Robin Simcox

What should the British government do about the Muslim Brotherhood? This question has confounded policy-makers for decades and was brought to the fore last month when the United States sanctioned, for the first time, a London-based Muslim Brotherhood leader. Announcing the sanctions, the US Treasury described Mahmoud al-Abyari as a ‘senior leader of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood’ with a ‘long history of senior leadership roles’, including in its General Secretariat. For the United States, the secretive, transnational network founded in Egypt in 1928 is ‘the root of all modern Islamist terrorism’. To the Israelis, it ‘promote[s] a radical vision of Islam’. To Mohammed bin Salman, the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, the Brotherhood is ‘very dangerous’.

Ottawa. Sydney. Paris. Copenhagen. Four major Western cities attacked in five months by Islamist terrorists and all committed by perpetrators with lengthy histories of criminal activity. When the next terrorist attack occurs, there will be those that demand to know why intelligence agencies failed to watch the perpetrators closely enough (as was the case with the murder of Drummer Lee Rigby). However, should we not also ask what we, as a society, are willing to do to make our intelligence agencies’ job easier? Consider the current debate surrounding communications data (the who, when, where, and how of a communication, but not the what – i.e. the content). Access to communications data is not so different to other long-standing forms of state interception.

Moazzam Begg’s lawyer once said that the former Guantanamo Bay detainee was ‘an extremist all right - he believes passionately in charity and justice for all.' Many seemed to agree. Despite Begg signing a confession at Guantanamo admitting his links to al-Qaeda and terrorism-related activity (which he says was coerced), Amnesty International promoted the terror suspect widely. At a campaign event in 2007, Shami Chakrabarti of the civil-liberties group Liberty called him a "wonderful advocate . . . for human rights and in particular for human liberty'. In 2006, the New Statesman ranked Begg 21st in its top-50 list of 'heroes of our time' (ahead of Bill Clinton, Bob Dylan and the Queen).