‘Arab Spring’ agents called back to Britain

“It was Sir James Craig who in 2004 put this project together, its essential aim being to produce an ‘Arab Revolt’ just like Lawrence of Arabia had organized against the Ottoman empire.

“During the First World War, Thomas Lawrence promised the Arabs their unity and freedom if they succeeded in toppling the Ottoman coloniser. At the end of the day, they had the British Empire,” Meyssan said.

According to Meyssan, the “Arab Spring” was launched with Iran in mind. The aim was to put the Muslim Brotherhood in power everywhere, which would have allowed for Anglo-Saxon influence to expand.

“One of the key agents in this programme, Angus McKee, was appointed the UK chargé d’affaires to Syria, in December 2011. When the UK embassy in Damascus closed, he continued his functions under the same cover, albeit with a change of locus to Beirut. In March 2012, he became the consul at the Iraqi Kurdistan. He has just been recalled by the MI6 to London.”

President Trump’s advisers meanwhile were debating in February this year whether to issue an order intended to designate the Muslim Brotherhood as a foreign terrorist organisation.

The Brotherhood won elections in Egypt after the fall of President Hosni Mubarak in 2011, and affiliated groups have made advances in Tunisia and Turkey. The New York Times reported that President Barack Obama long resisted pressure to declare it a terrorist organisation.

But the Brotherhood calls for a society governed by Islamic law, and advisers to Trump have characterised the Brotherhood as a radical faction secretly infiltrating the United States to promote Shariah law.

The leaders of some American allies — like Egypt, where the military forced the Brotherhood from power in 2013, as well as the United Arab Emirates, have urged Trump to get rid of the Brotherhood.

The proposal to declare it a terrorist organisation has been paired with a plan to similarly designate Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps.

While the Iran part of the plan has strong support within the White House, momentum to list the Muslim Brotherhood as terrorists, slowed. The Brotherhood is not popular with Stephen K. Bannon, a Trump advisor.

In a 2007 summary for a film Bannon proposed making on radical Islam in America, obtained by The Washington Post, Bannon called the Brotherhood “the foundation of modern terrorism”.

At his confirmation hearing, Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson grouped the Brotherhood and Al Qaeda together as “agents of radical Islam”. In Turkey, a NATO ally, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party has long supported the Muslim Brotherhood.

In 2015 Britain found that the Brotherhood “selectively used violence and sometimes terror in pursuit of their institutional goals,” and that it emphasized engagement in English but jihad in Arabic. Its leaders have defended Hamas’s attacks on Israel and justified attacks on American forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, the review pointed out. But it did not recommend that it be designated as a terrorist organisation.

Bahrain, Egypt, Russia, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates have all designated the Brotherhood as a terrorist organisation.

A report commissioned by Sweden’s Civil Contingencies Agency (MSB), the Muslim Brotherhood is creating a “parallel social structure” in Sweden, aided by “political elites”, making it impossible to criticise Islam.

But Dr. Robert Lambert, the former head of the London Metropolitan Police’s Muslim Contact Unit, wrote, in a Dec. 5, 2011 article in the New Statesman, that “Britain can be proud of how it has provided a safe haven for members and associates of the Muslim Brotherhood during the past three decades. Many escaped imprisonment and torture in countries run by corrupt dictators strongly supported by the West until the Arab spring. Now some are returning to their countries of origin to help build new democracies and bulwarks against future dictatorships in the Arab world.”