The neoconservative Middle Eastern Media Research Institute (MEMRI) is out with a new report about how Muslim Brotherhood supporters and critics alike have embraced an anti-Semitic narrative, driven in part by Egyptian tabloids that are frequently cited by American right-wing news outlets.
While it should be noted that MEMRI has a history of “twisting translations to portray criticisms of Israel and its driving ideology, Zionism, as anti-Semitic,” in this case it is reporting on the widely-observed fact that several pro-government press outlets in Egypt have promoted the conspiracy theory that Israel is behind the Muslim Brotherhood.
“The pro-government press in Egypt,” The Economist reports, has spread warnings about a “Zionist-American-Muslim Brotherhood plot” to “divide and weaken Israel’s most powerful Arab neighbours, one by one…. Here, the cabal of Israeli, Western and Islamist plotters set out to foment sectarian strife, and to install a Muslim Brotherhood government that would divide the country into two, perhaps four, weakened micro-states.”
American conservatives have championed many of these same Egyptian media outlets because they are heavily critical of President Obama, with some even accusing the president of being an agent of the Muslim Brotherhood.
MEMRI found that Egyptian newspapers including Al-Wafd and Roz Al-Youssef have promoted anti-Semitic conspiracy theories. Al-Wafd claimed that the Muslim Brotherhood and Mohamed Morsi were tools of Israel and were implementing the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” while Roz Al-Youssef claimed the Muslim Brotherhood is a “Masonic, Jewish, Zionist organization.”
Right-wing publications in the US have heavily promoted the work of Al-Wafd and Roz Al-Youssef, despite the newspapers’ anti-Semitic bents.
American outlets including WorldNetDaily, FrontPageMag and The Blaze have championed Roz Al-Youssef‘s conspiracy-laden “report” about Muslim Brotherhood agents in the Obama administration. FormerRepublican congressman and Colorado gubernatorial candidate Bob Beauprez and anti-Muslim activist Robert Spencer have also promoted the “report”; Spencer crowed that the publication’s work “vindicated [Michele] Bachmann” in her McCarthy-esque hunt for Muslim Brotherhood agents in the federal government.
Al-Wafd, which has painted Obama as Satan , has found its reports accusing Obama of being a Muslim Brotherhood member highlighted in The Blaze.
Desperate to smear the Obama administration as ridden with Muslim Brotherhood agents, it seems that several US conservative outlets don’t mind relying on publications that embrace anti-Semitism and hoaxes such as the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion.”
