April 24: Jordan Bans the Muslim Brotherhood
Trump implores Putin to STOP; "Screaming match" between Bessent and Musk; March of the Living is underway
The Big Story
Following the arrest last week of 16 Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated individuals trained and financed in Lebanon to develop a yearslong sabotage plot against and launch both missile and rocket attacks on the Hashemite Kingdom, Jordan took action Wednesday to outlaw the Brotherhood and confiscate its assets, The Times of Israel reports. All Muslim Brotherhood activities are henceforth banned, and any promotion of the group’s ideology is to be held accountable by law, said Jordanian Interior Minister Mazen Fraya.
The Muslim Brotherhood was also banned a decade ago, but Jordan officially licensed a “splinter group” and allowed the Brotherhood’s political party, Islamic Action Front, to engage in politics while restricting some of its activities. But in 2024, Islamic Action Front won the most seats in Jordan’s parliament. The seats are still mostly occupied by the current government’s supporters.
After the government announced the outlawing, Jordanian police surrounded and searched the party’s headquarters in Amman. “It has been proven that members of the group operate in the dark and engage in activities that could destabilize the country,” the Jordanian ministry said. “Members of the dissolved Muslim Brotherhood have tampered with security and national unity, and disrupted security and public order.” The Brotherhood denied the allegations, but Jordan’s government published a video of confessions by the suspects, who had been referred to the state security court for trial. Conveniently, the Brotherhood announced that the individuals arrested, despite connections to the group, might have acted in an “individual capacity” to smuggle arms to Palestinians in the West Bank, per Reuters.
The Muslim Brotherhood, a Sunni group established in Egypt nearly 100 years ago by Islamic schoolteacher Hassan al-Banna, officially claims it renounced violence decades ago. Arrests like this one in Jordan appear to negate this claim and support assertions by critics that the Brotherhood remains a brutal terrorist organization. Hamas emerged as an “outgrowth” (officially, at least) of the Palestinian wing of the Muslim Brotherhood during the first intifada in 1987, according to the Department of National Intelligence’s Counter Terrorism Guide.
Our senior policy analyst, however, says the notion that Hamas is merely an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood is a fallacy that mistakes the group’s nature: “[The Brotherhood] is not a tightly ordered hierarchical organization,” he says. “Hamas is the Muslim Brotherhood in Gaza, just as [Recep Tayyip] Erdogan is the Muslim Brotherhood in Turkey.”
Erdogan’s ties to the Brotherhood date back to the 1970s. Despite making several reforms toward the goal of secularizing Turkey when he became prime minister in 2002, Erdogan maintained ties with the group. He staunchly backed the Muslim Brotherhood and Mohamed Morsi during the Egyptian crisis and gave 1,500 Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood members asylum in Turkey after the 2013 Egyptian coup d'état, according to Al Arabiya News. The Brotherhood’s goal is the creation of an Islamic state subject to Sharia law, and its various arms—from Erdogan’s slippery ties with the group in Turkey to the political activities of the Islamic Action Front in Jordan—all work to advance that goal.
Some experts, according to a report by The New York Times, say that Jordan’s sweeping ban on Wednesday may be related to global pushback against Hamas. Jon B. Alterman, the director of the Middle East program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, said as much:
My guess is that the Jordanian government feels pressured by the Trump administration’s keenness to push people from the Gaza Strip to other countries. There is a way in which Gaza is in play now, which creates domestic concerns for the Jordanian government, which may make them less tolerant of political opposition and make them more fearful of domestic unrest.
Although this isn’t the first time the Jordanian government has banned the Brotherhood, our senior policy analyst believes there is something relevant to be gleaned from this report: “The training in Lebanon is the key part of this story,” he says. “It shows wider cooperation between the Brotherhood and Iran, not just Hamas. Which, of course, makes sense.”
During the 2006 Lebanon War between Lebanon and Israel, Iran firmly supported Hezbollah, and the diplomatic military ties between Iran and Lebanon have mostly strengthened since then. That these brotherhood operatives were trained in Lebanon is a stark reminder of Iran’s and Hezbollah’s decades-long connections to the group, specifically in Lebanon, says Tablet News Editor Tony Badran:
Iran’s outreach to the Lebanese franchise of the Brotherhood and its militia goes back to the early ’80s. It was in Lebanon, too, that the Iran-Hezbollah relationship with Hamas was established in the early ’90s, shortly after Hamas was formed. It makes sense in this context for Iran, which has been attempting to deepen its footprint in the Judea and Samaria, to lean on these long-standing relationships.
—Adam Lehrer
The Rest
→Truth Social of the Day
U.S. President Donald Trump pleaded with Russian President Vladimir Putin to get a peace deal done today, the morning after Russia rained strikes down upon Kyiv last night. Ukraine’s air force said Russia launched 145 drones and 70 missiles, including 11 ballistic missiles, in this year’s biggest assault on the city, according to Newsweek. Cease-fire and peace talks brokered by the United States between Russia and Ukraine have reached a critical juncture, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio threatened to have the United States pull out of negotiations if progress isn’t made soon.
Trump didn’t just have harsh words for Putin, however. He also slammed Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy for the latter’s comments that Ukraine wouldn’t recognize Russia’s control of Crimea. “It’s inflammatory statements like Zelenskyy’s that make it so difficult to settle this War,” Trump said on Truth Social. “He can have Peace or, he can fight for another three years before losing the whole Country.”
→A screaming match ensued last week between Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) head Elon Musk and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent following what The New York Times described as a “power struggle” between the two officials over who would head the Internal Revenue Service, according to The Huffington Post. Musk wanted the role to go to the former IRS supervisor Gary Shapley, who acted as the whistleblower during the 2023 investigation of Hunter Biden, while Bessent preferred his deputy, Michael Faulkender, to take it. Shapley was hired first as the acting commissioner of the IRS on April 16, only to be fired on the 18 and replaced by Faulkender. The argument between Musk and Bessent reportedly transpired on April 17. “It was two billionaire, middle-aged men thinking it was WWE in the hall of the West Wing,” one person told Axios about the intensity of the dispute between Musk and Bessent. One official told the New York Post that the nature of their feud stems from their ideological approaches to reform: “Bessent has two mandates: reform and stabilise,” said the insider. “Elon has one mandate: break things in the process of reform.”
→Syria is willing to join the Abraham Accords under the correct conditions, said Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa to Florida Rep. Cory Mills in a meeting last Saturday, according to a Thursday report by Bloomberg. Mills sat with the Syrian president for an hour and a half, outlining the Trump administration’s demands for lifting sanctions on Damascus, including the dismantling of chemical weapons from the Assad regime and countering terror groups within its borders. Syria, on the other hand, still demands the return of the Golan Heights, recognized by Trump as Israeli territory in 2019. Mills says he is cautiously optimistic about the talks.
→Post of the Day
Right-wing activist Laura Loomer here responds to Trump’s announcement that he will meet with The Atlantic Editor in Chief Jeffrey Goldberg. The editor, whose presence within the administration’s Signal chat about strikes last month on the Houthis launched the Signalgate controversy, will interview Trump at the White House. Trump said he is doing the interview “out of curiosity.”
“That’s why he can’t keep his house in order,” said one supporter of the president, disgruntled by the announcement.
→This year’s March of the Living is underway, as this year marks the 80th anniversary of the end of World War II and the liberation of the concentration camps in Nazi-occupied Europe. The march brings students around the world to Poland, where they explore the remnants of the Holocaust. Thousands of participants will march from Auschwitz to Birkenau.
→India announced measures to downgrade its ties with Pakistan on Wednesday, a day after militants killed 26 people in an attack on Kashmir in the worst attack on Indian civilians in decades, Reuters reports. Seeking to exert diplomatic pressure, Pakistan banned Indian films and cut off its train service to India.
→In a new executive order signed yesterday, President Trump called for cutting off federal funding to any university that doesn’t adequately disclose any foreign gifts it received. While federal law demands colleges and universities disclose foreign gifts or contracts worth more than $250,000, the enforcement (or lack thereof) of those requirements and related regulations has prompted scrutiny and criticism of the Biden administration from conservative lawmakers, according to Politico. “For far too long, foreign funds have flowed to U.S. colleges and universities with inadequate transparency or oversight,” the Trump administration said in its summary of the order. “Undisclosed foreign funding raises serious concerns about potential foreign influence, national security risks, and compromised academic integrity.”
→The FBI assesses that “some” officials within the Venezuelan government facilitated the migration of Tren de Aragua gang members to the United States to advance Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro’s goal of undermining U.S. public safety, according to Fox News. Fox News learned the information from a senior administration official who shared unclassified documents within the FBI’s classified assessment of Tren de Aragua’s relationship with the Venezuelan government. The FBI assesses that in the next six to 18 months, Venezuelan officials will attempt to leverage Tren de Aragua members in the United States as proxy actors to kill members of the Venezuelan diaspora in the United States who are vocal critics of Maduro and his regime, and that similar actions might be taken within South America. One expert on the matter is not surprised about the revelations in the least: “The [Venezuelan] regime itself is a criminal enterprise,” says the source. “It partners with and extends itself through other criminal organizations that allow it deniability. They are all in the same pack.”
→Texas Gov. Greg Abbott signed the SB 14 bill Wednesday to create the Texas Regulatory Efficiency Office, effectively Texas’ version of DOGE, in an effort to rid the state of unnecessary regulations, according to Fox News. “The regulatory environment in Texas is getting too burdensome,” Abbott said before putting pen to paper. ”It’s not as easy to navigate as it once was.”
→Attorney General Pam Bondi hosted cabinet officials Tuesday in the first meeting for an interagency task force tasked with eliminating “anti-Christian bias,” according to Fox News. “As President Donald Trump has stated, the Biden administration engaged in an egregious pattern of targeting peaceful Christians while ignoring violent, anti-Christian offenses,” Bondi told reporters. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, FBI Director Kash Patel, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, and Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. joined the task force.
→Stat of the Day: 37%
That’s the percentage of Americans who approve of President Trump’s handling of the economy, according to a new Reuters/Ipsos poll. Down from 42% on Inauguration Day, the poll suggests that, so far, voters don’t think Trump is bringing about the new “Golden Age of America” that he promised when sworn in on Jan. 20. “Everything that’s supposed to be up is down, everything that’s supposed to be down is up,” said James Pethokoukis, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. Reuters found that the cost of living and inflation remain the most concerning issues for voters, with more than 85% of them expressing anxiety about those issues.
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Isn’t Jim Pethokoukis just a democrat hack, former journalist who was a democrat hack as a journalist? Now that he’s a “fellow” means he’s supposed to be believed?
Oh, Donald still thinks he's running the Ukraine/Russia negotiations? Who's gonna tell him?