The Takfeeri Agenda and the Media Organizations Helping it Along

The favorite targets of Muslim extremists and Takfeeris from Kabul to Cairo are three: carved images and sculptures that are considered signs of idolatry, religious minorities of all faiths and sects, and State institutions and symbols of State authority. We have seen all three attacked in Egypt over the past few days as Coptic Christian churches have been burned, nuns and women harassed, ordinary people shot at for just walking down a street, antiquities’ museums vandalized, precious artifacts smashed, and police stations and other symbols of State authority attacked.

Al Qaeda, the Taliban and the Muslim Brotherhood are very different organizations, at least when you look at their public face, but beneath the surface they are essentially the same as they feed off the same extremist ideology and drink from the same poisoned well in which I am sure they would like us all to drown. Their goal is one, to sow chaos and fear and then to step into the vacuum left behind by the State and the national army and enforce an absurdly strict interpretation of the Muslim faith that instead of winning converts actually scares people away, increases irrational xenophobia and anti-Muslim feelings in the West and actually invites satirists to make fun of their ignorant rants.

This wave of terror that has swept through Egypt and that has been rejected by the majority of its own people and that has been successfully resisted by the country’s armed forces and police has a source, just as every mighty river has thousands of mountain springs and rivulets feeding it until it becomes a mighty unstoppable torrent. Similarly, extremist organizations like the Brotherhood have supporters who, whether for purely political or ideological reasons, bank role the Brotherhood's activities and in many instances extend diplomatic assistance and even offer skewed media coverage to further the Brotherhood's cause.

Qatar’s Al Jazeera is a conduit through which supporters of extremist Muslim ideology can lend support to organizations like the Muslim Brotherhood if only by exclusively focusing on one side of the story and unabashedly spreading Brotherhood lies and propaganda to a global audience. Even the BBC, the standard bearer of so-called objective journalism, was taken in by Brotherhood propaganda, hosting one soft spoken Ikhwani spokesperson after the other over the past few days. It is also clear that the EU has been taken in by the Ikhwani propaganda machine that has been working overtime in recent days.

But by and large, the biggest insult to viewers’ intelligence came from Al Jazeera’s scandalously skewed coverage, so much so that watching its coverage one would think Egypt was on the road to becoming the next Syria, as hapless unarmed Brotherhood supporters demonstrate peacefully only to be attacked and fired upon by police and what Al Jazeera refers to as ‘Baltagia’, a notorious term meaning regime thugs. In actual fact and on this one I trust my own judgment and my liberal Egyptian friends who tend to agree, it was local residents across the country who have clashed with Brotherhood thugs. Such is the level of derision felt towards the Brotherhood in Egypt.

The brotherhood’s future in Egypt, its very survival as a political movement is now in question. No one in that fiercely patriotic nation, a nation proud of its armed forces, is in the mood to forgive and forget or even to consider a truce let alone to sit down on a table and talk. I am not worried about the future for Egypt, it’s a solid and united nation that does not give in to terrorist threats, but the question now is which Arab country will be next in the sights of the financiers of terror and chaos.

It is no secret that Qatar supports the Brotherhood, it is also no secret that Qatar had a major role to play in bank rolling the Libyan revolutionaries. Let us not forget that it was in Libya where extremist factions attacked and destroyed Sufi Shrines and killed a US ambassador. While Saudi Arabia supports the relatively moderate Free Syrian Army command structure, it is extremist factions like Jabhat al Nusra that are most effective on the ground attacking Christian, Alawite and Kurdish communities, which has recently forced many Kurds to flee across the Iraqi border, thereby creating one more refugee crisis for the impotent UN to deal with.

The Saudis have a clear and rational political agenda when they decided to target the Syrian regime as they view that regime to be an extension of the ever present and looming Iranian threat, a major regional power with which the Kingdom has always had a tense adversarial relationship. But more dangerous than those regional powers that act for selfish political reasons to score points in a regional tug of war are those who act out of deeply felt conviction and ideological reasons.

A friend of mine recently described the Gulf countries as such: “They have the money and they want to exert influence and play politics.”