Com­ing soon to a the­ater near you?

COMMENT: Revis­it­ing the unnerv­ing prospect of the Egypt­ian Mus­lim Brotherhood’s devel­op­ing nuclear weapons, we access a fright­en­ing post high­light­ing some aspects of Mohamed Morsi’s recent trip to Tehran.

The post excerpted below high­lights Morsi’s inten­tion to accel­er­ate Egypt’s peace­ful nuclear energy pro­gram, leav­ing one to won­der if there will be some “derivatives”–nuclear weapons. (The post spells Morsi’s name “Mursi”–transliterated Ara­bic often yields var­i­ous Eng­lish spellings.)

As we have seen at length over the years, the Mus­lim Broth­er­hood is an Islamic fas­cist orga­ni­za­tion allied with the Axis in World War II. After the war, the organization–like so many fas­cist cadres around the world–was put to work by West­ern intel­li­gence as an anti-communist bulwark.

Despite his reas­sur­ances after assum­ing office, Morsi and the Broth­er­hood are cement­ing con­trol over every aspect of Egypt­ian life. Some key aspects of Broth­er­hood rule in Egypt:

• Crit­ics accuse the Broth­er­hood of media censorship.
• The Broth­er­hood regime replaced the mil­i­tary lead­er­ship with their own selected offi­cers, one of whom wrote a paper oppos­ing U.S. pol­icy in the region.
• Morsi’s gov­ern­ment is mov­ing to con­trol the Egypt­ian judi­ciary, a maneu­ver crit­ics call a move to estab­lish total con­trol over Egypt­ian society.
• This fol­lows on a series of bro­ken promises by the Broth­er­hood in Egypt, includ­ing their pledge not to run a pres­i­den­tial can­di­date and their state­ment that they wouldn’t move to dom­i­nate par­lia­ment, both of which they have done.
• The “mod­er­ate” Morsi also called for the release from prison of Sheik Rah­man, linked to the 1993 World Trade Cen­ter attack.

“Egypt: The Mus­lim Broth­er­hood Bomb?” by Ray­mond Stock; The Gate­stone­In­sti­tute; 9/7/2012.

EXCERPT: “We [Egyp­tians] are ready to starve in order to own a nuclear weapon that will rep­re­sent a real deter­rent and will be deci­sive in the Arab-Israeli con­flict.” — Dr. Hamdi Has­san, Spokesman, Mus­lim Broth­er­hood Par­lia­men­tary Cau­cus, 2006

When Egypt’s first civil­ian, demo­c­ra­t­i­cally elected dictator,[1] Mohamed Mursi became his country’s first head of state to visit Iran since its own Islamic rev­o­lu­tion in 1979 for the annual meet­ing of the Non-Aligned Move­ment (NAM) on August 30, the two lead­ers might have gone beyond the sched­uled turnover of NAM’s lead­er­ship from Mursi to Pres­i­dent Mah­moud Ahmadine­jad of Iran: they most prob­a­bly dis­cussed Egypt’s qui­etly reviv­ing drive to acquire nuclear power — pos­si­bly includ­ing nuclear weapons — and how Iran might be of help.

Since tak­ing office on June 30, Mursi has report­edly offered to renew diplo­matic rela­tions with Tehran, sev­ered for more than three decades — but then repeat­edly denied that he had planned to do so. His visit for the NAM con­fer­ence, how­ever, along with his sud­den recent pro­posal to set up a com­mit­tee of four nations includ­ing Egypt, Iran, Saudi Ara­bia and Turkey to try to end the fight­ing in Syria, and Egypt’s refusal to inspect an Iran­ian ship pass­ing through the Suez Canal en route to Syria, all indi­cate that Cairo’s rela­tions with Tehran are improv­ing dynam­i­cally. Mean­while, in advance of Mursi’s arrival, Iran was said to have offered to assist Egypt in devel­op­ing a nuclear program.

Almost com­pletely over­looked in Mursi’s warp-speed takeover of total state power in Egypt since his elec­tion vic­tory, was that on July 8, the Min­istry of Elec­tric­ity and Energy (MoEE) handed him a fea­si­bil­ity study for the cre­ation of a nuclear power plant at El-Dabaa in the Delta[2] — pos­si­bly the first of four nuclear power plants around the coun­try, the last of which would be brought online by 2025, accord­ing to a plan announced by MoEE in spring 2011. (Under the plan, El-Debaa would reach criticality—become operational–in 2019.) While Mursi has not yet announced his deci­sion on whether to pro­ceed with the projects, a num­ber of inter­na­tional com­pa­nies from Canada, China, France, Rus­sia, South Korea and the U.S. have expressed inter­est in the bid­ding for them. In his trip to Bei­jing just prior to head­ing for Tehran, Mursi requested $3 bil­lion for “power plants” from the Chi­nese, accord­ing to the geostrate­gic analy­sis firm Strat­for. Mean­while, the web­site israelhayom.com reported on August 30 that the pre­vi­ous day Mursi had told a group of Egypt­ian expa­tri­ates liv­ing in China that he was con­sid­er­ing the revival of Egypt’s nuclear power program.[3] Now comes the pos­si­bil­ity that Iran will trans­fer its nuclear capa­bil­i­ties to Egypt. As Stephen Man­ual reported from Tehran on August 26 for the web­site allvoices.com:

“Man­sour Haqiqat­pour, a mem­ber [vice-chairman] of the country’s Com­mit­tee on National Secu­rity and For­eign Pol­icy, told the state-run tele­vi­sion sta­tion, Press TV, that Iran also plans to invite heads of states to visit the country’s nuclear facil­i­ties on side­lines of NAM sum­mit. The pur­pose of the visit is to counter the pro­pa­ganda unleashed by West­ern coun­tries that Iran is devel­op­ing nuclear weapons. He said that Iran was ready to share expe­ri­ence and exper­tise on nuclear facil­i­ties with Egypt and there was no harm in it. One can eas­ily infer from the state­ment of Haqiqat­pour that Iran is indi­rectly urg­ing Egypt to go for the nuclear technology.[4]”

Iran later denied that it had invited any for­eign heads of state to visit any of its nuclear sites dur­ing the NAM conference—but not, appar­ently, the offer to assist Egypt’s nuclear program.[5] Although in Tehran Mursi also renewed Egypt’s long-standing call for a Nuclear-Weapons-Free Zone in the Mid­dle East, since at least 2006 the Mus­lim Broth­er­hood (MB, in which Mursi served as a major leader before his elec­tion) has called for Egypt to develop its own nuclear deterrent.[6] This view is so pop­u­lar that in an inter­view on the Cairo chan­nel ON-TV, on August 21, 2011, a retired Egypt­ian army gen­eral, Abdul-Hamid Umran said that it was “absolutely nec­es­sary” for the nation’s secu­rity to have “a nuclear pro­gram.” By this, he made clear, he did not mean a purely civil­ian pro­gram to pro­duce elec­tric power, to which Egypt is tech­ni­cally enti­tled as a sig­na­tory to the Nuclear Non­pro­lif­er­a­tion Treaty (NPT). He said, rather, that Egypt should declare the program’s peace­ful pur­poses, and then sys­tem­at­i­cally fool the inter­na­tional inspec­tors to achieve the needed lev­els of ura­nium enrich­ment to man­u­fac­ture bombs — cit­ing Iran as an exam­ple of how this can be done, and pro­vid­ing detailed steps to accom­plish it.[7] In another inter­view (for Egypt’s Tahrir-TV) on August 6, 2012, Umran again demanded that Egypt develop its own nuclear weapons, stress­ing that if Israel finds itself in a “dif­fi­cult sit­u­a­tion,” it would use its own nuclear shield: in that instance, Egypt must also have one to defend itself. The unmis­tak­able impli­ca­tion is that Egypt would need nuclear weapons against Israel’s expected atomic retal­i­a­tion in the event that Egypt went to war against the Jew­ish State.[8]

Given the MB’s extreme hos­til­ity to Israel, its anti-Semitic and anti-Western ide­ol­ogy, and its recent, appar­ently com­plete takeover of the mil­i­tary and the rest of state power in Egypt, the pos­si­bil­i­ties raised are deeply unsettling. . . .