Syrian Muslim Brotherhood Opens D.C. Office

From the website Islamic Voice:

Muslim Brotherhood Office in US
Washington DC
The Syrian Muslim Brotherhood (SMB), in alliance with the ex-vice- president of Syria, Abdul Halim Khaddam, a staunch Ba’athist, have opened an office in Washington DC. The aim of the office is to infiltrate the US government and influence its apathy towards political Islam. Ammar Abdul Hamid, a Syrian intellectual who works at Brookings Institute, will be running the office for the National Salvation Front. His duties are to sell political Islam and Ba’athism to reluctant US government officials and to give the Muslim Brotherhood a platform in the Think Tank community of Washington from which they can preach democracy.

[Hat Tip: LGF]

One admires the candor: "infiltrate the U.S. goverment." And the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood, steeped as it is in political Islam and Ba'athism, has so much to teach us about democracy!

The Ba'ath Party is the Arab Nationalist party that has governed Syria as a totalitarian police state since 1963. Until the fall of Saddam Hussein, a Ba'athist regime governed Iraq as well (although the two Ba'athist regimes were frequently at each other's throats).

Among the interesting aspects of this press release is the tie-in of Ba'athism with political Islam. In the past, one rarely would have associated Ba'athism with Islam. Traditionally, Ba'athism was a secular Arab movement. A trend has arisen only very recently in Syria to tie Ba'athism to political Islam, as the formerly secular Ba'athist regime of Bashar al-Assad (pictured above) has warily viewed the rising power of polticial Islam in the Arab world, and has tried to coopt it. This development was noted in an article in the October 2, 2006 issue of The New Republic ["Syria's Road to Damascus," by Andrew Lee Butters]. It is a development that bears watching,as does the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood office in our nation's capital.