Global Muslim Brotherhood Groups Try to Shift Narrative from Ukraine to Palestine (Part II)

Ele­ments of the Glob­al Mus­lim Broth­er­hood and relat­ed orga­ni­za­tions con­tin­ue to try and shift the nar­ra­tive on the Russ­ian inva­sion of Ukraine to con­flicts in the Mid­dle East, par­tic­u­lar­ly the Israeli-Pales­tin­ian con­flict. The Bridge Ini­tia­tive at George Wash­ing­ton Uni­ver­si­ty recent­ly post­ed an opin­ion piece by Peter Oborne, for­mer chief polit­i­cal com­men­ta­tor at The Dai­ly Tele­graph and known to be sup­port­ive of the Mus­lim Broth­er­hood. In the piece, writ­ten for the Broth­er­hood-linked pub­li­ca­tion the Mid­dle East Eye, Oborne raised the same charge of hypocrisy echoed in many such com­ments on the conflict:

March 3, 2022: On Mon­day, Saman­tha Pow­er, the admin­is­tra­tor of the US Agency for Inter­na­tion­al Devel­op­ment (USAID), descend­ed on the Pol­ish bor­der on a mis­sion to help Ukrain­ian refugees. Pow­er was US ambas­sador to the Unit­ed Nations when the Yemen war flared up in 2015. I don’t recall any mer­cy mis­sions from Pow­er to Yemen. Or to Gaza, or Syr­ia, or Myan­mar for that matter.

The Bridge Ini­tia­tive also cit­ed an arti­cle from Pol­i­tics Today, a mag­a­zine shar­ing the same con­tact infor­ma­tion with the SETA Foun­da­tion, a think tank close to Turk­ish Pres­i­dent Erdoğan’s AKP par­ty. The arti­cle makes the same charges of West­ern hypocrisy:

March 2, 2022: The human rights vio­la­tions com­mit­ted against mil­lions of peo­ple in the Mid­dle East, pushed by author­i­tar­i­an lead­ers, mas­querad­ing as con­cerned lib­er­al reformists in the West, fur­ther high­lights the racial and anti-Mus­lim sub­text of the lives of non- Euro­pean nations as unim­por­tant because they are judged infe­ri­or and there­fore “unciv­i­lized.” The lack of aware­ness of ear­li­er Euro­pean wars, from the Russ­ian takeover of Crimea to the Serb-com­mit­ted Bosn­ian Geno­cide, demon­strates the will­ful mis­rep­re­sen­ta­tion of recent Euro­pean his­to­ry by pur­pose­ly por­tray­ing the Mid­dle East and Mus­lim nations as syn­ony­mous with war.

The Bridge Ini­tia­tive is direct­ed by John Espos­i­to, a found­ing direc­tor of George­town Uni­ver­si­ty’s Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Cen­ter for Mus­lim-Chris­t­ian Under­stand­ing and a for­mer US State Depart­ment advi­sor. Espos­i­to has at least a dozen past and/or present affil­i­a­tions with Glob­al Mus­lim Broth­er­hood and Hamas orga­ni­za­tions and is known to have espoused views con­sis­tent with Broth­er­hood doc­trine. The Ini­tia­tive’s staff includes Farid Hafez, a promi­nent Aus­tri­an Islam­o­pho­bia researcher with Mus­lim Broth­er­hood ties.

The Europal Forum is a Lon­don-based lob­by­ing and PR orga­ni­za­tion whose lead­ers are close­ly tied to the Glob­al Mus­lim Broth­er­hood and Hamas sup­port infra­struc­ture. The Forum quot­ed from an Al-Jazeera arti­cle mak­ing the same charge of hypocrisy:

March 9, 2022: We fight our oppres­sors, and we get brand­ed ter­ror­ists. Ukraini­ans do the same, and they get applaud­ed for their courage.

The Pales­tin­ian Return Cen­tre is a Pales­tine advo­ca­cy group tied to Hamas and the Glob­al Mus­lim Broth­er­hood. The PRC sim­i­lar­ly post­ed the following:

March 6, 2022: Irish law­mak­er Richard Boyd Bar­ret called out the inter­na­tion­al com­mu­ni­ty for fail­ing to con­demn Israeli apartheid after 70 years of sys­tem­at­ic oppres­sion and aggres­sion against the Pales­tin­ian peo­ple. “Pales­tini­ans are treat­ed as an infe­ri­or race. Denied access to food and water. And yet no sanc­tions on Israel for its apartheid regime. Utter hypocrisy,” said Bar­ret as he referred to the inter­na­tion­al com­mu­ni­ty’s con­dem­na­tion of the Russ­ian mil­i­tary oper­a­tion in Ukraine.

The Glob­al Influ­ence Oper­a­tions Report (GIOR) report­ed last week on the first round of Glob­al Mus­lim Broth­er­hood reac­tions to the Ukraine conflict.