Trump Sets His Sights on the Muslim Brotherhood

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The Trump administration is attempting to label the Muslim Brotherhood a terrorist organization. The Wall Street Journal reports:

The Trump administration is seeking to designate the Muslim Brotherhood as a foreign terrorist organization, the White House said, a move that could complicate relations with U.S. allies where Muslim Brotherhood affiliates currently serve in parliament and other government roles.

White House press secretary Sarah Sanders on Tuesday said that President Trump had “consulted with his national security team and leaders in the region who share his concern, and this designation is working its way through the internal process.”

The move comes weeks after Egyptian President Abdel Fattah Al Sisi met with Mr. Trump at the White House, where the two leaders discussed “the threat posed by the Muslim Brotherhood,” the White House said.

Under a designation as a foreign terrorist organization, companies and individuals could be banned from providing any type of material support or resources to Muslim Brotherhood officials, such as financial services, weapons or transportation.

It wasn’t immediately known whether the Trump administration’s designation would apply only to the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, or to the set of Islamist movements across the world that are informally referred to as the Muslim Brotherhood.

The designation would be the administration’s second such move in recent weeks. In early April, the administration designated Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps as a foreign terrorist organization, the first time an element of a foreign state had been officially named a terrorist entity.

The Muslim Brotherhood includes dozens of groups across the Middle East, each with varying ties to radicalism. It has also influenced other groups, including Hamas, which the U.S. has called a terrorist organization, leading critics to call the Brotherhood a gateway to jihadism.