In an interview posted on the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood website, self-describe Brotherhood “foreign minister” Youssef Nada presents his views on terrorism and Al Qaeda. Here Nada makes the common Brotherhood assertion that the war on terrorism is actually a war on Islam itself:
Ikhwanweb: As you are a victim of the so-called war against terrorism; how can you evaluate the course of this war throughout the past six years?
Youssef Nada: Frankly speaking, there’s no international consensus on the definition for terrorism. The US administration adopted such a slogan to implement a well-studied plan to fight Islam which they claimed is an ideology hindering US policy, the same as what they did with the communist ideology before. This was highlighted by the US administration whose president said “as we eliminated communism in 70 years, we will eliminate this new ideology, (Islamic terrorism)” The US has used the UN Security Council and intelligence agencies all over the world including Islamic states, world media including media in Islamic states, NATO apparatuses, ethnologists, theologists intellectuals, bankers, orientalists and experts in all related fields. Even, religious teaching and educational curricula are suffering their deletions and amendments including Qur’anic verses. Suggestions and studies are still presented in these fields. The Muslim Brotherhood reads behind this a repetition to the previous waves of colonization that hitted the Islamic world and ended with the opposite results. Europe has colonized all The Moslem countries and tried throughout five centuries of colonization and used every means like those which are currently applied. Despite all these 500-year-old attempts, the number of Muslims in the world increased from about 400 millions to about.1,3 billions
Next, Nada labels the Al Qaeda/Jihadist phenomenon as a “religious adolescence” and makes the rather odd claim that “knives, pistols , and Kalashnikov” are their weapons of choice:
khwanweb: What is the right mechanism to confront the spread of the thought of Al-Qaeda movement and jihads groups?
Yourself Nada: I see that Al-Qaeda and the so-called jihads groups behavior can’t be called an ideology. They constitute a phenomenon like other phenomena that appeared at the end of the twentieth century in many places all over the world like the Ku Klux Klan in America and Badmeinerhof in Germany, the Red Brigades in Italy and the Pasc in Spain and the Republican Army in Ireland, the Red Army in Japan and the rest. The only difference is that these are Muslims who convinced themselves and those whom they managed to recruit that their fight is divine orders. What raises eyebrows is that they were convinced that they can change the countries and defeat their armies through the use of knives, pistols , and Kalashnikov. Therefore, they are trained on using them. I see that it is a stage of religious adolescence which has been fueled by the material, social and moral injustice, of tyranny rulers and their use of oppression and violence and sidelining the judiciary .
Finally, Nada offers to suggestions for ending the global Jihadist movement:
1. The spread of justice and recognition of judiciary control to which the executive authority have to abide.
2. Opening all fields for religiously matures to educate the religiously naïves.
The first suggestion absolves the Muslim Brotherhood and all other Islamist groups of any responsibility for terrorist suggesting that reform of governments, presumably in the MIddle East, will end the phenomenon. The notion also does not appear to show any recognition of terrorism directed at Western societies. The second suggestion implies that the Brotherhood should be used to educate Jihadists, a suggestion which Brotherhood leaders have made before and which is aimed at the legitimization of the Brotherhood itself.
Nada, and his partner Ghaleb Ali Himmat, are best known for their role in establishing the infamous and now-defunct Al Taqwa Bank located “offshore” in the Bahamas. Numerous Muslim Brotherhood luminaries held shares in the bank, including the bank’s Sharia supervisor Sheikh Youssef Qaradawi and his family, which was supposed to conduct business in accord with Islamic principles. The bank was closed in 2000 after what Nada said were unforeseen developments related to the Asian financial crisis and a run on the bank caused by unfavorable publicity generated by accusations that the bank was funding Hamas. No documentation of the bank’s activities has ever been produced and Nada has refused to hand over the bank records which he said were moved to Saudi Arabia. Nada has claimed to be the acting “foreign minister” for the Muslim Brotherhood and is known to have met with Saddam Hussein. Prosecution of Nada and Al Taqwa has also been dropped in Switzerland and Italy recently but Nada, Himmat, Nasreddin, and Al Taqwa remain on the U.S. and other lists of designated terrorists.