization in 2014. In the U.S., CAIR was named an unindicted co-conspirator in 2007 in an alleged criminal conspiracy to support both HAMAS and the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development.
Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi reportedly asked President Trump April 9 for the designation during a private consultation. Sisi overthrew the Muslim Brotherhood-backed president, Mohamed Morsi, in 2013, and then won election in his own right the year after. Since then he has cracked down on Muslim militants.
National Security Advisor John Bolton and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo reportedly favor the designation, but officials at the Pentagon and elsewhere in the administration have been dragging their heels.
The Obama administration was infested with Muslim Brotherhood backers.
For example, Hillary Clinton’s ties to the Brotherhood are well-documented.