The De-Listing of Yousef Nada
By Douglas Farah
I wrote a couple of days ago, before the other (or what appears to be another in many drops concerning the Muslim Brotherhood) shoe dropped: Yousef Nada, the godfather of the international Muslim Brotherhood was taken off the United Nations Security Council sanctions list
Mark Hosenball at Newsweek, being one of the few reporters left in the business who has any idea who Nada is and why he is important,wrote a good summary of the issue, including the fact that the U.S. had to sign off on the action at some level.
Despite the sign-off at the UN, Nada remains a designated individual on the U.S. sanctions list. Who knows for how long?
Nada was a seminal figure in the international MB movement, and his Bank al Taqwa, in the Bahamas, was one of the financial centers for Hamas (and, according to U.S. public statements at the time, al Qaeda), before being shut down.
He has funneled millions of dollars to Islamist causes around the world in the course of his long career. In addition, he has appeared in numerous important roles trying to bridge the Sunni-Shiite divide in the Muslim world, befriending Khomeini in Iran, Saddam in Iraq (and unsuccessfully working to broker a peace deal in the Iran-Iraq war), and has identified himself as the Muslim Brotherhood's foreign minister.
There is much more, but one will have to read Hosenball, Isikoff and my older stuff about that. One measure of how important he is in the MB world, even though few in the U.S. had ever heard of him: shortly after 9/11 al-Jazeera TV did a 10-hour interview session with him (two hours a night for five nights).
Chalk up another victory in the MB fight to return as the voice of reason in the Islamist world.
