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Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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The best way to approach the Muslim Brotherhood is to see it as an ideology. If Mecca, the UAE, Egypt and other Muslim countries can reject them and de-radicalize their population, what stops us from saying we too will reject what came out of Nazism and Marxism here in the West?
You're saying something I think is quite extraordinary, which is that the government of Britain and the intelligence services of Britain are fostering and allowing this extremism to flourish in Britain because it gives them leverage in their dealings with Arab countries? Yes.
Yes.
Well, that's extraordinarily irresponsible and dangerous, isn't it?
That's a statement of fact. Isn't that suicidal, Ed? That's how the strategy started in the 1980s. It's suicidal because they thought they could contain it. If it admits what you've just asked them, Francis, to admit, it means, A, they're responsible, and B, they must do something about it.
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Chapter 2: What is the main ideology behind the Muslim Brotherhood?
That is not the way of the Prophet Muhammad. You've got to be calmer. You've got to accept reality for what it is and change yourself first and then change followers. And it's not our business to confront America and to confront the Soviet Union. So they disagree with him. And this is the issue that he's a breakaway from mainstream Islamic norms, that he decides to take it upon himself.
He rejects Al-Azhar. the thousand year old Muslim institution that's still there. He rejects the Muslim mystics that are dated from the time of the Prophet Muhammad, old orders. And he says, I will create my own movement and I will work towards recreating the caliphate, bringing back Sharia as state law and thereby confronting the West, correcting the misdemeanors that I see.
So the bug of the Islamic State whether it's ISIS or Al-Qaeda or Hezbollah, and it's also connected to Iran, by the way, or Hamas, started there in Egypt in the Suez Canal area called Ismailiya in 1928. So you were just saying earlier, Francis, we're gonna be facing the 100-year moment in a couple of years' time, but the organization still sticks with us and hasn't left us.
But there are other points that he then absorbed. Those were the three kind of starting points. that motivated him, but then he developed an entire ideology. And I'll say this, Constantine, that the best way to approach the Muslim Brotherhood is to see it as an ideology.
So if we talk about something called the MBI, Muslim Brotherhood ideology, and then we're onto something, then we're fighting the true battle of ideas. Just saying we're going to shut down their bank accounts, although helpful, is really putting a Band-Aid, as they say here in America, or a plaster back home in England.
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Chapter 3: How did the Muslim Brotherhood influence Western intelligence strategies?
with the bleeding problem that the Muslim Brotherhood have sought to create across the world.
And just coming back to the ideological inspirations of it, I mean, the issue of the caliphate, I think, is something that's worth exploring because the caliphate effectively is, it's kind of been explained to us by four other guests in the past that the central fight within the Muslim world is between the people who believe in nation states and the people who don't want nation states.
They want the entire area of the Middle East and perhaps elsewhere. to be controlled by one theocratic worldview. And that's essentially the main theme that's driving these people. Is that right? Correct.
Correct. And it's correct because if you take away the argument for creating what they call an Islamic state, then you end up in accepting the status quo, modernity, multiple nation states, and working within these sovereign jurisdictions where you have the rule of law As the late great Roger Scruton used to put it, the rule of law has jurisdiction, and that jurisdiction is the nation state.
That's why some of us have reservations about something called international law. Well, who's going to enforce it? So that's the way of the modern world. Now, those who believe in the Islamic State believe ultimately in creating some kind of Islamist empire.
And while they call it an Islamic state, what they mean is their state, their interpretation of Sharia, their form of law, and they or their allocated leaders are in charge for this supranational state. And it's a confrontational state. It's an expansionist state. So it's much like, say, I don't know, the Soviet Union, or at its heyday, the Ottoman Empire,
The Chinese weren't really expansionist in those days. So the question is, what is a caliphate or what is an Islamic state? The hallmark of their understanding of the Islamic state is that it must have one leader and it must have frontiers and not borders. In other words, frontiers are temporary and they can expand. They go and... How convenient.
So they don't believe in borders or nation states. So the whole world at some point must come under the control of this caliphate or of this Islamic state.
The whole world or just the areas that have been historically populated and controlled by Muslims?
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Chapter 4: What historical context is essential to understand Islamist extremism?
And in the Quranic sense, we have again and again, just justice, because justice is unfair to people of all backgrounds. It's unfair to whether you're women or to men or whether you're black or white. But he comes up with this social justice, which was then a big movement here in America. So he Americanizes Islam and writes about social justice.
And the third thing he takes away from America, and then he takes that into the prisons of Egypt, which produces milestones, is a deep, deep venom towards African-Americans. And he calls them the N-word. He refers to them as having these primal instincts and therefore producing jazz music to which monkeys and others can dance. And so he leaves America with this deep sense of...
deep hatred towards some of the most important things in America, freedom, the justice system, which he manipulates, and then obviously the racial equality movement that was coming to force under the leadership of Martin Luther King and others. He then goes back to Egypt, and this is the strangeness of the man. He says the Egyptian government is not a Muslim government.
He says most Egyptians are not Muslims. He makes what we call takfir, or excommunicates them from Islam. And he says only a small vanguard of him and people around him are true believers, and they're the ones who are in prison being tortured. Now, in an attempt to be fair to the man, he's had a hard time in America. He goes to Egypt, gets put into prison, and the Egyptian government
tortures him and his contention is, how can a Muslim government torture me for trying to be a better Muslim, trying to bring about an Islamic state? It's your point earlier, Constantine, that I'm only being a good Muslim, why am I being tortured?
But the Egyptian government's point was he and his organization had supported the assassination of the Egyptian prime minister, several Egyptian judges, and they had found 150 cases of ammunition contained by the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood. And the question from the authorities is, what's this for?
and they said oh it's to blow up the zionists in neighboring palestine but the government was convinced that this was going to be used in egypt so they saw them at the terrorist organization and milestones his author was put into prison and that's when he comes out and he writes you know milestones and commentaries on the quran that justify the assassination of the egyptian president again and calls every muslim government in the world
non-muslim in other words you are a legitimate target for us it's not just israelis by then only a three-year-old state and it's not just the americans which had then supported israel so they now turn against america more
viciously, and it's not just the British imperialists or the European colonizers, it's every Muslim government, and you too must go, and your supporters, which means ordinary Muslims, which takes us back to the original point that, you know, Islam and ordinary Muslims are the biggest threat to the milestones-led worldview.
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Chapter 5: What role does cultural integration play in addressing extremism?
Or if you want us to work on a range of sensitive issues, let's kind of balance it out. So it's very cynical. Well, hold on.
Sorry to jump in. You're saying something what I think is quite extraordinary, which is that the government of Britain and the intelligence services of Britain are fostering and allowing this extremism to flourish in Britain because it gives them leverage in their dealings with Arab countries?
Yes. Yes. That's extraordinarily irresponsible and dangerous, isn't it? That's a statement of fact. And the first individual to highlight this was, and she's no friend of mine, but we've got to be honest, and highlight her scholarship on this was Melanie Phillips in her book, Londonistan. She highlights this danger. Subsequently, Michael Goves highlighted it.
Subsequently, several recent ministers in the Home Office who've left their posts after the last general election have confirmed this in private conversations.
But all of this is backed up by our intelligence agencies by basically saying, we don't think the Muslim Brotherhood and the various Arab opposition parties inside these countries are terrorist, and we can't ban them because they're not terrorist organizations yet.
So we don't have the evidence and nor, by the way, do we have the resources to go and find out what they're really after because we've got 40,000 plus Al-Qaeda supporting terrorists, real terrorists. We can't go further down and investigate what is basically an intelligence asset for us, having these groups here
The Bahraini opposition, the Emirati opposition, the Muslim Brotherhood from Egypt, they're all Muslim Brotherhood people. They call themselves human rights activists, but they're all Muslim Brotherhood people that are an intelligence asset for the British government to leverage against our allies in the Arabian Peninsula. It's a complicated and dirty game, I'm afraid, but that's where we are.
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Chapter 6: How does the Muslim Brotherhood compare to other extremist organizations?
I mean, isn't that suicidal, Ed?
That's how the strategy started in the 1980s. It's suicidal because they thought they could contain it. Our government thought it would be just a group of guys sat in North London smoking in... in Edgware Road. But what happened, and you're absolutely right, it's suicidal because these guys didn't just stick around in Edgware Road.
They went out onto campuses and started radicalizing and recruiting a new generation of British born and raised Muslims. And now we're on generation three. Whereas the intelligence agencies thought that they would be just nice local assets they could use to bully the Emiratis, bully the Saudis, bully the Jordanians, bully the Kuwaitis, bully the Bahrainis.
But now this beast is out of control, exactly as those countries have told us that they've seen this movie before. You start with charity and schools and mosques and it becomes a suicide mission. And that's what's happened. 7-7 was a direct outcome of that, that these guys then think, guess what? We're going to, you know,
We are going to now take hostage the British government and its foreign policy. We're now going to take hostage Keir Starmer and his foreign policy in relation to Iran and what we're seeing play out in the Middle East.
So what the British government and intelligence agencies thought was an asset against Arab governments and disregarded our government's advice has now turned on the British government itself.
How can they be so naive? Did they not see the way that this was started, the way it spread through the Muslim world, the chaos and misery that they created, the terrorism?
When was the last time you met the average British civil servant? No disrespect intended, but these are simple folk. They come out of the shires. They want to have a respectable life. They pursue what's called lines of least resistance, where there's no controversy. They don't go into government to be accused of being racist, Islamophobic.
So what we're discussing, I like to think we're all free people in a free country, freely exploring ideas.
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Chapter 7: What are the implications of Islamist ideology on Western societies?
They can't have this conversation. They're terrified of saying what you've just said, that this is suicidal. because it would be seen as questioning the policies of their older bosses that brought them into this job, and now potentially appearing Islamophobic to their Muslim colleagues, and worse,
having to admit that the government has made mistakes and therefore do something about this problem, which is to start identifying the Muslim Brotherhood's influence on now almost 2 million plus Muslims, some of whom are Muslim Brotherhood ideologues, are now in the government, are now in the House of Lords, are in the House of Commons.
are in the British media space, and this cancer is spreading. But the government, if it admits what you've just asked them, Francis, to admit, that this is a disastrous policy, it means, A, they're responsible, and B, they must do something about it. Safer to say, This is complicated.
But there must be a point where, look, eventually you've got to address what's actually happened.
This is why I disagree with you, and this is the point I was going to make. You say there must come a point, but the point has come the other way. I mean, we saw this in some ways, the Jeffrey Epstein scandal was actually very helpful because one of the things that happened is Peter Mandelson, who was implicated in a weird relationship with Jeffrey Epstein,
That caused Wes Streeting, the health secretary, to, for some reason, release his private communications with Peter Mandelson, in which we saw that they talk openly in private about the fact that they can't get elected in certain seats without pandering to the Muslim vote. Yes.
So what you have now actually is a set of incentives that actually drive them in the opposite direction, as exactly you're saying. They've created a problem that now determines how they behave politically. And far from having an incentive to admit what the problem is, on the contrary, they will pander more as this problem gets worse.
And I just want to... But surely there's then not a human element, Ed, where you look at the bombings and the Ariana Grande concert in 2017 and you see the bodies of little girls getting carried out. Is there not a part of you that just goes... no more. Is there not simple human decency?
That's where you deploy MI5 and you put greater resources in monitoring the terrorist or the physical violence threat. And that would be their response. We've allocated more resources. We've put the prevent program into place. And that's where the human element comes in. But the bigger strategic piece is that you've intentionally fostered
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Chapter 8: How can governments effectively counter radicalization?
And that's, you know, it's not complicated to say we've got to go back to that pluralist space of classical liberalism where we live and let live, but we are loyal to our nation states and a set of ideals that allowed all of us, all three of us, to come together here as free people in a free country.
And coming back a little bit to the history, what is the nature of the links between German Nazism and the Muslim Brotherhood?
Yeah, again, see, that's a fantastic question. And most people won't ask that because they don't want to go into their thought space, which says, all right, the Muslim Brotherhood has connections to Nazism. And it does. The connections are as follows. Hassan al-Banna, the founder, his brother was called Abd al-Rahman al-Banna.
And Abd al-Rahman was in regular contact with Haj Amin al-Husseini, who was then the Mufti of Jerusalem. And Haj Amin al-Husseini, as the Mufti of Jerusalem, went and met adult Hitler, supported the Nazi movement, disseminated Mein Kampf, and made sure
that he made several broadcasts through prominent Arab platforms to ensure that Arabs were supporting the German Nazis and against the Brits and the French for colonial reasons. But it goes worse and it goes further than that. At this point, you could say, you know what, they made the wrong call. There was a war against Britain.
They were British imperial or colonized subjects and they wanted to be against it and they backed the wrong horse, the Germans. But it's actually more sinister and deeper than that. And it's to do with the following. that Hajj Amin al-Husseini supports the Nazis anti-Jewish platform. And he argues that Jewish people have no right to settle in Jerusalem.
So he is behind the Holocaust and supportive of the Holocaust. And I've met his grand family, grand family, grandchildren in New York, sorry, in Jerusalem, and we've had this conversation. So what I'm saying isn't just concocted, it's historically proven, and it's known in the family that the mistake was made to support the Holocaust.
So that connection to the Palestinian radical Mufti via the brother of Hassan al-Banna then leads to them inviting him to come and settle in Egypt. But worse, a leading Nazi, Von Ellis, is also then invited, whose name became Omar Amin in Arabic, to convert and come and settle in Egypt under the Muslim Brotherhood's protection.
Those are two direct connections of the Muslim Brotherhood to living physical Nazi supporters and the entire movement supporting the Nazis. But the real connection is ideological and geographical. In other words, what was going on in neighboring Palestine at the time, They openly support the expulsion of Jewish people and Jewish people settling in Palestine.
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