Initially, Saudi Arabia supplied the Muslim Brotherhood (MB) with money only. After 1954, when Nasser cracked down on the MB, Saudi Arabia provided an important refuge for the MB, and many of its members flocked to the kingdom. This migration occurred just as the US was giving up on Nasser and turning to Saudi Arabia. The Brothers settled in Jeddah, where they went into business, and in Riyadh, Mecca and Medina where they radicalized the Wahhabi movement. For the next 50 years, Saudi Arabia would be the Brother’s ultimate redoubt, providing support, along with virtually unlimited financing.
Washington began to look at the conservative monarchy of King Ibn Saud as a counter within the Arab world to the growing influence of Nasser and his nationalist views, especially when it came to oil. Nasser’s famous quip was,” Arab oil is for the Arabs”. The CIA persuaded the Saudis to rebuild the banned Muslim Brotherhood, thereby creating a fusion with Saudi fundamentalist Islam and vast Saudi oil riches to wield a weapon across the entire Muslim world against feared soviet incursions, and a Nasser-type nationalistic movement. The MB were willing to oblige, and there began an unholy alliance of the CIA with the Muslim Brotherhood.
By 1954, Saudi Arabia had become the centre of worldwide MB activity. By 1961, the MB were able to persuade the Saudi king to create the Islamic University of Medina, where dozens of Islamic scholars that were secretly MB, established themselves. The university became the petri dish for training the next generation of Islamic Jihadists and Salafists (those who profess a return to pure Islam). Some 85% of the students at the Medina University came from outside the kingdom. That internationalization enabled the MB to spread the cadre of the MB throughout the entire Islamic world.
In 1962, the MB convinced the Saudi royal family to finance and support the Muslim World League (MWL). The MWL was headquartered in Mecca, with the Saudi government as the official sponsor. The alliance of the MB with Saudi Arabia was to remain from the early 1950s until around 2010, when the Saudi monarchy, amid the upheavals of the Arab Spring, began to increasingly fear the Brotherhood, at some point, would turn against the monarchy that fed them for so long.
Said Ramadan finally ended p in exile in Geneva, Switzerland, under protection of the Swiss government. From his Islamic Centre in Geneva, Ramadan maintained his influence around the world with his fellow Brothers in the aftermath of the murder of his father-in-law, Al-Banna.
Sadat & the Brotherhood
After the death of Nasser, in September 1970, Anwar Sadat became the next leader of Egypt. Since the 1940s Sadat had been a member of the MB. In the 1970s, guided by Kamal Adham, Saudi Arabia’s head of intelligence, Sadat brought the Muslim Brotherhood back to Egypt. Once freed, the MB knew no bounds. Back in their ancestral home, the MB worked feverishly to spread their influence worldwide. The consequences were profound and deadly, for Sadat.
When Sadat made a peace treaty with Israel, the Camp David Accords, and flew to Jerusalem, the MB began to turn against him. By the time Sadat was assassinated in 1981, by members of a militant MB offshoot, a violent Islamic underground was flourishing. Other Egyptian officials were assassinated, tourists massacred, Christians attacked, and secular Egyptian officials murdered or silenced.
The Rise of Economic Islam
In the 1970s, political Islam was bolstered by the explosion of a parallel forced economic Islam. Part of the vast wealth pouring into the Arab oil-exporting countries found its way into a network of banks and investment companies controlled by the Islamic right and the Muslim Brotherhood. In many countries, these Islamic banks did more than serve as money-changers. Sometimes openly or secretly, they supported sympathetic politicians and army officers and funded activists and political parties, Islamic run media companies, and businesses controlled by the MB. From 1974 onward, the Islamic banking system served as the financial backbone for the Islamic right.
And throughout it all, the Islamic banking system – which went from zero to global powerhouse in the 2 decades after 1974 – depended heavily on the advice and technological assistance from a host of financial institutions (all linked to the two families), including Citibank and HSBC. Thanks to economic Islam, there was now a direct line from the ultra-wealthy Saudi, Kuwaiti, and Qatari sheiks, princes, and emirs to Muslim Brotherhood businessmen and bankers to street-level thugs of the Islamic right – all of it fuelled by petrodollars. It was a force that transformed the Middle East.
There are several other countries where the Muslim Brotherhood is active, and destructive, depending on if that particular government is pro-, or anti-west – such countries as Algeria between 1992-6, Libya, Sudan, Pakistan, Syria, and Palestine. For our report here, we shall discuss only 2; Palestine and Syria.
Israel & Hamas
America’s position in the Middle East never seemed more secure than during the late 1970s. Only a handful of so-called rejectionist states – Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and the PLO – stood outside America’s nascent empire. And the US was on the offensive. Along with its allies, (Israel, Egypt, Jordan and the Gulf monarchies), America sought to weaken and isolate the remaining rejectionists, minimizing their role in the region, and even seeking regime change, using a combination of threats, persuasion, and bribes. Two members of the anti-US bloc, Syria and the PLO, found themselves facing simultaneous civil wars against forces led by the Muslim Brotherhood and the Islamic groups. And the US backed its allies in promoting Islamic unrest against Damascus and the PLO’s Yasser Arafat.
Former US ambassador to Saudi Arabia said,” Israel started Hamas. It was a project of the Shin Bet, which aimed to use Hamas to hem in the PLO. In Arabic, Hamas – an acronym for the Islamic Resistance Movement – means “zeal”. Though it was founded in 1987, the founders of Hamas were al l members of the Muslim Brotherhood, especially in the Gaza Strip. In the wake of the 1967 war, and Israel’s occupation of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, Islamic groups flourished with support from both Israel and Jordan.
Fatah, which began guerrilla attacks against Israel in 1965, would embody Palestinian nationalism and ally itself with Nasser’s vision of Arab nationalism. In the West Bank, the Brotherhood was tolerated by the Jordanian authorities, while in Gaza it was repressed by Nasser’s Egypt.
It was during this period that Ahmed Yassin first emerged as an Islamic firebrand. In 1965, Yassin was arrested by Egyptian intelligence. After 1967, with Israel in control of the West Bank and Gaza, things changed. Yassin was freed.
Soon Israel would begin to see Yassin, and the MB, as valuable allies against the PLO. In 1967 the MB began to create its infrastructure, under the tolerant eye of the now all-powerful Israeli authorities. Charity organizations flourished.
In 1970, the PLO was expelled from Jordan after being defeated in the civil war that erupted in September. The MB in Jordan supported the king against the PLO. In 1973, under the watchful eye of the Shin Bet, Yassin founded the Islamic Centre, and Yassin began to establish effective control over hundreds of mosques.
Israel’s formal support for Yassin’s Islamic group was formally licensed in 1978, when the Likud party of Menachem Begin won the national elections. In the West Bank and Gaza, Begin tried to undermine the PLO’s influence by fostering the Islamic move.
Palestinians were among the Arab world’s most educated, modern and Westernized populations; but above all, they were nationalists. On the other hand, the very nature of the Palestinian Islamic groups was to oppose nationalism, and to oppose the creation of the Palestinian state. Instead, these groups focused on the necessity of first Islamizing Palestine and the Arab world. But among the Palestinians the appeal of Islam grew as Israel’s relentless oppression of the PLO caused people to look for alternatives.
Right-wing elements in the Mossad feared that the popularity of Egypt’s president Anwar Sadat might force Israel to give up territories that it wanted to hold onto, so they backed Islamic groups “under false flags,” that is, by disguising the fact that aid was coming from Israel. The Mossad deliberately fostered Islamic among Palestinians. Supporting the radical elements of Muslim fundamentalism sat well with Mossad’s general plan for the region. An Arab world run by Muslim fundamentalists would not be party to any negotiations with Israel. The reasoning went like this: Israel does not like to enter into any peace negotiations with the Palestinians, since this would mean giving back the land stolen from the Palestinians. Thus, whenever any Palestinian politician was about to strike peace negotiations with Israel, the Mossad assassinated them, using other Palestinian groups such as Abu Nidal, or derailing a truce by the Suicide bombers of Hamas.
In 1983, Yassin was arrested by Israeli authorities for storing weapons in his house, and sentenced to 13 years. A year later he was released, compounding PLO suspicions that he was in Israel’s pay. Arafat told an Italian newspaper: “Hamas is a creation of Israel, which, at the time of Prime Minister Shamir, gave them money and more than 700 institutions, among them schools, universities and mosques.” Even after the Palestinian uprising began in 1987, the PLO accused Hamas and Yassin of acting with the direct support of –“reactionary Arab regimes in collusion with the Israeli occupation.”
Even Saudi Arabia was suspicious of Hamas, as they didn’t want money going to an Israeli front organization. Eventually, as Hamas seemed to grow more independent of Israel, and as the intifada gathered momentum, Saudi Arabia began to look the other way. The Intifada, which included both violent and non-violent tactics, had an important effect. It once again brought the Palestinian-Israeli conflict to world attention, and it propelled moderate Israelis, such as Rabin, Peres and Barak, towards negotiations with the PLO. This eventually resulted in the OSLO Peace Treaty.
Despite the support of Hamas for the intifada, the PLO and Hamas were engaged in a constant-tug-of-war. Whenever the PLO and the Israeli Labor Party moved toward an accord, Hamas would unleash a violent wave of attacks to disrupt the talks. Undermining the peace process has always been the real target of Hamas. Every time Israeli and PLO negotiators appeared ready to take a major step toward achieving peace, an act of Hamas terrorism has scuttled the peace process and pushed the two sides apart.
The Israeli right, led by the Likud Party’s Ariel Sharon and Benjamin Nethanyahu, were opposed to any peace talks with the PLO. Initially, Hamas found itself outflanked by Oslo as the Israeli Labor government and the PLO combined to undermine Hamas. Many arrests and executions of senior Hamas leaders followed. Then came the Hebron Mosque massacre in 1994 by a Jewish extremist. This massacre invigorated Hamas, which called for an armed uprising in response. A wave of suicide bombings followed. Then in November 1995, another Likud-inspired Jewish terrorist murdered Prime Minister Rabin.
Rabin’s death left a vacuum in Israeli politics, and the continuing suicide attacks by Hamas panicked the Israeli people, which led to the election of Nathanyahu, or Bibi as he is called, in June 1996. In 1997, he ordered the hit on a Hamas leader in Jordan, Khalid Meshal, This hit failed and the Mossad agents jailed. Israel and Jordan reached a deal, that freed Yassin in return for the jailed Mossad agents. Suddenly, Yassin was back in Gaza City, thundering against Oslo and building opposition to the PLO.
The pattern repeated itself in 2000. Netanyahu fell in 1999 and was replaced by Barak, who reengaged the PLO in negotiations, and with Clinton’s help, came close to reaching a comprehensive deal. Once again, the Israeli right provoked the Islamic Right. In September 2000, Sharon made a heavy-handed and provocative visit to the Masjid Al Aqsa, an action calculated to provoke the Muslim Palestinians. The result was the second intifada (2000-2004). Suicide attacks increased in Israel and stampede frightened Israelis into Sharon’s camp. From 1996 on, the popularity of Hamas began to grow.
In 2001, when the PLO secured a Hamas pledge to halt its attacks, Sharon ordered the assassination of a top Hamas official. Sharon shattered, in one blow, the gentleman’s agreement between Hamas and the PLO.
In August 2002, only 90 minutes before Yassin was to announce a ceasefire, Israel bombed a Hamas headquarters in Gaza, killing 17 people. Yassin and several other top officials were assassinated by Israel in 2004.
The Assassination of Yasser Arafat
Natural gas was discovered offshore Gaza in 1990. Several huge gas finds created new problems for the people of Gaza. These gas fields belonged to Gaza, and Israel desperately wanted control of this. Being in control of its own energy resources would enable Israel to expand its size through military means. Development of these fields was put on hold. The dilemma for Israel was: How to get control of these gas fields, and not sharing it with the PLO? Here’s the answer:
Amongst the many things Arafat did in Gaza was to pay a monthly stipend to the 27 clan chieftains of Gaza, who, in turn, used these funds for the betterment of his peoples. If these stipends were stopped by the death of Arafat, the result would be a social upheaval in Gaza. The PLO would lose in the next elections in Gaza. That meant a political victory for Hamas. And since Hamas is listed as a terrorist organization, it means it could be targeted and its leaders killed. The secondary aim was to destroy Gaza’s entire infrastructure, so that living conditions became unbearable, and thus forcing its peoples to leave Gaza, for other parts of the region, or world.
In this way, Israel would get full control of these gas fields, without any resistance from Gazans.
Two years after Arafat’s murder, and an ensuing bitter civil war between Hamas and the PLO in the Gaza, Hamas won the 2006 elections. Hamas now governed Gaza. Israel and the West labelled Gaza as a territory governed by a terrorist group. It left the way open for Israel to begin destroying Gaza, and killing its people. Israel attacked Gaza in 2008, in 2010, in 2012, and finally, in 2014.
The story of Hamas – from an Israeli experimental pet project to the PLO’s chief nemesis to the main source of anti-Israeli violence in Gaza and the West Bank – ran the gamut of Islamic political expansion from the 1960s to the 1990s and beyond. From an Israeli standpoint, the growth and transformation of Hamas over these decades was an earthquake, and it signalled to many Israelis that political Islam was not a force to be trifled with.
Syria & the Muslim Brotherhood
In the 1970s, Israel and Jordan were technically at war, the intelligence agencies had a long and complex covert relationship, and both had a common enemy: Syria. The Syrian ruler, Hafez Assad was vulnerable on Islamic grounds. He was a secular leader, and an Alawite, a Shia.
The Syrian MB was also an early offshoot of Banna’s movement. In the 1950s, a significant number of MB members took refuge in Syria from Nasser’s crackdown. When the Baath took power in Syria, the MB found it inhospitable. In 1967, during and after Syria’s defeat in the 6 – Day War with Israel, the MB’s faction declared a Jihad against the Syrian government. Their animosities intensified after 1971, when Assad proclaimed a secular constitution. In 1975, when Lebanon’s civil war began, drawing in Israel and Syria, the MB launched an all-out assault against the Syrian government.
At this point, Israel was busy negotiating a peace deal with Egypt, which culminated in the Camp David Accords. Syria had refused to sign a lop-sided deal with Israel, so she was targeted for destruction. The MB played a key part in destabilizing Syria at this point on. The MB always worked for, and on behalf of Western interests.
Beginning in 1976, the MB in Syria carried out assassinations, bomb attacks and other violent crimes in many cities. Next door, in Lebanon, Syria was engaged in a brutal proxy war with Israel in the midst of Lebanon’s civil war, and the Brothers proved to be a formidable anti-Assad force.
In June 1979, MB terrorists attacked a Syrian military school in Aleppo, killing 83 cadets by locking them into a building and shooting and bombing them. The following year, the MB attempted to assassinate Assad, and the government retaliated in an unrestrained counterattack. Fighting intensified in 1981, and in November, a massive car bomb in Damascus killed 200 people. Assad accused the MB of acting as “agents of Israel”. The MB in Syria was getting help from the Mossad, the CIA, and Jordan.
There was a total media blackout on the terror attacks in Syria, so the world at large was not aware of such problems. The scale of the attacks against the Syrian government intensified. The MB assassinated hundreds of Alawite members of Assad’s ruling party, along with their relatives, Assad’s personal doctor, and a number of Russian advisers.
The danger for Assad was critical. He spent five years trying to deal with the MB, to accommodate them or co-opt them. In the end, he had virtually lost control of the northern third of the country. He was going down at the time. He was really in trouble.
In 1985, Jordan admitted its role in support of the MB and apologized to Syria, and claiming, “The MB were outlaws committing crimes and sowing seeds of dissension among people,” and warned “against this rotten group”.
The final showdown took place in Hama, a Syrian city of 200,000, which had always been a stronghold of Sunni fundamentalism. It began with a rumour that Assad had been overthrown. Excited by the news, the MB went on a murder spree in the city, slaughtering hundreds of soldiers and Syrian officials, and killed all the Baathist officials in the city.
For Assad, it was an intolerable provocation. He assembled an army of Special Forces numbering 12,000, under the command of his brother, Rifaat Assad, a ruthless enforcer. This army entered Hama, and ruthlessly suppressed the insurrection and leaving many dead and the city in ruins. The death toll was as low as 5,000 to as high as 20,000. Over time, the legend of Hama grew. That was the end of the Islamic movement in Syria.
In 2011, the very same forces, with the addition of many new groups, once again, took up arms against the Syrian government, and Assad, but this time Assad the son, Basher al-Assad.
Egypt’s official Ikhwan sits atop a plethora of terrorist underground groups that are not officially tied to it- except for carrying out its orders. One of them is the Al Gamaa al-Islamiya, which began at Banna’s Al Azhar university. Sudan in the 1970s-1990s was represented by Sheik Turabi. In Libya, the Ikhwan operates through the Senussi Brotherhood, whose influence has grown since the fall of Qaddhafi. The Senussis are extremely secretive, and inquiring journalists are told firmly that it is no longer in existence, and that no one “has ever heard of it”. The society is based at a spiritual centre called Kufra in the middle of Libya’s eastern desert, which for years has served as a military base. Many of the leading families in Cyrenaica (the eastern part of Libya) are members of the Brotherhood. Today, its military base is centered in Misrata, from where the destabilization of Egypt is directed.
Conclusion
The existence of the Muslim Brotherhood in the Middle East is a danger to every nation in the Middle East – and to world peace. What is at stake with the rise again of the MB to a position of prominence is the existence of the nation-state in the Muslim world. The MB does not recognize the existence of separate states; it wants to abolish states and create a single Muslim empire again, but this time under control of the West! The target of the MB is not Israel, Britain, or America – but the governments of the Muslim world’s nations.
The British Intelligence Arab Bureau was moved from Cairo and relocated in London, and Geneva. Nothing was lost in the distance between the command centre and its deployed troops. The Ikhwan’s calls for jihad are not formulated in the clandestine cells of Middle East cities, but in the professorial offices of Western universities. From the professors, policy is run through various think tanks and NGO’s, whose financial support comes from the networks of power of both London and New York, such as banks, oil companies, and various international business groups. I
One of the chief coordinating organizations is the Islam and the West, founded in 1977, and headquartered in Geneva. Its main funder is the International Federation of Institutions of Advanced Studies. Among its past members are Aurelio Pecci and Arco’s president Robert Anderson (both tied to the Rockefeller Network), while one of the British-Rothschild key figures was Lord Caradon (Hugh Foot).
Even with its British and American sponsors and funders, the MB would not be the political danger it is, if it were simply a collection of small, poorly organized terror groups in the Mideast. The MB poses a threat on a far higher level. In every Arab government, Turkey, and many African and Asian nations, the MB enjoys the protection of ministers, intelligence and security officials, military officers, and others at the highest level of government.
Investigators who seek to track down leaders of the MB find their investigations mysteriously halted on orders “from the top”. Security agents pursuing MB terrorists are suddenly assassinated. Politicians hesitate before opening an inquiry into the MB because of direct knowledge or rumour that some Mr. Big does not want his toes stepped on.
A VERY IMPORTANT point to note is that 99% of the MB members are sincere, devout Muslims, who do not have the slightest idea of the hidden agenda of the 1% – who control the policies and agendas of the MB. And this is not the root of the problem yet. The real MB is not the Sheik with his followers; the real MB is those whose hands are never dirtied with the business of killing and destroying.
They are the secretive bankers and financiers who stand behind the curtain, the members of the old Arab and Turkish families whose genealogy places them in the oligarchical elite, with smooth business and intelligence associations to the European black nobility and to the British oligarchy, especially the Rothschild family. Not to be excluded from this list, one must add the Rockefeller family, and its American-based Network of Power.
And the Muslim Brotherhood is money. Together, the MB controls about $50 billion in assets, and controls billions more in day-to-day business operations in everything from oil trading and banking to drug-running, illegal arms dealings, and gold and diamond smuggling. By allying with the MB, the Anglo-Americans are not merely buying into a terrorist-for-hire racket; they are partners in a powerful, international financial empire that extends from numbered Swiss bank accounts to offshore financial havens in Dubai, Hong Kong, London and Hong Kong.
Is a major international corporation seeking partners to invest a few billion in an oil or mining venture? Try the MB. Does an Anglo-American bloc of banking houses want to start a run on a targeted nation’s currency? Try the MB.
Once again, I will re-iterate that the 99% of the members of the MB, and its various offshoots, are SINCERE, DEVOUT MUSLIMS! It’s the 1% at the top who are using political Islam to further their geopolitical agendas.
What we have discussed here is barely 5% of the information about this group and its Western sponsors and partners.
The marriage between the CIA and Jihadist Islam was to form a main pillar of US secret intelligence and secret foreign policy for more than seven decades. Until the shocking events of September 11, 2001 and revelations that Osama bin Laden had been trained in Afghanistan during the 1980s by the CIA, few had the slightest idea of the sinister alliance. The rise of Al Qaeda will now be investigated in the next part of this 6-part series.
In 1979, the CIA turned more actively to the Islamic Jihadists of the Muslim Brotherhood when the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan. Their project was called Operation Cyclone, and one of their young recruits was a Saudi who had been educated in Saudi Arabia by the Brotherhood. His name was Osama bin Laden.
