Editors at National Review Online praise one of the president’s recent actions against worldwide terrorism.
The Trump administration has announced a plan to designate various subdivisions of the Muslim Brotherhood as foreign terrorist organizations and specially designated global terrorists, moves that enable our government to take criminal enforcement actions and seize assets. While it’s not a sweeping designation of the Brotherhood itself, which would be legally and diplomatically fraught, the announcement is a welcome development that conveys the right message about the organization.
The Muslim Brotherhood (Jama’at al-Ikhwan al Muslimun) is the most consequential Islamist movement in modern history. Since its founding in Cairo by Hassan al-Banna in the late 1920s, it has spawned a global network of organizations, including jihadist organizations — Hamas, most notoriously — that are united in their sharia-supremacist ideology, which is virulent in its hostility to Western liberalism and its Jew hatred.
The Brotherhood has a violent history. Its “special apparatus” in Egypt murdered Prime Minister Nukrashi Pasha in 1948 and thereafter attempted to murder Prime Minister Gamal Abdel Nasser. In 1981, splinter groups inspired by Brotherhood ideology murdered President Anwar Sadat. By 1987, abetted by Brotherhood tentacles in the United States, Hamas was established as the Brotherhood’s Palestinian branch. From the first intifada through the still-ongoing war in Gaza, support for the jihad against Israel — material and financial, through recruitment, rhetoric, and indoctrination — has been a top priority of Brotherhood-linked organizations throughout the world.
Many major Islamist organizations in the United States have Brotherhood roots. That undeniable fact was proven in the Bush 43–era prosecution of the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development. The HLF was an umbrella organization for the material and rhetorical support of Hamas.
Many U.S.-based Islamist organizations were shown to have collaborative ties, including the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), the Islamic Society of North America (developed out of the Muslim Students Association, which has hundreds of chapters across our country), and the North American Islamic Trust (a pivotal player in the acquisition of mosques). It is not a mystery why, after Hamas’s October 7 atrocities, there was a groundswell of pro-Hamas agitation and a surge in antisemitic incidents.
