Proposal on Muslim Brotherhood as Foreign Terrorist Organisation

Why in news?

The White House recently said that a proposal to designate the Muslim Brotherhood as a Foreign Terrorist Organisation was being worked out.

What were the earlier developments in this regard?

The statement was linked to a meeting between Presidents Donald Trump and Abdel Fattah al-Sisi of Egypt.
During the meet, the Egyptian leader had urged the U.S. to impose sanction on the Muslim Brotherhood, which opposes his government.
Also recently, the U.S. designated Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) as a Foreign Terrorist Organisation (FTO).
The designation imposed economic and travel sanctions on IRGC and on organisations, companies, and individuals that have links to it.

What is a Foreign Terrorist Organisation?

Section 219 of the United States Immigration and Nationality Act provides for the designation of an organisation as an FTO.
It authorises the Secretary of State to designate an organization as an FTO if s/he finds that -

the organization is a foreign organization
the organization engages in terrorist activity or terrorism
it threatens the security of U.S. nationals or the national security of the country

FTO designation plays a critical role in US’s fight against terrorism, by curtailing support for terrorist activities and pressuring groups.

Who are the Muslim Brotherhood?

Muslim Brotherhood is a movement that was founded in Egypt in 1928 by a schoolteacher named Hassan al-Banna.
He preached that an Islamic religious revival would help Muslim nations improve their situation and defeat their colonial masters.
Hassan al-Banna was not specific about the kind of Muslim revivalist government he was advocating.
But his ideas travelled all over the world, and inspired a large number of Islamist groups and movements.
It reached across political movements and parties as well as powerful missionary and charitable initiatives.
Among others, Jordan, Iraq, Kuwait, Bahrain, Morocco, Turkey and Tunisia have large parties that trace their origins to the Brotherhood.
Not all of today’s movements and organisations call themselves the Muslim Brotherhood, however.

How about their terrorist orientation?

In the 1940s, the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood created an armed wing.
In 1948, one of its members killed the Prime Minister, Mahmoud Fahmy el-Nokrashy Pasha.
Hassan al-Banna denounced the killers as “neither Brothers nor Muslims”.
In the 1960s, the Brotherhood formally announced they were only “preachers”.
There is a broad consensus now that the Egyptian Brotherhood, as an organisation at least, has not undertaken violent action since then.
However, after the military takeover in Cairo in 2013, some factions of it have broken off and carried out violence against the government.
These include Hasm and Liwa al-Thawra which have already been designated as FTOs by the US.
Hamas, an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood, designated as an FTO, carries out bombings and rocket attacks on Israeli civilians.
Ayman al-Zawahiri, the fugitive leader of al-Qaeda, is a former member of the Egyptian Brotherhood.
Given these, President Al-Sisi accuses the Brotherhood, as a whole, of supporting and carrying out terrorism.

But the Brotherhood has strongly criticised al-Qaeda and violent undertakings of other factions.
All over the world, Muslim Brotherhood movements have been advocating democratic elections.
This has put them in the crosshairs of both authoritarian ruling regimes as well as militant Islamists.

Source: Indian Express