This isn't a listing of CAIR or even the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood proper. But it moves us one step closer to that day.
The surest route to listing the Brotherhood as a terror group is through its affiliates, as Patrick Poole reports. Hamas is the most obvious of its terror arms. But these are closer. And once you make a case that the Brotherhood has terror components, it becomes easier to wrap up the whole thing in a big red ribbon.
Following the visit of Vice President Mike Pence to Egypt two weeks ago, the State Department and the Treasury Department announced today that two Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood terror wings -- Hasm and Liwa al-Thawra -- have been designated as terror groups:
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Last month, 10 Hasm members were arrested after an attack on a Coptic church in Helwan south of Cairo. The arrest revealed plans to launch attacks on Christian churches and tourist sites during the Coptic Christmas celebrations. The Hasm cell had received terror training at a camp near Fayoum, and was operating at the direction of a senior Muslim Brotherhood leader in Turkey.
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As John Rossomando of the Investigative Project on Terrorism reported last May, several Muslim Brotherhood terror cells have jointly claimed attacks with the Islamic State affiliate in recent years. As Col. Okasha explained to me in my interview, those terror cells cooperating with the Islamic State were rolled up into Hasm and Liwa al-Thawra by Muslim Brotherhood Guidance Bureau leader Mohamed Kamal.
This isn't a new phenomenon. But it simplifies the process.
Before our domestic counterintelligence was dismantled, we were on the way to doing that here by tying Brotherhood figures in the United States to Al Qaeda and Hamas. A great deal of time has now been lost. And the Brotherhood has used that time to secure deep alliances with the left. What might have been 15 years ago isn't going to happen anymore without a lot of preliminary work.
But this is another step forward. And another step away from the Brotherhood.