President Trump signed an order designating the Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist organization. It’s something that a lot of people have been waiting for ever since 9/11. So it is a big deal. But the impact may be more complicated.
The order begins a process of designating some Brotherhood groups as terrorist organizations. The title of the order designates “certain chapters or other subdivisions of the Muslim Brotherhood” and does not treat the group itself as a terrorist organization. Contrast this with the Al Qaeda designation which doesn’t quibble about individual branches of Al Qaeda. (Al Qaeda is itself a splinter group of the Brotherhood.)
The order does begin a process of designating the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, which spawned Al Qaeda and many other Jihadist, as well as political Islamist groups, as an FTO (Foreign Terrorist Organization), as well as the Jordanian and Lebanese Brotherhoods. The Lebanon one is meaningless, the Egyptian and Jordanian ones have fairly clear links to Brotherhood groups in America. But that may have limited legal impact on them.
Some people are complaining that the Brotherhood in Qatar and Turkey weren’t designated, but Qatar and Turkey are state sponsors. The MB operates in Turkey both as an organization in exile and as an ally of the Islamist regime. The Brotherhood has similarly found sanctuary in Qatar. But considering Qatar and Turkey’s influence over the United States, there was no realistic expectation that those designations would come.
The Brotherhood in the UK is frankly more dangerous than some of these.
So back to the actual impact on the MB in America. The designation sets an important precedent, but it’s far from a knockout punch, hopefully it’s the beginning of a ‘process’, not just to ensure that the designation actually happens, but that it begins the deconstruction of the Brotherhood’s operations in America.
