President Barack Obama’s view of the Muslim Brotherhood is based on his — and his advisors’ — apparent rationale that the Islamist group is reformed and much more like the American and European models of pluralistic societies. However, experts on Islam and terrorism claim that the Muslim Brotherhood’s — and the radical Salafists – dominance of the Egyptian government, by virtue of its recent parliamentary election victories, will eventually lead to the imposition of Sharia law on Islamic Arabs and jihad against infidels.”Nothing the Obama administration is trying to do through its aggressive overtures, including recent high-level meetings with Muslim Brotherhood officials, will change that fact.  Jihad is embedded in its history, as evidenced by the violent Islamic jihadist organizations such as Hamas that it spawned. And let’s not forget that it was the Muslim Brotherhood that gave Osama bin Laden’s former deputy and current leader of al Qaeda, Ayman al-Zawahiri, his start,” said attorney and World Net Daily investigative journalist Joseph Klein.Klein states that Jihad remains in the Muslim Brotherhood’s DNA. Its motto includes the words: “Jihad is our way. Dying in the way of Allah is our highest hope.” The Brotherhood’s new offices are emblazoned with its emblem of crossed swords.

A counterterrorism think-tank based in the Middle East, released its latest report on the increasingly powerful Islamic group, the Egyptian-based Muslim Brotherhood.

In Middle Eastern and North African Arab countries, the behavior of the Muslim Brotherhood has been influenced by the basic tension between the movement’s ultimate goal of establishing a state run according to Islamic law (Sharia’h) and the need to exhibit a certain degree of pragmatism and flexibility in relation to the movement’s need to adapt itself to the social and political conditions of each country, according to a report by the Meir Amit Information Center in Israel.

The activities of the Muslim Brotherhood cannot be regarded as uniform throughout the Arab world for it is run differently in each country, according to local circumstances and constraints. However, there are connections and common learning  within the movement in Egypt and other countries in the Middle East and around the globe, according to Meir Amit.

The Muslim Brotherhood’s ideology is based on the world-view of “Islam as the solution” for every individual, social and political problem. Instituting a comprehensive “Muslim world order” will be possible, according to the movement and its founders, by means of a long-term process of multiple stages.

It will, through education, begin with the new Muslim individual, progress to his family, from his family to society at large and from there to the new Muslim world order.

Attaining political power includes winning elections and forming a state run according to Islamic law, the liberation of countries of Islam from a foreign yoke, uniting them into one Islamic entity, and spreading Islamic values around the globe on the ruins of the liberal West.

How to implement the ideology is subject to broad interpretation, and there are pragmatic, conservative and extremist factions within the movement.

It is the “pragmatic” members of the Muslim Brotherhood who President Barack Obama and his underlings choose to promote to the American people.

The Muslim Brotherhood is the most well-organized political force in Egypt today. It also has a broad socio-economic system (the da’wah), built up over the years as a function of the movement’s fundamental ideology. Once Mubarak’s regime was overthrown, the Muslim Brotherhood found itself in a forward position from which to attain power than for others who participated in the protests in Tahrir Square, as can be seen by its success in two of the three election rounds for the People’s Assembly.

The Muslim Brotherhood was founded in Egypt by Hassan al-Banna in the early 20th century. Over the years it grew to become the biggest and best-established of the Muslim Brotherhood movements in the Middle East and beyond, and one of the central movements of political Islam.

The success of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt is rooted in a combination of ideology, politics and social work. Ideologically, it is perceived as an authentic response to the hegemony of “Western occupation,” and attracted its following from among people who had been disappointed by other ideologies. It also found a foothold in the educated urban middle class using its vast socio-economic system, the da’wah, to win the battle for hearts and minds, according to Meir Amit.

It focused on responding to the problems of the ordinary man in the street through its broad social welfare programs, which included education and health care, along with preaching in its network of mosques. They often supplanted dysfunctional state institutions and became an effective social network for the dissemination of the Muslim Brotherhood’s religious and political ideas.

The Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt is hostile to Israel because of its fundamental ideology. The movement regards all the land of Palestine as an Islamic endowment (waqf), rejects the State of Israel‘s right to exist, promotes an uncompromising jihad against Israel, and absolutely rejects peace treaties and normalization with Israel.

In addition, it is consistently anti-Semitic and spreads anti-Semitism, either rooted in Islam or based on The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Publicly, however, it sometimes represents itself as moderate and pragmatic because it considers its image in the international community as important.

Special thanks to Jeffrey Hochman, a former American police sergeant now living in Israel, for his invaluable help in acquiring intelligence reports regarding terrorist groups.