Islamist media is reporting that Tunisian Muslim Brotherhood leader Rachid Ghannouchi has told a Washington, DC audience that he “has no information” about the Muslim Brotherhood ever using violence. According to Middle East Monitor report:
October 30, 2015 The head of Tunisia’s Ennahda Movement Sheikh Rashid Ghannouchi rejected on Wednesday the designation of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist group similar to Daesh and Al-Qaeda.
Speaking at the US Institute of Peace in Washington DC, Ghannouchi said: ‘The Muslim Brotherhood youth in Egypt reject any form of violence, and I do not have any information about them ever using violence.’
Remarking on the Nobel Prize Committee’s decision to grant the 2015 award to the Tunisian national dialogue quartet, Ghannouchi said the decision is a ‘proof of our success’.
‘Tunisia has not yet reached safety and has many challenges to face despite the successes that have been achieved,’ he said, stressing that the Tunisian youth are still waiting to reap the fruits of their revolution.
The Norwegian Nobel Committee announced that it has decided to grant the 2015 peace prize to the Tunisian national dialogue quartet.
The committee chair Kaci Kullmann Five said the Tunisian coalition had helped bring the country back from the brink of civil war in 2013, and had made a ‘decisive contribution to the building of a pluralistic democracy’.
The prize was intended to reward and bolster such efforts in Tunisia and beyond.
Rachid Ghannouchi (many spelling variations) is the head of the Tunisian Ennahda Party, essentially the Muslim Brotherhood in Tunisia. Mr. Ghannouchi has been a member of the European Council for Fatwa and Research (ECFR) and is currently and Assistant Secretary-General of the International Union of Muslim Scholars (IUMS), both organizations led by Global Muslim Brotherhood Youssef Qaradawi. In 2009, an Egyptian news report referred to Ghannouchi as a leader of the MB “abroad.” Ghannouchi is also one of the founding members of the World Assembly of Muslim Youth (WAMY), a Saudi organization closely linked to the Muslim Brotherhood and dedicated to the propagation of “Wahhabist” Islam throughout the world. Ghannouchi is known for his thinking on the issue of Islam and citizenship rights. In January 2011, Ghannouchi returned to Tunisia after a long exile in the UK and two weeks after the Tunisian leader Zine El Abidine Ben was forced from power in the events which triggered the “Arab Spring.”
The GMBDW recently reported that Mr. Ghannouchi had met with the US State Department and been on tour in the US in spite of his long history of extremism and support for terrorism. Earlier this month, we reported that Mr. Ghannouchi had called the recent wave of stabbing attacks in Israel “a wake-up call for the nation’s youth and the world to save the Palestinians from the Israeli aggression. Last week, we reported that the International Crisis Group (CG) had awarded Tunisian Muslim Brotherhood leader Rachid Ghannouchi the “Fred Cuny Award for the Prevention of Deadly Conflicts.”
For a history of Mr. Ghannouchi’s extremism, go here.