The Trump administration is preparing to designate the Muslim Brotherhood as a foreign terrorist organization. According to The New York Times, the move comes after a White House meeting between President Trump and Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi earlier this month. Sisi came to power in 2013 through a military coup that ousted the country’s first democratically elected president, Mohamed Morsi, a former Muslim Brotherhood leader. Since then, Sisi has designated the Brotherhood a terrorist organization within Egypt, and his government has carried out a brutal crackdown on supporters of the political movement—including the 2013 Rabaa massacre in which security forces killed at least 1,000 protesters and injured thousands more. Policy experts say the designation could hurt the civil liberties of American Muslims and lead to a clampdown on Muslim civil rights groups and charities, which are routinely accused by anti-Muslim groups of having ties to the Muslim Brotherhood. This comes just weeks after the Trump administration designated Iran’s elite Revolutionary Guard as a terrorist organization.
Trump to Designate the Muslim Brotherhood a Terrorist Organization
HeadlineApr 30, 2019