Hamas Deputy leader Musa Abu Marzuq (aka Mousa Abu Marzook) has met with Abdul Ghaffar Aziz, director of foreign affairs of Pakistan’s Jamaat-e-Islami (JEI) according to a MEMRI translation from a Pakistani newspaper. Mr Marzook is described in a new Hudson Institute report on the U.S. Muslim Brotherhood as follows:
Mousa Abu Marzook, likely a member of the U.S. Brotherhood Shura Council in 1988, was a long-time high-ranking leader of Hamas and is currently described by the U.S Government as “the Deputy Chief of Hamas’s Political Bureau based in Damascus, Syria. His activities include directing and coordinating terrorist acts by Hamas against soldiers and civilians in Israel and the West Bank and Gaza.
The Hudson report also notes that Mr. Marzook was the Head of the Palestine Committee of the U.S. Muslim Brotherhood.
The JEI was founded in 1941 and is Pakistan’s oldest religious party. The party had it’s origins in the thoughts of Maulana Sayyid Abul A’la Maududi (1903-79), the most important Islamist intellectual in the history of Southeast Asia. Maududi was also a major influence on the global Muslim Brotherhood with whom the JEI has long enjoyed close relations. In the United States, the Islamic Circle of North America (ICNA) is generally considered to represent the JEI. A recent post discussed a 3-day Islamic conference held in late October in Lahore that brought together leaders of the JEI with leaders in the global Muslim Brotherhood. Previous posts have discussed various anti-American, anti-Indian, anti-Israeli, and anti-Semitic comments made by JEI leaders.