The Jewish Telegraph Agency reports:
A conspiracy theory circulating in the Arab world holds that the Muslim Brotherhood is secretly allied with the Jews, the Anti-Defamation League said.
“It would seem that no allegation made against Jews and Israel is too absurd when it is used to discredit others,” ADL National Director Abraham Foxman said in a statement.
Protesters were shown in a television broadcast last Friday chanting “Khaibar, Khaibar, oh Jews, the Brothers (Muslim Brotherhood) are the Jews,” according to the ADL, which explains that the slogan is meant to evoke an Islamic story of a battle between the Prophet Muhammad and the Jews in the town of Khaibar.
Also, Dubai Police Chief Dahi Khalfan in a Twitter campaign aiming to discredit the Muslim Brotherhood recently alleged an allegiance to Israel and Jews.
“However bizarre and ludicrous, it is an increasingly popular conspiracy theory that the Muslim Brotherhood is a Jewish production to destroy Egyptians,” Foxman wrote.
Among other tweets to his 30,000 followers suggesting a Muslim Brotherhood connection to Jews, Khalfan has retweeted a link to a YouTube video titled “The Jewish-Muslim Brotherhood alliance and the project of establishing Greater Israel.” The video accuses Jews of using the Brotherhood to achieve their goal of controlling Muslims and establishing a greater Israel.
I’ve yet to see this particular canard in the United Kingdom context – although the Steve Bell cartoon is surely just around the corner. Far more common is the argument that the Muslim Brotherhood is a US proxy, or in another variant, is Obama’s creature.
It is not difficult to understand the cause of the cognitive dissonance which produces such outlandish theories. It is the thought that any two evil things must somehow be related: the more evil producing the lesser. So for anti-Islamist Arabs, Jews must be behind the hated Muslim Brotherhood; and for the anti-American, that the prime mover is that Evil Empire.
For the Obama-obsessive, the conviction that Obama plotted to install the Ikhwan in Egypt appears obvious. But it forgets that the the US was in no position to prop up Mubarak, that the Muslim Brotherhood was the only organisation capable of filling the vacuum that he left, and that the Muslim Brotherhood genuinely loathes the USA, and tolerates it only because Egypt is broke.
Nevertheless, there’s a sort of bitter pleasure in hearing the Khaybar chant being deployed against the Muslim Brotherhood, knowing how galling it must be for them to find them the subject of their favourite taunt.
