Reuters Plays Down the Power of the Muslim Brotherhood
In addition to sanitizing the image of the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood so as to make the group more palatable to Western audiences, Reuters is now engaged in a campaign to minimize the role and importance of the group in the upheaval taking place in Egypt and the wider Middle East.
In an “Analysis” of the situation, Reuters correspondent William Maclean proposes this whopper non sequitur:
The involvement of youths, secularists and the educated middle class gave the lie to any notion that Islamists were at the vanguard of opposition forces in the Arab world.
Notwithstanding the incoherent suggestion that youths and educated middle class cannot also be Islamists (Reuters has already noted that many Brotherhood members are indeed both educated and middle class), Maclean is simply wrong that the Muslim Brotherhood or Islamists generally, are not leading the opposition forces in Egypt or the Arab Middle East. In a lengthy briefing from last November which in many ways foreshadowed and may largely account for the intensity of the insurrection, AlJazeera wrote… cont’d