Juan Cole: Do Not Fear the Muslim Brotherhood!!

The hysteria in "our" American media about Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood is not only ignorant and demagogic, it is also hypocritical: "Our" United States has actively promoted Muslim Brother- hood branches in other countries when it suited its purposes, including Afghanistan and Iraq. Moreover, the Turkish and Indonesian cases of democratic transition in the Muslim world should have taught us something about how Muslim fundamentalist parties are themselves transformed in a democratic setting. As recently as 2005, the pragmatic Muslim Brotherhood had 88 seats in the lower house of the parliament, about 20 percent, and so has been at some points a junior partner in Egypt's governance. It has been so establishment that it declined to support the Facebook campaign on April 6, 2008, for better wages and working conditions for Egypt's textile factory workers. Out of that campaign came the April 6, 2008 Committee, that called for this year's Jan. 25 demonstration. The Brotherhood joined this year's protest movement only at the last minute, and was not a leading force in it. On Sunday, the Brotherhood called upon the new military regime to release all prisoners of conscience, including young protesters incarcerated during the past three weeks.