Moderate Compared to Whom?

Michael Totten, a blogger who actually does real investigative journalism, interviewed one of the mouthpieces of the Muslim Brotherhood.

“Listen, Mr. Michael,” he said. “Iran is not Egypt. Egypt is not Afghanistan. Afghanistan is not Sudan. Sudan is not Algeria. There are different models of Islamic life. We have a very long civilization here, it is ancient. We have common values here between Muslims and Christians and even Jews.”

Was he acknowledging in his own way that the Islamists in Iran and Afghanistan are whacked? Perhaps. On the Muslim Brotherhood’s Web site (www.islamonline.org) they advertise themselves as moderate Islamists. I wouldn’t say they are moderate in the way that, say, the Iraqi Kurds are moderate. Still, there are plenty of more extreme Islamist groups than these guys. The Brothers say they want to ban music videos, not massacre Shias or stone rape victims to death.

While there is an ideological overlap between them and Al Qaeda, the Brothers don’t have guns, they don’t hijack planes, and they don’t blow up hotels. They are moderate, I suppose, depending on who they’re compared with. Next to Zarqawi’s Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, they’re terrific. Compared with the student revolutionaries in Iran, the Brothers are nuts.

Lest we forget, the Muslim Brotherhood was responsible for assassinating Anwar Sadat, and more than 25,000 people were killed by Syria's Hafez Assad in 1982 in a crackdown on Muslim Brotherhood activities at Hama.

Where you rank this group depends on where you sit. And from where I sit, the Muslim Brotherhood is still a terrorist group whose views are not only extreme, but antithetical to Western democracy.