JNS
"The order’s ultimate aim is to eliminate the designated chapters’ capabilities and operations, deprive them of resources and end any threat such chapters pose to U.S. nationals and the national security of the United States,” the White House stated.
U.S. President Donald Trump signed an executive order on Monday directing the U.S. secretaries of state and the treasury to consider designating chapters of the Muslim Brotherhood as terrorist organizations.
According to a White House fact sheet, the president has ordered the two departments to submit a report within 30 days with recommendations to designate national chapters of the Muslim Brotherhood as Foreign Terrorist Organizations or Specially Designated Global Terrorists and to implement those recommendations within 45 days of the report’s publication.
“President Trump is confronting the Muslim Brotherhood’s transnational network, which fuels terrorism and destabilization campaigns against U.S. interests and allies in the Middle East,” the White House stated.
“The order’s ultimate aim is to eliminate the designated chapters’ capabilities and operations, deprive them of resources and end any threat such chapters pose to U.S. nationals and the national security of the United States,” it added.
The order specifically highlights the activities of three chapters of the Brotherhood as a threat to the United States.
“Its chapters in Lebanon, Jordan and Egypt engage in or facilitate and support violence and destabilization campaigns that harm their own regions, United States citizens and United States interests,” the order states.
It cites as an example the aftermath of the Oct. 7 attacks in Israel, during which “the military wing of the Lebanese chapter of the Muslim Brotherhood joined Hamas, Hezbollah and Palestinian factions to launch multiple rocket attacks against both civilian and military targets within Israel.”
The order states that “a senior leader of the Egyptian chapter of the Muslim Brotherhood, on Oct. 7, 2023, called for violent attacks against United States partners and interests, and Jordanian Muslim Brotherhood leaders have long provided material support to the militant wing of Hamas.”
“Such activities threaten the security of American civilians in the Levant and other parts of the Middle East, as well as the safety and stability of our regional partners,” it adds.
Under U.S. law, a foreign terrorist group must threaten “the security of United States nationals or the national security of the United States” in order to be formally designated as a Foreign Terrorist Organization.
Founded in Egypt in 1928 as a pan-Islamic revivalist movement, the Brotherhood is the forerunner of virtually all Sunni Islamist movements and spawned chapters and offshoots throughout the Islamic world, including Hamas.
The Egyptian Brotherhood and its chapters have varied over time in their willingness to embrace political violence, including terrorism, or engage in peaceful political processes.
Previous American administrations have declined to designate the Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist group, arguing that the group’s chapters were too diffuse or did not directly threaten U.S. security.
James Clapper, then the U.S. director of national intelligence, testified before the House in 2011 that the phrase “Muslim Brotherhood” is “an umbrella term for a variety of movements, in the case of Egypt, a very heterogeneous group, largely secular, which has eschewed violence and has decried al-Qaeda as a perversion of Islam.”
Clapper, who delivered that testimony shortly after Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak was overthrown, said that “they have pursued social ends” and “a betterment of the political order in Egypt.”
“In other countries, there are also chapters or franchises of the Muslim Brotherhood, but there is no overarching agenda, particularly in pursuit of violence, at least internationally,” he testified.
Days later, Clapper partially withdrew his comments about the Brotherhood, whose mottoes include “Islam is the solution” and “the Quran is our constitution.”
Attitudes towards the Brotherhood and its ideology sharply divide the Sunni Islamic world, with Saudi Arabia, Egypt and the United Arab Emirates among its most ardent opponents and Turkey and Qatar the Brotherhood’s strongest backers.
The Brotherhood is already a designated terrorist organization in the former three countries, while the Islamism of Turkey’s ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) is partly inspired by the Brotherhood.
Designating the Brotherhood has long been a goal of Trump’s senior director for counter terrorism at the National Security Council, Sebastian Gorka, who welcomed the announcement on Monday.
“History has been made,” Gorka wrote. “As we left the Oval, President Trump explicitly instructed us to inform the world of his tectonic act.”
