The Role of the Muslim Brotherhood With Hamas and Iran
By Douglas Farah
Former CIA analyst Reuel Marc Gerecht has an important piece in the Wall Street Journal on Iran's Hamas strategy. The Global Muslim Brotherhood Daily Report (free subscription required) fleshes out the picture even further.
The fundamental truth is that Hamas' road to Iran runs through the international Muslim Brotherhood, and has for two decades.
What is often missing in the discussion of the Muslim Brotherhood is that Hamas, according to its own founding charter, is an integral and armed part of the Ikwhan, not separate from it.
According to Article Two of the Hamas Charter:
“The Islamic Resistance Movement is one of the wings of the Muslim Brotherhood in Palestine. The Muslim Brotherhood Movement is a universal organization which constitutes the largest Islamic movement of modern times. It is characterized by its deep understanding, accurate comprehension and its complete embrace of all Islamic concepts of all aspects of life, culture, creed, politics, economics, education, society, justice and
judgment ,the spreading of Islam, education, art, information, science of the occult and conversion to Islam.”
The most open analysis of the relationship of the Brotherhood to Iran comes from the public interviews of Yousef Nada, the self-described foreign minister of international Muslim Brotherhood. Unfortunately, there is no English language link to the extraordinary series of statements he gave.
In a series of interviews he gave to al Jazeera in late 2001 and 2002, Nada described how the Ikhwan sent a delegation to Tehran immediately after Khommeini assumed power in 1979. He states that the MB delegation was the third plane to land in Tehran after the revolution-the first was Khommeni's, then security from the PLO, and then his.
As the Brother in charge of relations with Iran, he tells how his group worked with the Iranian revolutionary regime, and how he personally tried to mediate an end to the Iran-Iraq war. My full blog is here.
