ANALYSIS: MPAC Posts Chomsky Article Blaming Boston Bombings On US

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The Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC) national office has posted an article on their Twitter feed by leftwing ideologue Noam Chomsky titled “Boston and Beyond-When we experience terror at home, we must remember the United States’s use of terror abroad.” In 2008, we presented an analysis that identified four conceptual categories into which Brotherhood positions on terrorism can usually be parsed. The GMBDW noted that this Muslim Brotherhood strategy regarding terrorism should be seen for what it is, a remarkably consistent and internally coherent means of obscuring the true aims and goals of the group. The third category of that strategy is:

3. DEFENSE- Having staked out the positions that Islam is not violent and that Jihad is not connected with violence, the Brotherhood is left with the task of defending the violence carried out by Islamist groups. Since according to the Brotherhood these groups cannot, by definition, be motivated by Islamic ideology, there can be only one answer- they are fighting because of “legitimate grievances” and hence are “freedom fighters.” This defense of Islamist violence is mounted differently for Brotherhood-related groups such as Hamas as opposed to Al Qaeda. Because of the visible dispute over land, it is easy for the Brotherhood to suggest that the actions of Palestinian terror groups such as Hamas are based on such grievances whereas, in reality, the Brotherhood has managed to turn the conflict into a religious war. The most viable strategy for the Brotherhood in the West is to posit that the problem is “Occupation“, leaving it to the audience to figure out whether the reference is to 1967 or 1947. Given the sensitivity in the West towards terrorism at home, the Brotherhood has a far more difficult job explaining Al Qaeda terrorism which is does by suggesting that while nothing “justifies” such terrorism, Al Qaeda actions spring from justified anger at U.S. foreign policy. This strategy provides a natural interface” for the Brotherhood with the political far-left and, in Europe, the Brotherhood has been successful in forging such alliances.

At one point, Chomsky’s writes:

There are few in Boston who were not touched in some way by the marathon bombings on April 15 and the tense week that followed. Several friends of mine were at the finish line when the bombs went off. Others live close to where Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the second suspect, was captured. The young police officer Sean Collier was murdered right outside my office building. It’s rare for privileged Westerners to see, graphically, what many others experience daily—for example, in a remote village in Yemen, the same week as the marathon bombings. 

On April 23, Yemeni activist and journalist Farea Al-Muslimi, who had studied at an American high school, testified before a U.S. Senate committee that right after the marathon bombings, a drone strike in his home village in Yemen killed its target. The strike terrorized the villagers, turning them into enemies of the United States—something that years of jihadi propaganda had failed to accomplish.

This is yet another of the myriad attempts that MPAC and other US Muslim Brotherhood organizations have made to blame Islamist violence on US foreign policy. A post from last month discussed an article by an official of the Canadian Counsel on American Islamic Relations (CAIR-CAN) that neatly exemplified each of the four strategies conveniently presented in the same order as the GMBDW analysis. 

Just three days ago, an MPC official was asked in a TV interview what an organization like MPAC could do to counter the “violent, extremist rhetoric” encountered by young Muslims and he replied:

I think what we can do, number one, is to ensure that there’s a counter-narrative, that there’s a narrative of life, of positivity, that even if you have a grievance or you have a disagreement on policy, whether domestic or international, you can address those policy grievances through civic and political engagement and change that— maybe not overnight, but eventually you have the power to change policy.

GMBDW will leave to readers to decide if Chomsky’s position is an example of a “narrative of life, of positivity.”

The Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC) was established originally in 1986 as the Political Action Committee of the Islamic Center of Southern California whose leaders had backgrounds suggesting they were associated with the  Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood. MPAC has since developed into the political lobby arm of the U.S. Muslim Brotherhood and has opposed almost every counterterrorism action proposed or carried out by the U.S. government, often suggesting that the efforts were aimed at the U.S. Muslim community. MPAC has also acted to support a variety of Palestinian terrorist organizations as well as facilitating a wider range of terrorism by defending or justifying violence carried out by Islamic groups. MPAC and its leaders have made anti-Semitic statements that assert or imply an organized Jewish effort to defame and exclude U.S. Muslims from U.S. political life and has engaged in frequent and virulent demonization of Israel including describing Israeli actions at the Al-Aqsa Mosque as a “rape of the soul of the Islamic people”, asserting that the objective of Israeli actions in Gaza was “gross killings of Palestinian civilians, including women and children”, and accusing supporters of Israel of using tactics similar to Hitler’s. In December 2009, MPAC reported that “Israeli doctors had extracted human organs from dead Palestinians during the 1988 intifada and into the 1990s.” MPAC has developed particularly extensive relationships with agencies of the U.S. government including meetings with the Department of Justice and the FBI.

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