When the GMBDW posted recently on the what we see as the madness engulfing both the Democratic and Republican parties in the US with respect to the Muslim Brotherhood, we believed that we were taking a risk of alienating and perhaps even losing a portion or even a substantial portion of our readership. As we wrote in our post analyzing reader complaints on these postings:
….we would be greatly saddened if almost 10 years and thousands of mostly unique posts on the Global Muslim Brotherhood were simply dismissed because of this disagreement.
We are happy to report that since our first posting on these subjects, we have actually enjoyed a 3:1 net gain in Twitter followers and a 4:1 net gain in email subscribers. In addition to communications received protesting our post on the Republican Party, we received an equal number praising the recent posts and complementing us for being fair and objective. So, kudos to our readership for their ability to tolerate varying points of view and not falling into the trap of confining their reading to the various “echo chambers” so prevalent in today’s political landscape.
As a brief note on balance and objectivity, the GMDW has never subscribed to the notion that fairness requires that the scales be set to some kind of artificial 50/50 ratio of positive and negative commentary, a practice that we find characterizes much of media reporting today. What we do believe is that fairness means that all relevant data is taken into consideration and reported honestly. It may strike some such readers that the GMBDW appears unremittingly negative on the subject of the Global Muslim Brotherhood but that is because we consider ourselves to an intelligence publication as opposed to an academic journal or conventional media outlet. Intelligence in this sense is never collected on phenomenon that are not prejudged to be hostile to the interest of the client. We consider our client in this case to be the liberal democracies of the West to which the Global Muslim Brotherhood poses varying forms of threat. Readers are no doubt aware that the Muslim Brotherhood is often described as “moderate Islamists” a term which at best can be considered to be an oxymoron. As we posted in May 2103 when reviewing Syrian-born scholar Bassam Tibi’s book titled “Islamism and Islam”, his view on Islamism was described as follows:
“Despite the intense media focus on Muslims and their religion since the tragedy of 9/11, few Western scholars or policymakers today have a clear idea of the distinctions between Islam and the politically based fundamentalist movement known as Islamism. In this important and illuminating book, Bassam Tibi, a senior scholar of Islamic politics, provides a corrective to this dangerous gap in our understanding. He explores the true nature of contemporary Islamism and the essential ways in which it differs from the religious faith of Islam.
Drawing on research in twenty Islamic countries over three decades, Tibi describes Islamism as a political ideology based on a reinvented version of Islamic law. In separate chapters devoted to the major features of Islamism, he discusses the Islamist vision of state order, the centrality of antisemitism in Islamist ideology, Islamism’s incompatibility with democracy, the reinvention of jihadism as terrorism, the invented tradition of shari’a law as constitutional order, and the Islamists’ confusion of the concepts of authenticity and cultural purity. Tibi’s concluding chapter applies elements of Hannah Arendt’s theory to identify Islamism as a totalitarian ideology.”
Buy it here.
Given Tibi’s characterization, found by the GMBDW to be the most accurate ever attempted, Islamism by its very nature can never be correctly described as “moderate” and in all its forms stands directly in opposition to Western liberal democracy.
Once again, we are heartened by the overall response to our recent postings and we will continue to strive to present, as ever, fair and balanced reporting on the Global Muslim Brotherhood.