The success of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) terrorists to topple the Assad regime is traumatizing all pro-US Arab regimes, which, for decades, have had the machetes of Iran’s Ayatollahs and the Moslem Brotherhood at their throats.

AMB. YORAM ETTINGER -  Contrary to some Western policy makers, journalists and academics, the pro-US Arab leaders do not take HTS’ moderate statements at face value. They are aware of the fanatic, religious vision, which has guided the HTS, and are familiar with the Middle Eastern gap between the talk and the walk, and with the Islamic tactic of Taqiyya (dissimulation).  

Taqiyya was also employed by Bashar Assad upon assuming power in 2000, when his moderate talk led US legislators (e.g., Senator John Kerry), Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and NYT’s Tom Friedman to view him as a potentially peaceful leader. It was used by Ayatollah Khomeini in 1978/79, ahead of assuming power in Iran, convincing President Carter and the State Department that he would be “an Iranian edition of Ghandi.... preoccupied with tractors, not tanks.”  

The Houthis issued moderate pronouncements that led to their delisting from the list of terror organizations in 2021 by President Biden.  Also, Arafat issued peaceful statements upon concluding the Oslo Accord, which won him the Nobel Prize for Peace, and led Tom Friedman to wonder: “Who’s Arafat? Is he Nelson Mandela or Willie Nelson?”). Etc.    

The vision of the HTS is not limited to Syria. It aims to topple all national Islamic regimes, and establish a universal Islamic entity, as prescribed by the precepts of the Moslem Brotherhood, which has pursued its goals through politics, education, social welfare and affiliates, splinters and offshoots that engage in terrorism.

The initial strategy of HTS, as suggested by their name (al-Sham = the Levant) is to “liberate” the Levant, which was “Greater Syria” (Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Israel, Cyprus and Turkey’s Hatay province), then the entire Middle East, the “Abode of Islam,” and finally the “Abode of the Infidel,” preferably via peaceful means, or militarily, if resisted by the “infidel.”

The Moslem Brotherhood is inspired by the HTS’ success in Syria, to be replicated in additional Moslem countries.  Therefore, the Muslim Brotherhood branches in Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon and other Moslem countries have congratulated HTS for achieving the first goal of the Sunni Islamic revolution, expecting a robust tailwind to bringing down additional national Moslem regimes.

HTS considers the toppling of Jordan’s pro-US Hashemite regime as a top priority, as does a chief enemy of HTS, Iran’s Ayatollahs. Both have intensified subversion, terrorism and drug trafficking in Jordan, leveraging the presence – in Jordan – of 2 million refugees from Syria and Iraq, a solid operational foundation of the Moslem Brotherhood, the presence of Palestinian terror organizations, and the intra-Bedouin animosity.

The HTS’ success in Syria is inspiring the Moslem Brotherhood in its attempts to topple the pro-US  General Sisi regime in Egypt, which is the 1928 birth site of the Moslem Brotherhood. In 1949, the Moslem Brotherhood assassinated Egyptian Prime Minister Mahmoud Nuqrashi; in 1954, the Moslem Brotherhood failed in its attempt to murder Egyptian President Nasser; in 1981, the Moslem Brotherhood’s offshoot, the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, murdered Egyptian President Sadat. The Islamic Jihad merged with Al Qaeda. 

Prof. Albert Hourani, a leading Middle East historian, Oxford University’s St. Anthony’s College, noted the following tenets of the Muslim Brotherhood (A History of the Arab Peoples, pp. 445-446): “A total rejection of all forms of society except the wholly Islamic one…. The true Islamic society…regarded the Quran as the source of all guidance for human life…. All other societies were societies of Jahiliyya (ignorance of religious truth), whether they were communist, capitalist, nationalist, [followers of] false religions, or claimed to be Muslim but did not obey the Sharia…. The leadership of Western man in the human world is coming to an end… The turn of Islam has come….Those who accepted [the Muslim Brotherhood] program would form a vanguard of dedicated fighters, using every means, including Jihad… The struggle should aim at creating a universal Muslim society.... The Western age is finished…. Only Islam offered hope to the world…. [The Muslim Brotherhood] were prepared for violence and martyrdom.”

The Muslim Brotherhood, just like the HTS, have been very skillful in obfuscating the West through Taqiyya and a two-pronged operation: the religious, educational, social and political screensavers, as well as the operational (subversive and terroristic) modes.  In fact, the Muslim Brotherhood poses the following proposition: Submission to Allah and the Koran, or else...!

Before embracing the Muslim Brotherhood’s and the Hayat Tahrir al-Sham’s moderate talk, Western policy-makers are advised to study the following observations by Sir John Jenkins, a top specialist on the Moslem Brotherhood and the Middle East, and former Executive Director of the British International Institute for Strategic Studies – Middle East branch:

“[The West] should resist the temptation to seek to understand the Muslim Brotherhood through our own cultural or epistemological [knowledge] categories…. [The Muslim Brotherhood] continues to threaten the constitutive basis of most contemporary Muslim majority states…. Some may still be tempted to hope that when a malign or otherwise unsatisfactory regime is overthrown the subsequent trajectory must be progressive. [Middle East] experience suggests the reverse.... Authoritarianism is not weakened in such circumstances: it recurs….

“[Hassan Al Banna, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood] urged his followers to scorn life; claimed that ultimate martyrdom could only be attained through death in the service of the divine; articulated a doctrine of armed physical force.... The writings of Sayyid Qutb – its most significant and protean ideologue [who was executed in Egypt in 1966] – remain central to Brotherhood thinking everywhere and continue to be used to justify multiple forms of Islamist violence....”

“The Brotherhood… gives little space to tolerance, choice and individual freedoms.... no commitment to democratic choice.... It is constitutively antisemitic.

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