Bachmann: Muslim Brotherhood Secret Agent?

It has become increasingly apparent that politics and business often attract psychopaths, because of the opportunities they offer for the gratification of narcissism, grandiosity, sadism and other severe pathologies.

For psychopaths, really on an Anders Breivik pre-massacre level, no one takes the cake in American politics more than Congresswoman Michele Bachmann, of Minnesota’s 6th District.

Bachmann has recently been charging that the federal government is infiltrated by the Muslim Brotherhood, and gives poor Huma Abedin, an aide to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and wife of former congressman Anthony Weiner, as her evidence. I mean, this stuff is reminiscent of the LaRouchies and of Nixon’s dirty tricks, and of course of McCarthyism.

But as Karl Marx remarked, everything in history occurs twice, first as tragedy, and the second time as farce. Bachmann is the farce.

But the irony is that Bachmann is right. There is a figure in the Federal government that has suspicious ties to the Muslim Brotherhood, the Muslim fundamentalist movement that began in Egypt in 1928. It is Michele Bachmann.

1. Bachmann is a major supporter of the MEK (Mojahedin-e Khalq or People’s Holy Jihadis), an Iranian terrorist group that joined in the taking of US diplomats hostage in 1979-81. The MEK was formed as a mixture of Marxism and Muslim fundamentalism, and was influenced by Sayyid Qutb, a major thinker of the …. Muslim Brotherhood.

2. Bachmann has accused President Barack Obama of ‘leading from behind’ and not being interventionist enough in Syria. She wants the secular, Arab nationalist regime in Syria overthrown. But the major opposition force in Syria is the Muslim Brotherhood, and it would have a good chance of coming to power (just as happened in post-revolutionary Egypt) if the Baath falls. AnsaMed writes

“In spite of ”long years of repression by the regime,” the movement has remained strong in Syria, said Brotherhood leader, Mohammad Riad Shakfa. The biggest force on the Syrian National Council, which is the West’s main opposition interlocutor, and very influential in the Syrian Free Army…

So Bachmann is actually herself a strong ally of the Muslim Brotherhood of Syria.

3. Bachmann is a supporter of the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan and tried to visit with them.. The Northern Alliance was a coalition of forces fighting the Taliban. It consisted in part of the Jami’at-i Islami, to which many of its prominent members belonged. The Jami’at-i Islami is the Afghanistan branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, founded by Egyptian missionaries in the 1960s. Another component of the Northern Alliance was the Shiite Hizb-i Vahdat or Unity Party, which was allied with Iran in the 1990s.

So Bachmann is, once again, closely connected with the Muslim Brotherhood via the Afghanistan Northern Alliance.

4. In fall of 2011 as the US was preparing to withdraw from Iraq, Michele Bachmann opposed the troop withdrawal. She said that the US was being kicked out of Iraq because the Shiite government of PM Nouri al-Maliki was under the thumb of Iran, and taking orders from it.

Iraq’s disgraced former vice president, Tariq al-Hashemi, also accused Tehran of orchestrating the launching of charges against him of being involved in terrorism. Bachmann is therefore an ally of Hashemi, since they have the same analysis and resentments toward Iran’s role in Iraqi politics, and they oppose that role together. Hashemi was for a long time a leader of the Iraqi Islamic Party, which is the Iraqi branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, founded by an Egyptian missionary in 1934 in Mosul.

In all seriousness, the Muslim Brotherhood is not a centralized party. It has its own history in each country where it exists, and the leaderships don’t coordinate. The largest MB party is in Egypt, and it is not only not a terrorist group, it is behind the Freedom and Justice Party, which got 46 percent of the seats in the parliament and won the presidency. The Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood made a commitment to non-violence and to civil politics in the 1970s and is not a terrorist organization.

Still, it is very suspicious the way it has managed to recruit a Minnesota congresswoman to its cause.

by Juan Cole

Juan Cole is Richard P. Mitchell Collegiate Professor of History at the University of Michigan. For three decades, he has sought to put the relationship of the West and the Muslim world in historical context. He continues to study and write about contemporary Islamic movements, whether mainstream or radical, whether Sunni and Salafi or Shi`ite. He lived in various parts of the Muslim world for nearly 10 years.

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