Muslim un-Brotherhood

Melanie Phillips, in a much-linked piece --

And this Hamas coup [release of Alan Johnston] is in turn but one part of a broader strategy. Hamas is an arm of the Muslim Brotherhood. All over the world, the Brotherhood is behind the pincer movement of jihad through terrorism and jihad through cultural capture. And manipulation is the name of the game it plays. It creates terrorist or insurrectionary pressure; it then poses as the ‘honest broker’ peacemaker; it thus turns its victims into its supplicants and can then turn the ratchet still further. ...

And it is playing it in Britain and the US, where its proxies have been pushing hard for ‘engagement’ with the Brotherhood as an antidote to al Qaeda — and where, with the British and American political elite now in such moral, intellectual and political disarray, it is now succeeding.

Ayman al-Zawahiri, 2nd in command of al-Qaeda in his latest video --

During the course of his segments Zawahiri continually laments the ceding of four-fifths of Palestine, and again voices his anger at Hamas for entering into negotiations and abandoning Shari’a, and warns it to not fall into the same trap as former PLO leader, Yassir Arafat, giving up everything before allegedly being poisoned. Zawahiri also attacks the Egyptian regime and its prisons, and questions the Muslim Brotherhood’s position on peace initiatives and acting as its progency, Hamas, has done in regard to Palestine.

Of course it could be that al-Zawahiri is fiendishly contradicating in public what is his true strategy in private, the one that Phillips claim. This would also be strange, though, as none other than George W. Bush always prefers to take the words of al-Qaeda at face value.