In the West, we have come to expect superficial analyses of political Islam in general and the Muslim Brotherhood in particular.
How fortunate we are, then, to have Tariq Ramadan, the grandson of the movement's founder, to set us straight in the pages of the NYT.
And we're even more fortunate to have Barry Rubin, to point out what a load of nonsense Ramadan's cosy little whitewash really is. For instance:
“The Muslim Brothers began in the 1930s as a legalist, anti-colonialist and nonviolent movement that claimed legitimacy for armed resistance in Palestine against Zionist expansionism during the period before World War II. The writings from between 1930 and 1945 of Hassan al-Banna, founder of the Brotherhood, show that he opposed colonialism and strongly criticized the fascist governments in Germany and Italy. He rejected use of violence in Egypt, even though he considered it legitimate in Palestine, in resistance to the Zionist Stern and Irgun terror gangs. He believed that the British parliamentary model represented the kind closest to Islamic principles.”
This is a lie so shameless that Ramadan knew he was fabricating just to fool the Western audience. The Brotherhood was founded by his grandfather in 1928. It was not only anti-colonialist but, as noted above, intent on gaining power for itself and suppressing the other anti-colonialist movements, be they liberal, leftist, or nationalist. The idea that his grandfather was a believer in the British parliamentary system is such a huge fabrication that it sounds like a joke.
But “nonviolent”! What about the famous Muslim Brotherhood terrorist unit which assassinated political rivals? His own grandfather was killed in revenge after his men murdered the Egyptian prime minister! To say, “He was assassinated in 1949 by the Egyptian government on the orders of the British occupier,” is of course a typical fabrication, to play on the theme that only imperialists and their stooges opposed the Brotherhood.
What he writes about Zionism is also a lie. The Brotherhood’s attitude toward Jews is full of basic anti-Semitism expressed in virtually every document of the organization. And, of course, the Brotherhood was fighting against any Jewish state long before either the Sternists or Irgun did anything. When his father went off to fight the Jews, he was almost certainly carrying a German rifle supplied to the Muslim Brotherhood by Hitler in 1942.
Among the most profound lies is to claim that the Brotherhood was anti-fascist. In a forthcoming book, Germany, the Nazis, and the Making of the Modern Middle East, Wolfgang Schwanitz and I will show how the Brotherhood was in fact subsidized by the Nazi government in the 1930s through Amin al-Husaini, the mufti, and became a wartime ally of Germany. In 1942, the Brotherhood received German weapons to stage an uprising once the German army entered into Egypt. It also was incorporated in plans to massacre all of the Jews of the Middle East. Ramadan’s grandfather was a Nazi collaborator.
Mick Hartley 
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