20 hours ago
Barbara Kay: Canada needs to have a serious talk about the Muslim Brotherhood
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Nevertheless, investigations carried out elsewhere are available to us. For example, in 2021 a European Parliament committee produced an in-depth analysis of Muslim Brotherhood activity in Europe. More recently, a classified French report the group's plan to take over Europe was leaked to France's Le Figaro; writing on the subject, the Free Press's Simone Rodan-Benzaquen observed, 'The Brotherhood operates as a political project. Its goal is not sudden revolution, but gradual transformation.… And it is not coming just for France. It is coming for all of the West.'
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The U.S. has known all about the Muslim Brotherhood's ideology since a damning 1991 memorandum by the group detailing its Islamist aims and methods surfaced in the next decade during the Hamas-centric Holy Land Foundation trial. Before the Trump era, a cone of silence, similar to Canada's, had been placed over it. (Barack Obama naively believed he could make the Brotherhood an ally.)
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In 2017, Congress held a hearing on whether the Muslim Brotherhood should be designated as a foreign terrorist organization, but a proposal to criminalize it failed to materialize due to divisions in Trump's first administration. Now, lawmakers are trying again: early this month, a new bill was introduced to Congress with promising bicameral support.
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Unfortunately, the chances of Canada's present government following suit — or even committing to a Europe-style investigation — are nugatory to nil.
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My certainty springs from the concerning fact that on June 6, in Ottawa, Prime Minister Mark Carney chose MAC as his audience for a multiculturalism-themed Eid al-Adha address. A George Washington University report by the school's Program on Extremism found that MAC proudly self-identifies as a Muslim Brotherhood legacy group. The Brotherhood also hosts foreign speakers whose discourse features antisemitism, misogyny and homophobia.
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At his address, Carney equated MAC values with Canadian values. Backlash ensued; more than one observer noted that MAC had been investigated by the Canada Revenue Agency which, in a 2021 audit document, alleged that some MAC directors and employees were involved in 'an apparent Hamas support network.'
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It's one thing for woke, virtue-signalling global marchers to be shrouded in ignorance. We can mock their credulity. The same appearance of ignorance is inexcusable in a nation's leader. Was Carney deliberately messaging acceptance of the Muslim Brotherhood's claim for social inclusion under the aegis of multiculturalism? If so, that too is inexcusable, but also makes no sense. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, which has, like the Brotherhood, spawned numerous terrorist offshoots — Hezbollah, the Houthis, the Palestinian Islamic Jihad — was (finally) designated by Canada as a terrorist entity in 2024. Yet there is precious little daylight between the triumphalist end games of both IRGC and the Muslim Brotherhood.
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A saving grace in the era of Soviet-sponsored infiltration of the West was our freedom to educate ourselves about communism's dangers without being accused of 'Marxophobia.' It's past time we had that same freedom to hold a 'national level discussion' on the Muslim Brotherhood.
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