Bird’s Eye: And that’s the big fear, innit? What if the Muslim Brotherhood takes over? That’s the bogeyman Mubarek used to justify his payoffs and killoffs for 29 years. And given the West’s rampant Islamophobia, it’s being hammered to justify whatever it develops that our governments will want to justify. But the Muslim Brotherhood are worth looking at directly, so we start with a link to their site, followed by comments by Mondoweiss, and an excellent overview of the Brotherhood’s role in Egypt from Juan Cole

* The Muslim Brotherhood Is The New Marijuana Ikhwanweb :: The Muslim Brotherhood Official English Website

Bill Roggio, writing yesterday about the death of a Jordanian al-Qaeda member in a U.S. airstrike in Pakistan, described the Muslim Brotherhood as a “gateway to al-Qaeda.”

The Muslim Brotherhood advocates the imposition of Islamic State using political means. Disaffected members of the MB who think that method is too soft often join more radical groups, such as Hamas, al Qaeda, etc. The Egyptian Islamic Group broke off from the MB.

Statistically speaking, if the Brotherhood is a gateway to terrorism, it’s a damn ineffective one. The Muslim Brotherhood has had millions of members throughout its history; only a small fraction of them joined radical groups.

And if we’re using Roggio’s analytical framework, I wonder if he would agree that the Catholic Church and the Republican Party are gateways to terrorism? They both advocate the abolition of abortion in the United States through political means. Disaffected members who think both groups are too soft occasionally resort to violence to further their aims.

* Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood vs. Al-Qaeda Mondoweiss

All of a sudden, middle-aged American men in suits who couldn’t find their way, unaided, from Cairo’s Ramses Station down Talaat Harb to Midan Tahrir, are posing as experts, appearing on U.S. television to insinuate that the Muslim Brotherhood is violent and extremist.

Fortunately, the Brothers have an English-language website.  Scroll down it to the lower left and you will see the feature: “MB vs. Qaeda.”  This segment is one more sign of the organization’s decades-long commitment to nonviolence, even though over the years the Mubarak regime has arrested and tortured thousands of its members.

One current post notes happily, “Al-Qaeda losing supporters in jihadi groups across the Arab world.”  There’s also an open letter that starts off, “Dear ‘Muslim’ Terrorist.”  “Sister Jannah” pointedly asks jihadists who planned attacks on civilians, “But did you even bother to ask a single real scholar of Islam? Like the hundreds and thousands of mainstream Islamic scholars out there. — Guess what they say — That killing innocent people is Haram.”

*Why Egypt 2011 is not Iran 1979 Juan Cole Informed Comment

Alarms have been raised by those observing the popular uprising in Egypt that, while it is not itself a Muslim fundamentalist movement, the Muslim fundamentalists could take it over as it unfolds. The best-positioned group to do so is the Muslim Brotherhood. Some are even conflating the peaceful Brotherhood with radical groups such as al-Qaeda….

The white collar and labor activists are far more central to the organization of the Egyptian protests than had been their counterparts in the Iranian Revolution. The Egyptian “bazaar” is much less tied to the Muslim clergy than was the case in Iran, and far less likely to fund clerical politicians. Whereas Iran’s bazaar merchants often suffered from Western competition, Egypt’s bazaar depends centrally on Western tourism. Secular parties, if we count the NDP, have an organizational advantage over the religious ones, since they have been freer to meet and act under Mubarak. It is not clear that the law banning religious parties will be changed, in which case the Brotherhood would again be stuck with running its candidates under other rubrics. And, Sunni Muslims don’t have a doctrine of owing implicit obedience to their clergy, and the clergy are not as important in Sunni religious life as the Shiite Ayatollahs are in Iran. The Muslim Brotherhood, a largely lay organization, has a lot of support, but it is not clear that they could gain more than about a third of seats even if they were able to run in free elections.