MEMRI executive director Steven Stalinsky expresses indignation at reports that the US government has opened channels to the Muslim Brotherhood. He objects that the “pro-jihad terrorist ideology of the Brotherhood” makes it “difficult to understand how anyone in the US would consider a dialogue with the group”.

Front Page Magazine, 10 May 2005

Not so difficult, I’d have thought. In Egypt, under any fair system of election, the Muslim Brotherhood would almost certainly form the largest parliamentary party. Its offshoot Hamas has just polled well in the Palestinian Authority local elections, defeating Fatah in the larger towns. The US State Department has evidently woken up to the fact that it’s a bit counterproductive to call for democracy in the Middle East while at the same time denouncing as jihadists, terrorists and enemies of western civilisation the very forces that democracy will most likely bring to power.

Islamophobia may indeed be a racist tool of western imperialism but, in the form promoted by Steven Stalinsky, Daniel Pipes, Jihad Watch et al, it in fact runs counter to the interests of US foreign policy as understood by its more pragmatic exponents.