Is there anything to fear from the Muslim Brotherhood?

The BBC would try to persuade us that we have nothing to fear from the Muslim Brotherhood, Andrew McCarthy at the National Review thinks differently:

'One might wonder how an organization can be thought to have renounced violence when it has inspired m4ore jihadists than any other, and when its Palestinian branch, the Islamic Resistance Movement, is probably more familiar to you by the name Hamas — a terrorist organization committed by charter to the violent destruction of Israel. Indeed, in recent years, the Brotherhood (a.k.a., the Ikhwan) has enthusiastically praised jihad and even applauded — albeit in more muted tones — Osama bin Laden.

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The Brotherhood did not suddenly become violent (or “more violent”) during World War II. It was violent from its origins two decades earlier. This fact — along with Egyptian Islamic society’s deep antipathy toward the West and its attraction to the Nazis’ virulent anti-Semitism — is what gradually beat European powers, especially Britain, into withdrawal.

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Islamism is not a right-wing movement. The Brotherhood’s is a revolutionary program, the political and economic components of which are essentially socialist. It is no accident that Islamists in America are among the staunchest supporters of Obamacare and other redistributionist elements of the Obama agenda. In his Social Justice in Islam, Qutb concludes that Marx’s system is far superior to capitalism, which Islamists deplore. Communism, he argues, faltered principally in its rigid economic determinism, thus missing the spiritual components of Allah’s totalitarian plan

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In addition, the Brotherhood even continues to lionize Osama bin Laden. In 2008, for example, “Supreme Guide” Muhammad Mahdi Akef lauded al-Qaeda’s emir, saying that bin Laden is not a terrorist at all but a “mujahid,” a term of honor for a jihad warrior. The Supreme Guide had “no doubt” about bin Laden’s “sincerity in resisting the occupation,” a point on which he proclaimed bin Laden “close to Allah on high.” Yes, Akef said, the Brotherhood opposed the killing of “civilians” — and note that, in Brotherhood ideology, one who assists “occupiers” or is deemed to oppose Islam is not a civilian. But Akef affirmed the Brotherhood’s support for al-Qaeda’s “activities against the occupiers.”

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no more than we should be surprised when the Brotherhood’s sharia compass, Sheikh Yusuf Qaradawi, approves suicide bombings or unleashes rioting over mere cartoons; no more than when the Ikhwan’s Hamas faction reaffirms its foundational pledge to destroy Israel. Still, just in case it is not obvious enough that the “Brotherhood renounces violence” canard is just that, a canard, consider Akef’s explicit call for jihad in Egypt just two years ago, saying that the time “requires the raising of the young people on the basis of the principles of jihad so as to create mujahideen [there’s that word again] who love to die as much as others love to live, and who can perform their duty towards their God, themselves, and their homeland.” That leitmotif — We love death more than you love life — has been a staple of every jihadist from bin Laden through Maj. Nidal Hasan, the Fort Hood killer.

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To this day, the Brotherhood’s motto remains, “Allah is our objective, the Prophet is our leader, the Koran is our law, Jihad is our way, and dying in the way of Allah is our highest hope. Allahu akbar!” Still, our see-no-Islamic-evil foreign-policy establishment blathers on about the Brotherhood’s purported renunciation of violence — and never you mind that, with or without violence, its commitment is, as Qaradawi puts it, to “conquer America” and “conquer Europe.”

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The Obama administration has courted Egyptian Islamists from the start. It invited the Muslim Brotherhood to the president’s 2009 Cairo speech, even though the organization is officially banned in Egypt. It has rolled out the red carpet to the Brotherhood’s Islamist infrastructure in the U.S. — CAIR, the Muslim American Society, the Islamic Society of North America, the Ground Zero mosque activists — even though many of them have a documented history of Hamas support. To be sure, the current administration has not been singular in this regard. The courting of Ikhwan-allied Islamists has been a bipartisan project since the early 1990s, and elements of the intelligence community and the State Department have long agitated for a license to cultivate the Brotherhood overtly. They think what Anwar Sadat thought: Hey, we can work with these guys.

There is a very good chance we are about to reap what they’ve sown. We ought to be very afraid.'

I am more inclined to believe Andrew C. McCarthy, a senior fellow at the National Review Institute, the author, most recently, of The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America than the BBC's choice of 'experts;.