PrintFebruary 10, 2011
Obama's Director of National Intelligence thinks Muslim Brotherhood is 'largely secular'
This is the caliber of personnel we have come to expect from the Obama Administration.
From Josh Gerstein at Politico :
During a House Intelligence Committee hearing Thursday, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper called Egypt's branch of the Muslim Brotherhood movement "largely secular."In response to questioning from Rep. Sue Myrick (R-N.C.) about the threat posed by the group, Clapper suggested that the Egyptian part of the Brotherhood is not particularly extreme and that the broader international movement is hard to generalize about."The term 'Muslim Brotherhood'...is an umbrella term for a variety of movements, in the case of Egypt, a very heterogeneous group, largely secular, which has eschewed violence and has decried Al Qaeda as a perversion of Islam," Clapper said. "They have pursued social ends, a betterment of the political order in Egypt, et cetera.....In other countries, there are also chapters or franchises of the Muslim Brotherhood, but there is no overarching agenda, particularly in pursuit of violence, at least internationally."The Brotherhood uses the slogan, "Islam is the answer," and generally advocates for government in accordance with Islamic principles. The movement has as a broad goal unifying what it perceives as Muslim lands, from Spain to Indonesia, as a "caliphate."
From the people who brought you the term "man-made disasters," "overseas contingency actions,"; andwho have done everything in their power to disabuse people of the odd notion that there is such a thing as "Islamic terrorism" (see their reaction to the Fort Hood shooting, for one example) comes the perverse and dangerous idea that the Muslim Brotherhood is "largely secular".
Patrick Moynihan would call this "defining deviancy down." Others might have more pointed terms.
