The West continues to fail to understand the nature of Muslim Brotherhood: to impose Shari’a by all means, if necessary by violence.

JERUSALEM. The Muslim Brotherhood’s avowed goal since the creation of the movement in 1928 has been to impose Sharia, Islamic law, first on Egypt, then, the rest of the world, turning it into a Muslim- ruled caliphate.

Eighty years later, the fall of Hosni Mubarak paved the way for the dream to come true; the Brotherhood won both parliamentary and presidential elections and formed the government of Egypt. Barely a year after the election, president Mohamed Morsi was arrested and the government toppled by the people, aided and abetted by the army.

The Brotherhood refused to accept their defeat and launched a series of violent protests with their Salafi allies, followed by terror operations that have already caused the death of 350 members of the police and military forces. The interim regime first banned their activities and when that did not help, declared the Brotherhood a terrorist organization.

Interestingly, the West – and the Western press – put their own spin on what they saw as a military coup against the legitimate government of a movement they persist in calling “moderate” or “pragmatic,” insisting that the Brotherhood acted in nonviolent ways.

Gamal Abdel Nasser

History tells otherwise. The Brotherhood has been banned before; president Gamal Abdel Nasser tried to eliminate it after being the target of a failed assassination attempt. He threw 60,000 members – 60,000! – in detention camps and had their leaders executed, including Sayyid Qutb, considered the father of modern fundamentalism and the man who advocated imposing Shari’a by force. A few years earlier, in 1949, King Farouk had Hassan al-Banna, the founder of the movement, executed after the “secret organization” he had created assassinated the prime minister and a number of judges.

The Brotherhood created sister branches in Arab countries in the ’40s; starting in the ’60s it launched so-called cultural centers and mosques in Western Europe and the US to propagate its brand of Islam. The world organization of the Muslim Brotherhood has members in Great Britain, Switzerland, Turkey, Qatar and elsewhere, coordinating and aiding local branches, though these branches are largely autonomous.

More here at D-I, The article was first published in Jerusalem Post.