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.