What Is the Muslim Brotherhood?

It is reported that our Secretary of State-- and media darling-- Hillary Clinton will be the first foreign dignitary to visit the new Egyptian president Mohamed Morsi.

Since Morsi represents the Muslim Brotherhood, the timing of Clinton's visit says that the Obama administration is giving America’s blessing to its rule.

A few days ago French philosophe Bernard-Henri Levy took a few minutes to remind us of the origins of the Muslim Brotherhood. As he puts it, the Brotherhood is “a totalitarian sect inspired by Nazism.”

In his words:

Worse, we can never be reminded enough that the organization whose pale apparatchik is in the process of acceding to the leadership of the largest Arab nation was born in the late '20s as a totalitarian sect, inspired by Naziism, one whose founder, Hassan Al-Banna, never neglected an occasion to inscribe Adolf Hitler after Saladin, Abu Bakr or Abdelaziz al-Saoud in the lineage of "reformers" whose "patience, firmness, wisdom and obstination" had guided humanity.

And this "error of youth," far from being washed away with time, has been constantly reiterated, confirmed, the theorized about -- didn't Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the current guide of the Brotherhood and master, by the by, of a certain Tariq Ramadan, describe Adolf Hitler as the latest-born of these "representatives of Allah" who have appeared regularly to "punish the Jews" for their extreme "corruption," in a January 2009 statement on Al Jazeera, picked up and disseminated by the excellent Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI)?

Being a philosopher BHL remains cautiously optimistic about the possible outcomes, but it is worth our time and effort to recognize the nature of the organization on which Hillary Clinton is rushing to confer legitimacy.