This is from this morning’s Washington Post report on the Muslim Brotherhood:
Analysts worry that [the Brotherhood’s] members, bitter and angry after the deaths of more than 1,000 Morsi supporters in the past week, could abandon the Brotherhood’s decades-long commitment to nonviolence, particularly as its leadership loses its grip on them. Some pro-Morsi demonstrators have been spotted with weapons, and attacks against security forces in the volatile Sinai Peninsula have intensified since Morsi was deposed July 3.
A non-violent Muslim Brotherhood. Who knew?
The Muslim Brotherhood is one of one of history’s blood-soaked organizations, not the embattled civic leaders portrayed in this morning's Post. The reporters on the piece cleverly make the alleged commitment to non-violence only decades long. If you call them on it, they’d say that—yeah, yeah—the Brotherhood have an unsavory past. But they're better now. The story in the Post is almost laugh-out-loud funny. Except that people depend on newspapers to form their opinions.
This isn’t a post as much about the Muslim Brotherhood as it is about a story that doesn't inform the readers. In fact, it misinforms readers. I don't know if it's bias or ignorance. But I do know this: if you depend only on reporting like this, you are certifiably a low-information voter. This story on the Muslim Brotherhood is particularly infuriating because it comes at a time when Americans are struggling to make up their minds about what is going on in the Middle East.
Of course, you don't have to go far to learn that the Brotherhood isn't a very nice bunch of folks.
Links to the Nazis began during the 1930s and were close during the Second World War, involving agitation against the British, espionage and sabotage, as well as support for terrorist activities orchestrated by Haj Amin el-Hussaini in British Mandate Palestine, as a wide range of declassified documents from the British, American and Nazi German governmental archives, as well as from personal accounts and memoires from that period, confirm.[6] Reflecting this connection the Muslim Brotherhood also disseminated Hitler's Mein Kampf and The Protocols of the Elders of Zion widely in Arab translations, helping to deepen and extend already existing hostile views about Jews and Western societies generally.
Sure, that was a long time ago. But the Brotherhood has never renounced this past. They did launch a “charm offensive,” according to the item in Wikipedia, in 2005, but apparenty it didn't last long. The item quotes Tarek Osman, author of Egypt on the Brink (Yale University), who had this from “an observer” at a post-charm offensive Muslim Brotherhood masked march through the streets of Cairo:
…after a number of conciliatory engagements and interactions with the West", the Brotherhood retreated into its comfort zone of inflammatory rhetoric intended for local consumption: all suicide bombers are `martyrs`; `Israel` regularly became the Jews`; even its theological discourse became more confrontational and oriented to social conservatism.
While many Egyptians appear to have been immune to the Brotherhood’s charm offensive, two well-paid Western journalists fell for it.
Articles such as the one in today’s Washington Post would be hilarious because of their naivete. But there are people who actually believe what they read in the posh papers. There are people who depend on mainstream media outlets in forming their opinions.
Newspapers owe readers more truth than this.