It’s Past Time to Designate the Muslim Brotherhood a Terrorist Organization

On Tuesday, New York City radio host Sid Rosenberg asked Secretary of State Marco Rubio about whether the State Department intends to designate the Muslim Brotherhood and Council on American-Islamic Relations as terrorist organizations. Rubio responded that “all of that is in the works,” although “obviously there are different branches of the Muslim Brotherhood, so you’d have to designate each one of them.”

Logistics and bureaucracy aside: It’s about time.

For far too long, the United States has treated the Muslim Brotherhood with a dangerous combination of naivete and willful blindness. The Brotherhood is not a random innocuous political movement with a religious bent. It is, and has been since its founding about a century ago, the ideological wellspring of modern Sunni Islamism. The Brotherhood’s fingerprints are on jihadist groups as wide-ranging as al-Qaeda and Hamas, yet successive American administrations—Republican and Democratic alike—have failed to designate its various offshoots for what they are: terrorist organizations.