Totten hears from Muslim Brotherhood insiders

MB won't do well in the elections, didn't have a role in the Tahrir Square revolution, thinks Hamas is too liberal, conceals its policy from the press, and is a top-down hard-line organization. Two former staffers of the Muslim Brotherhood website give Michael Totten an inside view.

“Is there a model of governance that exists somewhere in the world that the Muslim Brotherhood wants to emulate here?” I said. “The Brothers think of the (Turkish) AKP as liberal and they don’t want that here,” he said. “They’ve expelled the liberal Islamists from the group.” [...] “I would like for the Muslim Brotherhood to be more like Hamas,” Adel said. That stopped me cold. “You want the Brotherhood to be like Hamas?” I said. “Yes,” he said. “Because Hamas is more liberal. The Brotherhood here no longer has any liberal members. Hamas is more willing to cooperate with other movements than the Muslim Brotherhood is.”

Michael Totten

“They aren’t going to do well in the upcoming elections,” he said. “Most of the votes they got before were protest votes against Mubarak’s NDP rather than votes for the Muslim Brotherhood.  Now that the NDP has been dissolved, they don’t have that base to fall back on.   [...] The Brotherhood is afraid of two parties in particular, the Free Egypt Party and Mostafa El-Naggar’s Justice Party.”

"The revolution was produced by people who didn’t belong to any organization. [...] Even after the square filled with tens of thousands and even hundred of thousands of people, the Brotherhood hadn’t shown up. They were too busy calculating. They did not see the revolution coming — nobody did — and they had no idea what to do after it started. They certainly were not its leaders".

Bonus: An Egyptian explains how to embrace both Islam and humanism.